Did you know?! There’s a difference between WordPress.com & WordPress.org. Many people know, and many don’t. If you don’t know, you’ll probably do a search for Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress.com, and do a comparison to see which one works best for you. All of those offer hosting, templates, and tiers with storage space, Ecommerce, support, etc. The tiers will have their pricing, according to how much is offered. It’s an all-in-one service.
Platform details
WordPress.org is a free, open source platform. There are many, many free templates to choose from, or you can buy some premium templates at a reasonable price (I’ve seen some lovely ones at ~$30), and you’d have total freedom on the plugins you can add. They wouldn’t provide the domain name & the hosting, but you can get that through a service like Bluehost. You’d get some nice perks on the Bluehost Choice Plus plan, which costs ~$65/year and lets you have unlimited sites, domains, and includes site backup. The premium plan on WordPress.com is closer to ~$100/year or the Business Plan which is ~$300/year.
The original site for The Uncompany was actually built with Squarespace. It’s a good service, it’s easy to use, and it has nice, clean templates that you can tweak. That way, if someone needs help with site upkeep on Squarespace, we can help. However, due to its advantages, many sites use WordPress.org. I eventually switched the site for The UC to WordPress.org.
The case for .org
If you have a premium or business plan on WordPress.com, you get access to their WordAds program. If you use WordPress.org, you can sell as many ads as you’d like, and you keep 100% of revenue earned. The same goes for all paid/free plugins for SEO, forms, Analytics, Social Media, etc. You’d have access to all of them on WordPress.org. You would also be able to have an Ecommerce store and/or a Membership site, whereas the same would cost $300+/year on WordPress.com.
Due to the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, I created a personal blog using .com first, and then changed to .org (mariamoledo.com). I did it both because I wanted to write and share posts on a variety of topics, and because I wanted to learn how to use it in order to be of help to others. It’s pretty great, having so many templates to choose from, adding plugins as needed, creating a newsletter signup option, syncing with Mailchimp, etc. Squarespace offers an email campaign service, but at an extra cost, and the Business plan is already ~$215/year. And, if you’d like to sync a Squarespace site with a service like Mailchimp, you’d need to be subscribed to their Business plan, at least. So, now you know!
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