Whats the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? WordPress.com is free and easy and wordpress.org is high maintenance. Sounds like me before marriage and after marriage! But believe it or not there are advantages in both of these hosting platforms (just like pre and post marriage).  This post will explain the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

So whats the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? As I have already said wordpress.com is free and is easy to set up; all of the technical details are taken care of by the wordpress people including things like the free hosting, security issues, spam, back-ups for your content and no matter how much traffic you get you don’t have to worry about the servers crashing, that’s the job of the wordpress people so there are a heap of reasons why the wordpress.com platform is a great choice for you. And since I have mentioned the topic of traffic, another advantage with being part of wordpress.com is that because you are a part of the community you can get more traffic.

After hearing all this you may wonder why bother with anything else. However there are some disadvantages with using wordpress.com. For one thing you can’t customize your site by uploading your own theme (mind you wordpress.com has over 200 themes so there should be something there for everyone), you cannot upload your own plugins so this could be a disadvantage if you want to promote something that requires a special widget, and you can’t change the PHP code that your blog is running on.

Whats the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? Well now we need to look at the benefits of wordpress.org. These are basically the things that you can’t do with wordpress.com; you can upload plugins, you can fiddle around with the blog code to your heart’s content and you can create a custom theme for your blog.

Of course with every pro there has to be a con and wordpress.org has some. Firstly all that technical stuff that the wordpress people take care of that I mentioned earlier is now your responsibility. You have to get a host and they usually cost around $10/month and this will go up as your blog traffic numbers goes up, you will have to back up your content and worry about security and spam and generally you need to be knowledgeable about all the technical stuff.

In looking at whats the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org it would appear that wordpress.com wins hands down and in my opinion it does for the average Joe Blogs (no pun intended) but the real advantage of wordpress.org is that you have a lot more control and this becomes very important when you have huge traffic volumes and you need to customize your site to cater for your visitors growing needs. However when you are starting out wordpress.com is the best option for you.

In conclusion I hope you have a clearer idea of whats the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. If not then read over the points I have raised again until they are clear in your mind.