WordPress has revolutionized the industry of building websites so that people without a codebase can also build their own websites. It can be used for a personal website (blog, community), or a business website, it doesn’t matter what kind of website you need to build as, options are many. If you are new to WordPress, you may not know that WordPress is actually divided into .com and .org, and they are both called WordPress. You may be wondering what is the difference between WordPress.com & WordPress.org?
Note: As long as someone is talking about WordPress (WP) online, 99% refers to WordPress.org.
What is the relationship between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
Because they have the same name, but different suffixes, many people confuse them.
What is the Difference Between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org?
WordPress.org is a non-profit open-source program, anyone can download it for free, just need to buy a domain name and hosting space to use it to start a website, because it is an open-source program, the scalability is very strong; any type of website can be built with it. WordPress.com is a for-profit enterprise owned by Automattic and uses the open-source program of WordPress.org. It does not require the purchase of domain names and hosting space to create blogs for free. In addition to the free service, it also includes a paid service. Due to the third-party hosting, the scalability is poor, and the number of people who use it is very small.
Why are they all called WordPress? Since Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic is one of the two founders of WordPress.org and the CEO of WordPress.com, his company can also be called WordPress.
The main difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
Although the core structure of the two is basically the same, the difference in use is very large, mainly including the following aspects.
1. Different Host Space
There is no doubt that the main difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is the way the website is hosted. WordPress.org is self-hosted. Users need to purchase the domain name and hosting space. WordPress.com is fully hosted, meaning that WordPress.com hosts your website for free. No need to worry about domain names and hosting space and there is no choice in hosting, unlike WordPress.org ’s flexibility.
2. Different Autonomy
WordPresss.com is a third-party hosting, and there are many restrictions on its use. When using WordPress.com, a custom domain name cannot be used, instead, it is a subdomain (e.g. mysite.WordPress.com). This is a very big limitation. In addition to domain names, WordPress.com has more restrictions. For example, the free service only provides 3GB of storage space, and it will show visitors some ads that are not related to your website itself. The profits of the ads are all owned by WordPress.com.
To lift these restrictions, WordPress.com will charge at least $ 4 / month for a personal website plan. Even so, compared with WordPress.org, there are still many restrictions, especially in terms of scalability.
3. Different Scalability
The following is the difference in scalability between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
- org has unlimited possibilities (PHP, CSS, HTML code modification) while only dedicated themes can be used for wordpress.com
- Unlimited use of various plugins in wordpress.org while only the built-in plug-ins can be used for wordpress.com
- Maintenance, backup, update and safe handling by wordpress.org users while wordpress.com handles that of its users
- Any SEO plugin can be used on wordpress.org, while to use SEO function, you need to pay an extra fee on wordpress.com
- org users can use Google Analytics normally, but WordPress.com users cannot, which is a big limitation.
At a glance, WordPress.org has no limitations and is extremely scalable.
