When I originally started out blogging about two and a half years ago I – like many – started out with a free WordPress blog. I had read a countless amount of articles suggesting – mainly for the same reason – why WordPress was an ideal choice for any person looking to start blogging.
That reason: WordPress.com provided people with a free blogging service which included not only basic blogging functionality but also allowed for some advanced customization for those who needed and(or) wanted it.
Though as I come back to WordPress to reignite my personal blog I’m baffled to see some essential services labeled as paid upgrades let alone the infamously overpriced guided transfers still remain. Sure you have millions of users and intend to cash in them but, at the expense of severely limiting your services?
There are three 3 paid upgrade features which I’ll be touching upon due to their unnecessary existence. They are: Guided Transfers, CSS Styling, No Ads / Lack of user Advertising.
Guided Transfers
Currently priced at $129 – down from $199 last year – a guided transfer is when an person decides they’re going to move from a free WordPress.com site to self hosted WordPress site. Considering the limitation a free WordPress.com website has, users are only able to fill their site with will be quite minimalistic content. Besides the minimalistic content WordPress has an import and export feature readily available to all users which with one click will export all posts, pages, media files, comments and users into one file.
Now a days hosting providers will – with one-click – set up WordPress for users. Thus making the process of importing all the content they had hosted on their free WordPress.com site as simple as selecting the exported file from their free website.
Now does this process justify the $129 price tag – I don’t think so. If you’re pondering a purchasing a guided transfer please shoot me an email – in most cases I can do it free!
CSS Styling
I believe this feature being a “paid upgrade” will be my deciding factor as to why I’ll be moving back to a self-hosted website.
Most people are looking to create a free WordPress website primarily for their personal blogs – meaning that given a small selection of free themes to use its only expected one will want to customize the shit out of their free themes. Be it only through text and colouring; regardless, it provides sites with an identity.
Apparently now users only have the option to change header images and fonts (with only a few selections available). Any other front-end customizations can done after purchasing a CSS paid upgrade.
Let it be known that this upgrade doesn’t provide users access the current stylesheets. Therefore, if users are looking to go about doing any style changes they better know basic HTML – as there’s no existing code to lean on. As an example one would be able to change the font size when seeing a line of code like the one below – without it they wouldn’t know where to begin.
.p
{
Font-size: 14px
}
Lack of user Advertising
I completely understand and agree with why WordPress displays ads on free sites they host. But, at the same time they’re taking away users ability to make any sort of compensation from their website by disallowing users to place ads on their own sites. If a user decides hell I ‘ll live with both WordPress ads and sidebar widget for Google AdSense that should be their decision.
Before the time of paid upgrades when WordPress was only making their money through donations – ads on free sites this made 100% sense. Now, with an abundance of paid upgrades and VIP packages why in the hell do they need to advertise on millions free sites. Just think $1/day from each free site and WordPress is racking in millions… daily. This may not be the case but, hopefully my point has been made.
I’d happily pay $30/year to not only remove ads but also for the right to display advertisements on my site myself.
Do you agree or disagree with WordPress’ paid upgrades: why or why not? Drop a comment!
As a relative newbie of about 7 months, this makes for fascinating reading – I’ve “toyed” with looking at the theme variants and would even consider an upgrade BUT not as an ongoing cost. The $99 or whatever it is would be fair as a one off, but seems a little cute as an annual cost.
Thanks for such a stimulating post…
Thanks for the comment, as always they’re greatly appreciated. Before I get into an unintended spiel on the benefits of a self hosted WordPress site – have you had an opportunity to play with the backend of a self hosted site?
No – I don’t blog that often, so apart from brief looks, fairly limited knowledge/experience…
So here’s where I’m coming from. For $50 a year users can purchase suitable hosting and a domain name. From there hosting providers (most of them anyway) have one click installations options for WordPress – seeing as how the vast majority of websites are powered by the CMS.
Self hosted wordpress websites provide users with access to the plugin repository. Plugins – just in case you don’t know – are codes containing extended functionality for your website. For example in order to help improve your on-page SEO (thus increasing your search results page visibility) you may go ahead and install the All in One SEO pack. The plugin would add new input areas where you write your posts looking for a title, meta description (which is usually auto generated garbage) etc.
Besides plugins which are a thing of beauty. You’ll be introduced to a new theme repository, the wordpress.org one. This contains thousands more themes than on WordPress.com. It could be just me but I’m not to fond of the free themes WordPress.com there’s a small selection and well the layout of your site (of course and content) are what separate yourself from the hundreds of millions of sites out there.
Anyway, really I’d only suggest upgrading if you’re quite keen on personalizing your theme or looking to make some sort of compensation off your blog. Thanks for the little chat and by the way you’ve got a new blog follower yourself
Have a great day!
Thanks for the comprehensive comment! I think I’ll have to keep it to hand and look over it. You’re right in that it is not something I’m looking to do a lot with… yet. Seven months ago I couldn’t even think of anything to cover, now I enjoy checking the stats and reading the work of others. We’ll see where it ends up!
Cheers again for the effort – greatly appreciated!
Glad your loving blogging. Keep at it – I’m loving your posts! If you ever venture out into self-hosting your blog let me know I can get you some great (cheap) hosting packages!
Happy blogging, Jesse
I tried WordPress once but I did not like it. As other people have said it could be that there’s more customization options for paid upgraded but there did not seem to be very much if you were using the free blogging service. I could not even change the color of my webpage. Blogger is better I think as you don’t have these restrictions.
Admittedly free WordPress blogs are horrid. Like yourself I’m stuck unable to change colours on my free WordPress site which drives me baddy. However, I’m in love the WordPress community itself. I find on average most users are willing to help one another and are in it for the love of blogging.
While on the other hand – this could be just what i’ve seen personally – but, i find Blogger to host more spam. That’s not to say WordPress doesn’t have it’s fair share of free spam blogs.
Thanks for taking the time to comment Andrea. As always it’s greatly appreciated!