This WordPress.com review aims to clear bloggers’ worry concerning about the value to host a blog on the platform. We start to comprehensively analyze the blog web hosting service provider in many aspects varying from supports of themes, plugins to website customizability and search engine optimization.
Main Features
Choose a domain for free or with some pay: WordPress.com provides free blog hosting for registered users with a format of a domain name as blog.wordpress.com. For many serious bloggers, this sounds like a little unprofessional. If they want their own customized domain names coming with blog.com, blog.co, .blog.net or any other format, they have to purchase one paid hosting plan from reliable web hosts.
Dashboard: the platform labels its dashboard categories very clearly with well-arranged items including posts, media, settings, appearance. However, to get a deep control of these items, it requires some time and technical skills for bloggers to get familiar with new software tools and follow the steps to log into the dashboard as follows:
- 1.Open web browser and type the WordPress login-page address in the address box.
- 2. Type username in the username text box and the password in the password text box.
- 3. Select the Remember Me Check box to if want WordPress to place a cookie in the browser.
Design Features: more than 100 ready-made themes are available for bloggers to design a good-looking spot, and many templates supporting at least one sidebar and often a footer allows bloggers to place dozens of widgets. For some other advanced themes, plugins and templates, bloggers need pay extra fees.
Customizability: blogs hosted on the platform is highly customizable because it is with great flexibility to add or move around widgets.
Advantages
Since WordPress.com powered blog is free of charge, the platform has embraced over 60 million spots up till now. Aside from the displayed aspects above, there are some other highlighted features that help blog attract more visitors.
Freedom from upgrades:one good thing to host blog on the platform is that bloggers are able to concentrate on the spot management without worrying about the future updating, bug fixes and security issues, because whenever a new upgrade is available, it is automatically done even if people no ideal about FTP.
Automatic backups: to avoid that a server hardware stops working, the provider helps back up the most of the daily backups of blogs automatically.
check features in advance: WordPress.com is the where new features are tested and to be produced. Thus before other bloggers smell the new creation, one is probably checking it already.
Disadvantages
Differing from the paid self-hosted blog platform like WordPress.org which is supported by leading web hosts with high quality hosting service, this platform lacks many security issues, SEO options, reliable uptime, fast hosting speed and technical support.
Security issues: blogs hosted on free web hosting is more likely subject to malicious intruders because a proven secure hosting environment demands a lot of budgets. Meanwhile, there is little possibility that the provider offers any security related plugins to protect websites from hacking or valuable information stealing.
SEO Option: it’s difficult to get a high ranking in the search result list for a blog, whose domain is free of charge and is not SEO friendly.
Uptime & Speed.: a blog frequently suffering from downtime and slow hosting speed is no doubt to suck down in the crowd. A free web hosting can not ensure a robust blog hosting environment for the investment is not a matter of pennies but millions.
Is WordPress.com an Ideal Platform for all bloggers?
From the in-depth analysis above, hosting blogswith WordPress.com, bloggers can set up a spot without a penny cost and have access to a huge number of design features, but at the same time, the spot security and performance are not well ensured.
Therefore, WordPress.com is a good option for a simple blog requesting inexpensive method to share thoughts, images and connect with others. On the contrary, it is not an ideal choicefor a professional one like an industry or a business blog. Thus, we suggest webmasters choose a reliable WordPress web hosting plan from the following leading hosts and start a self-hosted spot.