Why I moved from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

I recently moved my website from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. I realise that this seems odd as most people tend to move from WP.com to WP.org. Let me explain …

Note: There are no affiliate links in this article and therefore I am in no way gaining financially from recommending WordPress.com.

The Cost of WordPress.org Hosting Starts to Rise

I’ve been using WordPress.org for over 10 years and think it’s awesome. There are other very good solutions for building simple websites (such as the Mailchimp website builder (disclaimer: I’m a Mailchimp Partner), Squarespace, Wix and Weebly) however they are too basic for my needs. Over the past year or two I’ve needed to invest more money in hosting my website both because of the number of posts and number of visits (60k a month). I found that my website wasn’t small any longer (from a server requirements perspective) and certainly not large either. My website however really “fell in the middle” between a small and large website. I was using SiteGround VPS hosting which is good (and I continue to use SiteGround for other websites) but decided to look at other hosting and website builder options.

After investigating options for alternate website services and software I quickly came to the conclusion that WordPress continues to be the best software for my website. I then started to look at moving to another host but really couldn’t find anything better than what I had at SiteGround.

Why I Chose WordPress.com

When looking at moving to new software I looked at what WordPress.com offers . I was surprised that they offer WordPress.org hosting. I always thought that WordPress.com offered only Multisite (i.e. no FTP and restrictions on themes and plugins). The best part is that the Business plan (which I signed up for) is about 40% of the price that I was paying for my previous hosting).

How I Moved to WordPress.com

I moved my website using the All-in-One Wp Migration plugin which was very simple (WordPress.com provide a temporary/staging URL that makes migrating easy). I decided to keep using Cloudflare as my DNS host and WordPress.com provided the IP addresses for my A-Records.

Jetpack Causes a Few Problems

I had a few issues with Jetpack as I was using a Jetpack paid plan on my past host and the WordPress.com Business plan comes with Jetpack premium functionality included. The WordPress.com online chat is very good and helped get over the Jetpack issues.

So far I have had no adverse issues at all with WordPress.com. I am very impressed and glad that I moved.