Free, Personal, Premium or Business? – Choosing the right WordPress Plan

Posted on by Abirami

A lot of people have been commenting lately asking for advice on which plan they should choose. I recently upgraded to the Personal plan and so I have some insight to offer which is why I decided to make a post out of it. I hope it answers all of your questions.

Whether you’re just starting off on WordPress for a creative platform, or an online journal or a business there is indeed a perfect plan for each of you which was tailored to your needs.

Who should go for the Free Plan?

If you’re not already on WordPress, or if you’re simply here to experiment and understand how WordPress works. The Free plan is the one for you. You get a decent subdomain which looks like this,

“Yourblogname.wordpress.com”

It’s good enough for anyone at the beginning. And as free things tend to be, it doesn’t come with many privileges. Since it is free, WordPress runs Ads on your site and you can’t remove them or get paid for them. You have a bunch of free themes to choose from, you get 3GB of space to upload media, you get to personalize your site to a certain extent as much as the theme allows, you get Jetpack which shows you your everyday stats and that’s about it. If this is all you’re looking for and you don’t mind the Ads on your site then the Free Plan is your best bet.

Who should go for the Personal Plan?

If you’re interested in this plan, and end up buying it, you’ll probably have a nice little smile on your face because you got the best of both worlds. It’s the cheapest bargain you can get for all of these amazing features.

With the Personal plan you get an increased 6GB of storage space, you get your own domain name which looks like,

“Yourblogname.com”

It removes the ugly .wordpress.com subdomain from your website address. You officially own your site and are in control of everything that happens on it. Starting with the Ads. You can choose to disable Ads altogether or you can apply to the WordAds program and once you reach a certain amount of views per month they’ll accept your application and pay you for the Ads they host on your site based on your views. This is an amazing way to make a few bucks off of doing something you love – blogging.

If you’re a small business, you don’t necessarily need WooCommerce. (it is a feature that deals with payment and shipping of your products) You can probably just display your products and leave a PayPal link on your site to allow your customers to pay through that and ship your products on your own. But keep in mind this is only for a small scale business that’s only starting out. Think of this as a way of testing the waters before you really jump in with the sales.

The Personal plan doesn’t allow you to upload videos but you can always upload your videos on Youtube and link to them on your site. It looks just as good.

The Personal plan allows you to change the font, background colour, and other features of your theme which are not available on the Free theme. You will no longer feel boxed into the generic WordPress theme and be able to distinguish your site from others in a notable way.

The plan also comes with a live chat support with WordPress. My experience with the Happiness Engineers at WordPress Customer Service has always been a very positive one. Even as I was typing in this article, I needed their help. I was researching about the discount on each plan and I accidentally purchased two domains. It was a purchase of over 100 dollars and I panicked as it was a Sunday and I thought no one would be able to help, but they instantly showed up and responded to my emails and refunded my accidental purchase. In the past they have also helped me to set up WordAds, figure out how to use and customise themes and so on. The Happiness Engineers are a great value added service you get by upgrading to the Personal Plan. The live chat makes it seem as if you have professional help right there within the confines of your home.

To sum up, the Personal plan is for anyone like me. A hobbyist who is passionate about writing, who would like their own domain and be able to advertise and get paid for it. The customer support is also very handy. If you go on the Internet and do a small search you’ll find that everyone recommends self-hosting on WordPress.Org instead of going for any of these plans. But a major drawback with that is you lose your connection to the WordPress reader which is a great source of views. It’s an excellent community to be a part of and you lose that if you self-host.

Who should go for the Premium Plan?

The first and foremost thing is, you can start advertising instantly. It comes with all the features of the Personal plan and more. As I mentioned earlier, you can indeed advertise with the Personal plan, but you have to wait a while before you get accepted. You need to be getting at least a few thousand views a month to get accepted into the WordAds program. But with the Premium Plan you get accepted instantly.

The Personal plan is my favourite but the Premium plan is the most popular amongst users. It is also relatively cheap. And a good bargain for the features it offers.

The Premium plan allows you to upload videos and other media upto 13 Gb. That’s pretty good.

The most notable feature of the Premium plan is that you get a little more customisation. On the Free and Personal plans you can only do with your site what your theme allows you to do. With the Premium plan you can directly edit the CSS code of your site and make it extremely unique. You will no longer be tied to the limitations of your theme.

You may have seen several themes on WordPress and wanted to use it, but alas! only to find out that you had to pay for it. When you purchase the Premium plan you get access to ALL of those paid themes and they are absolutely free. Now you might start to understand why the Premium theme is the most popular of them all. Each of those themes cost over 50 U.S dollars or more. And there are hundreds of such paid themes which you get for free with the Premium plan.

So the Premium plan is for anyone who wants to use WordPress for professional reasons. You get to customise your site, get access to all the Premium themes for free, advertise instantly and upload videos directly on to your site. It’s a good bargain for this price especially because of the discount that is available right now.

Who should go for the Business plan?

As the name suggest it is mainly targeted at businesses. I mentioned earlier that a small business could do without this plan by simply leaving a link to their PayPal account. But when you’ve come to a stage where you get at least a 100 customers a week, it’s going to get complicated to do everything manually. Also you don’t see professional sites like Amazon leaving PayPal links and manually sending a human being to ask each customer for their shipping address. Automation makes things simpler.

The Business Plan comes with WooCommerce which allows easy shipping and payment for all your products. You have a live customer support team that will assist you with all your needs right from setting it all up to maintenance issues.

Google Analytics and SEO tools are of great use to any blogger. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is essentially a technique to get your site indexed better on search engine results. The more your content shows up whenever a relevant search is made, the more views you get. You can also improve your site’s ranking which will display it above all the other sites that have results for the same search. To explain in simpler terms, people are more likely to search for something using a particular set of keywords. Only if your post has those keywords it’ll show up in the search results related to that topic. With SEO tools you are always advised to use better keywords in your content. It recommends keywords related to your topic based on their popularity. You get all this with the Business plan.

The best way to customise your site is through Plug-In’s. They’re essentially apps for your site. And WordPress has tonnes of them to satisfy your every need. Only the Business Plan lets you install Plug-In’s. Even if you’re not a business and you’re just a blog you will one day need to install Plug-In’s for some service or the other. When the time comes and you have established your blog you should upgrade to the Business Plan to get all the benefits WordPress has to offer.

The Business Plan comes with unlimited storage, unlimited access to all Premium and Business themes. You can also remove the WordPress branding from your site and truly make it your own.

I hope this post was useful. 🙂

Please drop a comment below if you have any more questions!

– The Obsessive Writer.

92 thoughts on “Free, Personal, Premium or Business? – Choosing the right WordPress Plan”

      1. In premium you get automatically accepted into word ads but in personal you’ve to reach a certain amount of views per month to be accepted. Other than that the feature difference won’t matter much!

        Liked by 1 person

  5. Wow, very informative. Liked it. Research is a good choice for a start. I’ve jumped between different plans and it affected my comments (still cant comment sometimes). I think it’s mostly if u downgrade …but who knows ppl having lots of troubles with WP lately (my followers told me)

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  14. Thank you for sharing a very useful article. I’ve been thinking to upgrade my blog to premium or personal plan. But i still dont understand the part about losing connection to the wordpress reader. What does that mean?

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  15. Thank you for sharing a very useful article. I’ve been thinking to upgrade my blog to premium or personal plan. But i still dont understand the part about losing connection to the wordpress reader. What does that mean?
    Thank you 😊

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  17. I’m so grateful that I read this because I needed an outlook on this! I will probably do the personal myself when I make the money to do so! I didn’t even know about word ads on here either so that’s really amazing to know! All I really wanted to do was get my own domain name so that I can get more affiliate ads and stuff, so this post really was probably the most helpful I’ve seen thus far. Question: If I go from my wordpress account and upgrade to personal, do my posts I’ve already written disappear?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Nothing disappears! All your content stays the same 🙂 and it gets relinked to the new site. So if anyone even looks up your old address it gets mapped to your current address

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  20. Thanks for sharing this information! I have been playing with the idea of purchasing the personal plan for a while now and what you shared convinced me to do so. Thanks!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  26. I have just purchased a personal plan thinking that I have own a website. But it is not more better than previous free plan. If I want to get really nice features than I have to purchase next plan. But before that I will try this one to understand it better.
    And your article is better representation for it. Thanks

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  28. Thank you! This has been huge help. I have had the free plan for about 3 years now, and use it to sell my services, but it has its limitations, and I really want to create better blogs. I have been looking into developing a new blog site, but don’t have much spare cash, and I wondered if I could improve my current situation, as a starting point… and you answered my question! If I change my domain name, will that mean the old customers won’t be able to find me, though?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  29. Hi, I just started my blog 10 days back and have 800+ views. I want to make money from my blog. I m on free plan WordPress.com
    In personal plan , u can use only WordAds right? And what about premium plan? Can we use Google Adsense?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      6. Well the plan will not help with the views. So running on the personal plan for a while and improving your views might help. Or if you feel that premium is a better fit you should go for it!

        Like

  31. Pingback: Can You Really Make Money By Blogging On WordPress? – THE OBSESSIVE WRITER

  33. Thank you for sharing, it’s helpful. I am in free plan don’t get many views and have been thinking of upgrading to personal. From your explanation I better run on free till I get a good following then I can move to personal especially because i want to earn.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  37. I still have yet to find an article from someone who gives specific details about the benefits of the premium plan. Is the $96 fee worth it? Do you make your money back with the site monetization within a year? If so, how quickly and what type of earnings do you actually get??

    I appreciate the tip on the personal vs premium as far as the timing of being able to add advertisement but it still does not tell me the earnings ratio. What do the earnings actually look like on a premium account?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. The earnings depend on your views and have nothing to do with the plan. Premium is worth it if you have a substantial following of around like 10k views a day. Then you will make around 100 usd a month approximately.

      Like

      Reply
  38. Pingback: What is it like to make money as a Blogger on WordPress.com? (Advise on how to succeed on WordPress) – THE OBSESSIVE WRITER

  39. Hi, I just figured to switch my site to the personal plan. I see that the personal plan does not allow site monetization while the premium one does. Can I still be able to apply for WordAds and still try to earn a few bucks and continue blogging on the personal plan?

    And also, can you be able to redirect old links to your new changed domain?

    Like

    Reply

  40. Thank you for the article, my question: is it more difficult- in technical/designing terms, to use the premium plan? or is it similar to the personal plan? I’m not a professional web designer, so, I’m looking for user-friendly platforms…

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

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