Why WordPress.com is the Best Choice for Building your Website

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Starting your online journey as a website owner may seem a daunting task especially when you have no web development or programming skills but with a platform like WordPress.com that fear has been removed; you don’t need to be tech savvy with regard to WordPress to have your website up and running.

Actually you can have a new website in minute’s time just by creating an account and choosing one of the website setup options provided by WordPress.com, completing the setup through a few clicks on your device and you are good to go.

In this article I will show you why WordPress.com is the best choice for you especially if you have no experience running a website and you are looking for a hosting that takes you off the hustle of site maintenance, which might be too technical for some users.

When I was starting my very first website, some years ago, I didn’t have any experience with web hosting stuff, and since I didn’t want to incur extra costs hiring a web developer, I had to learn some basic skills in web development just to get my self-hosted website up. This was a bit overwhelming for me as a new user, coupled with the responsibility of having to manage the self-hosting account myself. What if I tell you that for WordPress.com, it is actually managed WordPress hosting available to you from the start, whether you are a free user or you are on their paid plans, where this technical site maintenance stuff is fully taken care of by WordPress.com team.

Self-Hosting vs. Managed Hosting

Self-hosting vs. managed hosting – what are the differences? These are basic terms about web hosting that you need to know, especially if you’re planning to start a new website and you have no prior experience.

Without going too technical, self-hosting can be defined as a way of running and controlling your own website on your own server. So when you self-host your website you have to have some basic knowledge on how to manage website on a server. You are responsible for site maintenance and performance tuning. You must also handle security updates, backups, software updates as well as monitor downtime. This requires an investment from you in terms of time and learning. Alternatively you will have to hire someone to do all these tasks at an extra cost. Self-hosting is typically what you get when you sign up for a shared hosting service.

Managed hosting (what WordPress.com offers in all their plans) in a nutshell is a hosting service where the hosting provider takes care of all the technical aspects of your website.

When you create your website on WordPress.com, your site is hosted on WordPress.com’s servers optimized to handle any kind of website.

With managed WordPress hosting, WordPress.com takes care of all the technical aspects of your site; they handle the following for you:

• Server setup, configuration and maintenance.
• Security monitoring and updates.
• Software updates.
• Automatic backups.
• Performance optimization (caching, tuning).

You won’t get these done for you on shared hosting – you will be actually responsible for all the above activities.

WordPress.com CDN and global data centers, provides the necessary resources to handle any amount of traffic from any part of the world. Thus when you create your website with WordPress.com you can easily manage traffic bursts without the fear of your site going down or incurring any extra cost.

WordPress.com managed WordPress hosting removes the heavy technical work for website owners, enabling you to focus on content creation and website marketing.

Since I have talked about self-hosting, it won’t be fair for me not to mention WordPress.org, so that when you meet this name out there, you don’t confuse it with WordPress.com.

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

First before going further, to avoid confusion, I need to define WordPress: WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), open-source software that lets you create, edit, and publish your website content. 

WordPress.org is the home on the web, for WordPress, where users can download the software and host it anywhere with a webhosting provider. In particular, when you self-host, you have to download WordPress from WordPress.org. For WordPress.com users, you don’t need to download and install WordPress yourself; this is usually already installed and managed for you.

So when you choose WordPress.com, you’re choosing a complete WordPress building and hosting platform where the technical hustle of managing your site has been removed. All you have to do after setting up your website with WordPress.com is to focus on content creation and website growth and worry less about the technical maintenance.

WordPress.com Webhosting Features

When you create your website with WordPress.com, you get:

• Out of the box webhosting – your site’s file are stored on WordPress.com servers. Website creation has been simplified with this hosting service.
• A free WordPress.com web address or you can use your own domain name; you can register a new domain still on the same platform.
• Tools to help you design a professional looking website – many theme options available for you and customization options.
• Content management tools to create and organize your pages, posts and media.
• Site maintenance done for you. Security and software updates are faithfully done by WordPress.com. No need to worry about losing your work online as they offer automatic backups.

Benefits of Building your Website with WordPress.com

Choosing WordPress.com for building and hosting your website comes with so many benefits, some of which I have already mentioned above. But to put everything together, when you choose WordPress.com, you are choosing:

• Simplest WordPress hosting solution that is complete with everything you need to build and run a website online. When you sign up with WordPress.com, there is no complexity when it comes to getting your website up. Everything has been simplified for you, for example WordPress is already installed, additional as aforementioned, security, software updates and backups are all handled for you. There is no hustle for you with the technical maintenance stuff.
• Exceptional performance and speed for your website – for anyone who has ever self-hosted a website with many of the hosting providers out there, you can attest that speed and performance is usually a major issue especially when your website starts receiving high traffic but with WordPress.com, there is no such an issue, your site stays stable even during high traffic periods, at no extra cost to you. WordPress.com worldwide infrastructure providing Content Delivery Network (CDN) ensures quick load times no matter where your visitors are located. Performance tuning is handled by the WordPress.com team, ensuring everything is optimized on your site for higher rankings in organic search engines.
• Scalability – with your website built for unlimited traffic, you are ready to handle bursts in traffic from day one. This is not something you will get with other hosting providers, actually on the other platforms, abrupt high traffic to your website can bring it down. Also with these other hosting platforms, when your site traffic numbers reach a certain level, you will have to pay to handle this high traffic. With WordPress.com, there is no price and performance change irrespective of the traffic increase.  You can start small and grow your website to levels of very high traffic on WordPress.com without any problem or without price changes on your plan.
•  Inbuilt security features – with daily automatic backups, malware scanning, SSL, DDoS protection all done for you, your website stays secure online. You don’t need to do anything from your side.
• Expert support – here you are dealing with the really WordPress professionals, people who know the ins and outs of WordPress. You can access these experts with any of the paid plans. Alternatively, if you’re on the free plan, you get support from community forums.
• Flexibility – for those who choose the business or commerce plans, you have access to third-party plugins and themes, with these features, you are able to customize your website to match your brand as well as integrate your favorite tools.

Getting started with WordPress.com

From personal blogs, business websites to ecommerce stores, WordPress.com is built to handle each one of them.

Getting started with WordPress.com is pretty simple, there are three ways provided to get started:

• AI Website Builder – here you simply answer a few questions and you get a complete site in the shortest time as possible.
• Do It Yourself (DIY) Setup – here you have a free choice to choose your own theme and build your site step by step.
• Express Website Design Service – for those who want to completely avoid the site setup process hustle, you can have WordPress.com team build your site professionally.

Note that, WordPress.com offers several plans you can choose from: From free plans for personal projects to advanced plans for businesses that require additional features. Explore WordPress.com plans.

Conclusion

WordPress.com has simplified the process of webhosting and building a website. You don’t need to have any programming knowledge to get your website up and running with WordPress.com. All the technical aspects of webhosting and site maintenance are all taken care by the WordPress.com team. Their expert support which is always at hand to offer help when needed makes them the best choice both for beginners and business website owners.

Related articles:

• Key differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
• The 4 types of Hosting, you need to know about as a Blogger
• How to Improve the WordPress Site Speed & Performance
• Why it is Worth Migrating your Site to Pressable Hosting