Is WordPress free? What does WordPress cost?
It’s a question I get all the time on Twitter, which pushes many towards Blogger or Tumblr.
The simple truth is there are parts of WordPress which are free, and parts which are not free.
It’s your job as a blogger to monetize a blog to cover the costs, or find a way to make it free, or simply just blog for free.
In this post I’ll explain which part of WordPress is free and which parts are paid. We’ll also address whether wordpress is free to use and how much wordpress costs each year!
WordPress.com – free wordpress, but…
My first ever blog was a wordpress.com blog about economics and costs of real life in a big city.
I loved adding images, making the blog come to life, checking the stats and other basic blog tasks.
It was a one-hundred-percent free blog.
However I soon learned that I could not edit the code or install plugins without paying for it. As a broke 20 something, this hurt.
My journey over the next couple years found me on Blogger, where you could edit code for free, and customize more, and then finally I migrated WordPress.com to WordPress.org where I wish I had started sooner.
WordPress.org – free software, but…
WordPress.org is free software you can download right from their website. However, in order to use this full version of WordPress as most of us want (to get traffic and build a profitable blog) you must buy some cheap web hosting and a domain.
One Year Example: Web hosting costs ~ $10/month while a domain costs ~ $15/yr. WordPress.org is free. Use our HostGator coupon BigBonus for $6 domains and 50-62% off web hosting. Total annual cost of WordPress then is $60 or about $5/month. Put ads on your blog, publish sponsored posts, or referral market your theme/hosting to easily make that $5 back! Your earnings on WordPress.org are actually unlimited, unlike on free blog sites where you share revenue.
Disclosure: We are registered affiliates of HostGator and many other web hosts. If you click our links and sign up we may earn a small commission at no cost to you. The cost will actually be less because of our increased discounts. Thanks for your support!
Another good way of looking at the cost of wordpress: The Music Festival Example – You and your friends pony up $150 to see several bands live at Mountainside 2020. You obviously pay for the tickets/wristband up front (hosting costs). You also pay to Lyft to make it to the show’s address on time (domain costs). Once inside, you are blown away – everything is free! You get a free meal (WordPress) free T-shirt (theme) and even a free backstage pass because your cute friend is a great networker (blogging gig on a bigger blog who likes you). You don’t even remember the initial costs, because this experience was so worth it!
As we mentioned above, $10 + $15 is actually quite a lot for new bloggers to shell out. Fortunately for DearBlogger users, HostGator has agreed to offer our readers a domain for just $6 and web hosting for 50-62% off.
The WordPress part is free and requires without coding to install.
What is the cost to setup WordPress today?
The cost to setup WordPress today can be as low as a domain name + just ONE MONTH of hosting. At HostGator, where we went to create our first WordPress.org blog and have lived happily ever since, this cost is $11.81.
Or, if you already have a domain name, you can get use our coupon CoffeeMoney to get your first month of hosting for 1 PENNY.
What else is free in WordPress?
There is so much free goodness to enjoy in WordPress. Other free swag includes:
- Free themes (nearly 9000 to choose from inside your WordPress.org library)
- Free plugins (nearly 4500 to choose from, add social icons, forms, improve Google SEO, etc etc)
- Free graphics (use website like Pixabay or Pexels to get amazing free images, or Themeforest for graphics)
- Free editors (use Pixlr.com to create cool banner ads like you would in Photoshop)
- Free logos (use Logomakr for free icons)
- Free WordPress tutorials 🙂 From yours truly and so many other great creators on the web.
As that last bullet point indicated, you can learn WordPress for free which alone can save you $2500 on a WordPress or web design course in your town (I actually took one, it was $3500!). So, if you’re ready to get on the WordPress train, we got a an amazing free WordPress website tutorial for you hot off the press!
If you can’t watch or don’t want to, you can read these manual steps to install WordPress on your own domain/hosting.
Conclusion: What does WordPress cost to you?
Did you recently start a WordPress blog and find the costs to be different? This may be the case if you went to Bluehost, SiteGround, HostPapa, GreenGeeks or any other number of hosts which we also recommend!
Or, in a metaphorical sense, we’d love to hear what WordPress is worth to you? Is it priceless, as they say? 🙂
Let us know in the comments, and thanks for reading!
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