What’s the Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org | EP 631

What’s the Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

1. The difference 01:19

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:25 David Blackmon: E verybody welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast I’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:37 David Blackmon: And this is brought to you by WP Gears. I sounded so official, I almost threw myself off I liked introductions to be really casual and laid-back in that time I felt like I was very official, and I’m David Blackmon you know. So yeah today we’ve got a great episode what’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We get this question asked a lot and a lot of people who manage their own website or small businesses that do it themselves. They don’t really realize that there is actually a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They automatically assume WordPress is WordPress and yes that’s true. However there isn’t one major difference between these two Tim. 

01:18 Tim Strifler: Yeah and so WordPress is in this it’s actually kind of annoying that they have the same name, because people will here oh “yeah WordPress has a most popular website platform and blah blah blah”. Like you know my web guy recommended WordPress and so if I start googling and stuff. And then they come across WordPress.com and so they like oh this is the WordPress that everyone’s talking about. Well maybe but probably not because WordPress.org is open-source software you can put that software anywhere you want any server whatever
you can download it you can make changes to it, add plugins stuff like that. It’s fully open and you can do whatever right, and so that’s why because the open source nature of it.  That’s why it’s so popular and 30% of the Internet’s built on it. However WordPress.com is a closed  system and that closed system is a walled garden, meaning that it might look pretty but you are limited on what you can do. You can only do the things that they allow you to do similar to Squarespace and wicks and Shopify and stuff like that and so it’s a hosted solution so they take care of  everything for you so there’s a lot of benefits to it but you don’t get to do anything you want like Beaver Builder on WordPress.com you have
to use one of their built-in themes where wordpress.org can take that software put on a server add whatever plugins, whatever themes, whatever you want to do and so that’s the main difference.

02:42 David Blackmon: Yeah create your own theme,  Yeah freedom flexibility WordPress.org is the way that we highly recommend versus WordPress.com. Because at the end of the day you want to own and manage your own website. So there you go big difference. Tomorrow we’ve got another great topic debuging the Divi shortcode myth. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then. 

03:07 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye bye.