WordPress.com Is Making A Stupid Change

This is a sea change of my position on WordPress.com, and hopefully by the end of this I will convince you to take your creative talent elsewhere.

12 years ago as a Computer Science/ Software Engineering university student I came across Automattic's platform WordPress.com. This platform has been a mainstay of my creative work outside of my day job. Over the years they have been generally amazing, and there is always a support person on hand to fix things... Even to add things you don't technically have.

Just to give an example of the outstanding work they do... I really wanted snow on my site for my Christmas Countdown poems but I didn't want to pay for the plan I'd need to add this, because I didn't need any of the other features. Knowing that the code behind this was tiny, I reached out to the support team to ask how to get it added... Within the hour they had added their own snow code and set it up so I could start and stop it via a simple sidebar trick. How amazing is that?

Over the last 12 years I have run at least 7 blogs of all different types with the biggest and proudest of those being peskypoetry.co.uk.

PeskyPoetry has grown from a free wordpress.com site to a Premium site over the years. This happened in two stages. I hated having the wordpress.com name in my site domain so I moved to the Personal plan within the first year or so. This cost about $84 for two years. Then, following some distasteful ads, such as one for "celebrating father's day with your dad" on a poem about remembering my dead dad, I moved to the Premium plan for $180 every two years. This gave me the pinnacle of control I needed for my site and some unneeded features. But the main thing was the ability to turn off adverts. Adverts, even though served by wordpress.com, present an image of your site and so look like they come from you. I had a mother reach out because her child was reading my poetry when a Viagra advert was presented! She accused me of indecent advertising. Because, to the end user, it's your sites therefore your ads. It would appear the Personal Plan also lets you turn adverts off now.

So, Pesky Poetry is on the Premium Plan and that does all I need it to do. $7.50 per month billed every two years and it is set to expire October 2023.

The most recent site I've set up is CyberSecSey. While setting up this site I clicked the plans option because I knew I'd want rid of adverts off the bat. Who needs an advert for condoms because they are reading an antivirus post? I was met by a single plan called Pro Plan at a cost of $180. Naively I thought that was for the same terms of billed every two years. It wasn't. The Pro Plan is $180 per year. And the new free plan is unusable for any reasonable creator. The original Pesky Poetry site would not have coped with the current free plan at all. It is clear, in my opinion, that Wordpress.com have gone down the money grabbing route. And it pains me to say that.

While writing this I checked the price and it was showing as $180 per year. They have now updated it to show ￡15 per month. Let that sink in. No longer is it $180 per year for me... They've upped the price again to ￡180... That's about ￡37 more again! They've changed the prices and plans while fighting this and it shows that none of this was thought through. They also appear to be going for the apple model of $1=￡1, which is just ludicrous.

While writing my open letter on PeskyPoetry outlining the difficult position I am in, WordPress.com released a Starter plan at ￡5 per month (￡60 per year).

Being fare I thought I should take a look and see what you get for the ￡60 per year (~$75) and what I saw confirmed that WordPress.com was just out to screw over their users. I would have loved if they had reached out to their users to workshop this change, but the decision not to proves, again, in my opinion, it was a money first approach.

The features of the new Starter plan (￡60 per year ~$75) is closer to the old Personal plan ($42 per year - ~￡33) than the Professional Plan ($90 per year ~￡71). The most obvious difference between Starter and the current Personal plan is that the new Starter plan doesn't allow you to turn off ads at all. So you are getting the old Personal plan for nearly double the cost without even the ability to turn off ads. I will not recommend anyone move to the Starter plan at all!

But what are the alternatives? You could always host it yourself... That isn't for everyone though. For most people in the Personal and Professional plans I'd recommend moving to a competitor such as Namesco. For ￡4.40 /m (￡105.6 for two years) on Namesco, you can get all the features of the old Professional plan and more. In USD that is $5.57 /m or $66.84 /y or almost $134 every two years. With Namesco you get almost full control of a WordPress site for less than the Starter Plan at WordPress.com.

There is of course the hassle of moving from one provider to another. But given the egregious cost increase I'd say it's worth it this time. That is my plan after all. CyberSecSay will move to NamesCo March next year and PeskyPoetry will be soon after. Wordpress.com have also made it clear that they will not give an export of the sites database so I have to be content with just exporting the contents.

When I make my move I will be writing a guide to help others on the internet. Even if WordPress.com decide to grandfather older sites, CyberSecSay will still have to move, and I don't know if I can trust them to keep their word after this, so PeskyPoetry will likely move anyway. I was happy paying just slightly over the market rate for WordPress hosting with WordPress.com because they were pretty good... But I cannot, and they definitely cannot, justify this cost increase.

Let me know in the comments what your thoughts are. If you are a current WordPress.com user and didn't know about this change leave a comment. As with anything, if you are new to looking for a service, shop around first.