Downgrading southafrica-info.com from Business

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  mary1alexander · Member · Aug 22, 2023 at 3:41 pm

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  Hi there
  I would like to downgrade my website southafrica-info.com from the Business plan to a plan that is less expensive.
  Please advise how I can do this without WordPress deleting my website altogether.
  I would prefer to speak to a human being and not a machine.
  Thanks

  WP.com: Yes
  Jetpack: Yes
  Correct account: Yes

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  staff-totoro · Staff · Aug 23, 2023 at 9:03 pm

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  Hi there, I’m totally not a machine, and I would like to visit the forests of South Africa some day!

  I would like to downgrade my website southafrica-info.com from the Business plan to a plan that is less expensive.

  It is possible to downgrade, but in doing so you will lose the ability to use plugins and activate 3rd party themes on your site. Any active plugins/themes you have now will be removed unless they are offered under the Premium Plan, which can lead to changes to the site.

  Looking at southafrica-info.com I do see that downgrading will lead to some substantial changes that I want to review with you before proceeding. My primary concern is that the following functionality will be lost

  • The Classic Editor plugin will be removed
  • The Google Fonts Typography plugin will be removed, and custom themes will instead be replaced with default fonts for your theme instead.
  • The Yoast SEO plugin will be removed, and this may also remove some SEO customizations you have on the site, since the plugin needs to be active for those to work
  • Permalinks on blog posts will revert to the default structure. For example, a post like https://southafrica-info.com/history/nelson-mandela-timeline/ will instead use the default permalink structure https://southafrica-info.com/2023/06/06/nelson-mandela-timeline/.

  Based on my look at the rest of the site, The overall appearance of the site as it is now (the theme it uses) as well as the content itself (all posts, pages, categories, uploaded media, etc) will remain. But there may be some substantial SEO changes to the site if you cancel suddenly.

  If you don’t mind my asking, I wanted to understand what you meant by “without WordPress deleting my website altogether” a bit better. Did you have a vision in mind for how your site will function after downgrading? Are you trying to maintain traffic to the site and the current visibility it enjoys in search results? Or are you mostly interested in keeping a copy of the current site (more or less) online as an archive, but not overly concerned with how traffic will be affected?

  Thanks for the additional info!