Paid $26 but blog is still wordpress.com

  • Unknown's avatar
    feltiefare · Member ·

    I’m really confused – I paid $26 to have a self-hosted wordpress blog and I chose the domain that they offered my which was feltiefare.com rather than feltiefare.wordpress.com which is what they offered me as free.

    I am unable to install any widgets on this blog, apparently because it is a .com blog. But I paid for it – surely the $26 should allow me to put widgets on?? I don’t understand what I paid for – is my blog self hosted or not?

    I’m very confused! If anyone can shed any light on this I would be very very grateful :)

    SHona

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

  • staff-happychia · Staff ·

    $26 is for custom domain. So you can get rid of .wordpress.com from your site address and have a nice and simple feltiefare.com address for your blog. You can read more about custom domains here: https://store.wordpress.com/premium-upgrades/custom-domains/

    If you didn’t buy custom domain, you will have to live with feltiefare.wordpress.com which is not as cool as feltiefare.com :)

    This doesn’t make any difference in terms of what widgets , plugins and themes you can use. I can have the same widgets, plugins and themes on the site using free xxx.wordpress.com address as well.

    You will get full control on your blog if you self-host it. You can learn more about differences here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/ and here: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/com-or-org/

    Feel free to ask if you have more questions :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    feltiefare · Member ·

    Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! :)

    So the $26 I paid was only for getting rid of the wordpress bit, it doesn’t make it a self hosted blog?

    Every time I go to the plugins section of my blog, it just comes up with a page saying:

    “Want to add a store to your site?
    Support for Shopify, Ecwid, and Gumroad is now available for WordPress.com Business.

    Upgrade Now”

    It wont let me search for plugins or anything. Do you know why that would be? I read somewhere that it is because I have a wordpress.com site and you can’t put plugins onto that…would that be why?

    Such a newbie blogger as you can tell! :)

    Shona

  • staff-happychia · Staff ·

    So the $26 I paid was only for getting rid of the wordpress bit, it doesn’t make it a self hosted blog?

    That’s correct. Self-hosting has lot more to deal with than just buying a domain name :)

    You are correct about plugins. On WordPress.com most popular plugin functionality is available automatically. So there is no Plugins menu in the dashboard. Although I wonder what do you mean by plug in section on your blog. Or do you mean Store page?

  • Unknown's avatar
    feltiefare · Member ·

    Aaah ok! Haha right, I understand now :)

    With the plugin thing, I tried to add a bloglovin link and also a pinterest link but the intsructions that wordpress gave told me to do it through the plugin page which didnt work. It’s not a big deal though, I don’t really mind, I just thought that maybe I was being really stupid and just couldn’t work it out :)

    You have been so helpful, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!

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