Time to upgrade
-
I have run out of storage space and need to upgrade, but I am worried about a number of things. 1) Do I need to back up my blog first? 2) Do I have to change my URL and if I do, will my followers find me? 3) If I don’t renew, do I lose my blog even from when it was free? 4) Is there another option? I don’t mind paying, but I am not very savvy about technology so am worried about losing everything I’ve done over the last three years.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Hi there,
The answers to 1, 2 and 3 are no :)
Adding Premium to your site will give you extra storage space and a few other extra features, but it won’t otherwise affect your site. Your content will be perfectly safe, and if you later decide to cancel the upgrade it still won’t do anything to your content. You’ll only lose the extra features.
Premium includes a free domain, but you don’t need to register one if you don’t want to. However, if you decide to register a domain, your free address will still work as well, and your followers will still get updates from your site as before.
As for other options, if you used very big images in your posts you can go through your media library one image at a time and replace them each with a smaller image, but I’ve done that myself and it’s both a lot of work and a bit complicated.
However, if you want the extra space in the Premium Plan to last as long as possible, make sure that you resize your images before you upload them to your site. For your theme you don’t need any image to be bigger than 1200 pixels wide, so any images bigger than that only wastes storage space.
Let me know if you have any more questions about this.
-
Thank you! This is VERY helpful. One question: how do I reduce the size of an image (usually my own photos, but sometimes public domain materials from the internet) in the future? I’ve never noticed how many pixels wide an image is before uploading.
-
I use Picasa to do this. When you export images from Picasa you have an option to resize them. I also like Picasa because you can export and resize several images at once. But you can use any image editing software for resizing. A relatively easy to use and free online tool is Pixlr.com.
Then you can also reduce the file size of the exported image, without changing the actual size or image quality, using something like JPEGMini.com. I use it on all images I upload to my personal site.
Here’s a good article another blogger wrote on the topic, if you’re interested:
-
Thanks! I will give these a try and see which works best (i.e., which is easiest) for me. Hasn’t Google discontinued Picasa?
Thanks again for all your help. I upgraded to Premium, and so far, so good. I don’t see the advantages yet aside from additional storage, nor can I figure out why I would change the URL. But as long as it works like it had before, I am happy.
-
Google isn’t supporting Picasa anymore, no, but I’ll use it for as long as it works. I haven’t been able to find another program that works as well as Picasa for organising and simple editing of photos :)
A custom domain is good both from an SEO and a branding perspective – it’s a unique address online that doesn’t have our (WordPress.com’s) name in it. But if you’re happy with the free address there’s no need to change it.
With Premium we also no longer show ads to your users, you can add audio and video files to your posts, and you can select custom colours and fonts for your theme in the Customizer should you choose.
Let me know if you have questions on the specifics of any of these features.
-
What is an SEO? I don’t really care about branding. My blog is not for generating money.
Isn’t there also something about better access to support (though you’ve certainly been great!)?
-
SEO means search engine optimization.
re: search engine discoverability
It can take weeks for search engines to index your site content. Please read this support doc https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/ so you know we have no control over search engines positioning or appearance in the SERPs (search engine page results).
To verify blog ownership of a WordPress.com hosted blog with the major search engines you must use this process > http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
Note: Even if you do not verify the blog the content will be indexed by search engines so don’t feel panicky about this please.WordPress.com automatically supplies sitemaps for our blogs to search engines – we do nothing. http://en.support.wordpress.com/sitemaps/#xml-sitemaps-for-search-engines
To gain search engine attention, I recommend that you start publishing posts (not pages) https://en.support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/ frequently. That’s because it can take weeks for search engines to index content in a new blog and/or to re-index content under a new URL.
For more information on expediting search engine indexing of your site read > http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/omg-i-cant-find-my-blog-on-google
SEO resources for wordpress.COM sites that you will want to consult are:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/six-seo-factors-you-should-know/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/ -
Isn’t there also something about better access to support (though you’ve certainly been great!)?
There is no phone support. See here for all the support options when you have wordpress.COM technical support issues see https://en.support.wordpress.com/help-support-options/
Those who have a paid upgrade for a wordpress.COM site can use the “Contact Support” form, http://support.wordpress.com/contact/ where they will receive a choice of having staff answer your question publicly or privately.
The best WordPress.COM contact form to use now for Staff assistance is:
http://wordpress.com/help/contact
Live chat will be available there if we have Happiness Engineers available to chat. When they are not available using that link results in posting to this peer support forum. https://en.support.wordpress.com/live-chat/re: direct email support
Also note, that you can email WordPress.COM Staff at:
support@wordpress.com
or
help@wordpress.comAlternatively, you can simply specifically state exactly what you need help with here in this peer support forum thread as there’s rarely a question asked that has not been previously answered.
-
Timethief, thanks. I’ve been posting regularly for close to three years, and my blog often pops up on searches I do, so I think I’ve been indexed. Are you saying the having a domain without wordpress.com in it will mean that more results will be found by those who are searching?
-
Thanks for the info on contacting support. I will save the response for future reference.
-
Are you saying the having a domain without wordpress.com in it will mean that more results will be found by those who are searching?
No. When you purchase domain the old URLs automatically redirect to the new domain URLs seamlessly.
https://brotmanblog.wordpress.com/ is being indexed as you can see by clicking this link.
-
@timethief
Thanks for jumping in :)Just so you know, the support@ email address is no longer used and /help/contact goes to live chat or email support for paid users (or should – it’s glitchy on occasion), and forums for unpaid users, unless they have a free trial upgrade.
-
/waving @kokkieh
unless they have a free trial upgrade
Trial upgrades have been reinstated?
@amybesscohen there is a list of free image editing software on this page: https://en.support.wordpress.com/media/image-optimization/ although as you pointed out Picasa is no longer available. Other image editing options are also available: Pixlr https://pixlr.com/ Fotor http://www.fotor.com/ and PicMonkey https://www.picmonkey.com/
-
Thanks, everyone. Someone suggested TinyPNG to me also. Does that do the same thing? It seems quite simple and will compress up to 20 photos at a time.
-
Both TinyPNG and JPEGmini http://www.jpegmini.com/ do the same thing. They recompress your image so the image is less in KB (or MB), but in a way that image quality isn’t affected.
However, neither of these online tools resize the image itself. So an image that is 4000 pixels high x 3000 pixels wide would stay the same size pixel-wise, but be less KB.
When you upload an image here, WordPressdotcom will display an image at the maximum width for the theme (and content width) you are using. For Twenty Eleven, about 850 pixels wide would be the largest image width you would really need. See the specs at the bottom of this page. https://wordpress.com/themes/twentyeleven/
-
So is compressing it not going to save me storage space? My goal is to save storage space, so do I need to resize as opposed to compress? This is all very confusing to me. It may make this all too much trouble if I have to edit each picture I upload. Is there any benefit from using TinyPNG in terms of preserving storage space?
-
@amybesscohen
Compressing the image file will save storage space, as it makes the file size smaller, but not the physical image. For best results, resize the image itself first, i.e. height and width, and then compress the image file to save even more space.TinyPNG will only work on PNG images, not JPEGs as saved by a digital camera, so just be aware of that.
Trial upgrades have been reinstated?
Not in the same way as they worked before, and nothing finalised at the moment.
-
Not so, kokkieh. I used TinyPNG to compress all the photos in my last blog post.
So it sounds like I will save some space with TinyPNG alone, but will save more if I also reduce the size in addition to compressing with TinyPNG. I will take a look at Irfan. I have the Fotor app, but I don’t see anyway to reduce the size of a photo except by cropping it. I also took a look at Google Photo, which has replaced Picasa, and I don’t see any way to do it there.
For now I will use TinyPNG and hope my 10 new GB of storage will last as long as I do!
-
I notice that on the Settings for Images on my Theme, I can change the maximum pixels for width and height of images. If I lower the maximum width and height to 850, what does that do? Right now both are set at 1024.
- The topic ‘Time to upgrade’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 