Choose the Personal plan (formerly known as the Starter plan) to create a powerful WordPress website or blog to use as your home on the web. This guide explains what’s included in the WordPress.com Personal plan.
The Personal plan includes WordPress hosting and everything else included in the free version of WordPress.com. By upgrading to this plan, your website will have all the features listed below.
If you decide you want to have more features in the future, you can upgrade your existing plan at any time.
With any WordPress.com paid plan (monthly or annual), you can set your domain as your site’s primary address. Without a paid plan, the free .wordpress.com address is the site’s primary domain.
If you have an existing domain name that you aren’t ready to transfer yet, you can connect the domain to your WordPress.com site on any of our plans.
When you purchase an annual plan, you can register a new domain for free for the first year. This offer is included in our one-year, two-year, and three-year plans but not monthly plans.
Register any available domain with popular extensions, including .com, .net, .org, and many more. If you already own the domain name you wish to use with your website, you can transfer your domain registration to WordPress.com for free with your annual plan.
After the first year, your domain will renew at the standard registration price listed in your Purchases. You can also check domain pricing here.
An SSL certificate is like a safety stamp for your website. When your website has an SSL certificate, it will load with https before your domain and the browser will display a padlock icon in the address bar that tells visitors your website is safe.
We provide an SSL certificate for all WordPress.com websites. We consider it so important that it can’t be turned off.
Free sites on WordPress.com display ads to help us pay the bills. To remove those ads from your site, purchase any plan, and no more advertisements will be displayed. Learn more about removing advertising on WordPress.com.
Plugins are additional tools that enhance a website’s functionality in thousands of different ways. With any of our paid plans, you can install plugins to create an online store, offer an online course, create memberships, install different editors, and implement virtually any other feature you can imagine.
Plugins are created by individuals and companies in the WordPress community who have made their tools available to all WordPress users. You can install plugins from over 50,000 available plugins, upload plugins you’ve found elsewhere, or even build a plugin yourself. Plugin authors can provide their plugins for free, at a cost, or commonly with a free version plus an option to upgrade for extra features.
A small number of plugins are not permitted on WordPress.com because we’ve found they can cause problems with your website, such as “reset” plugins. In those cases, we’ll often provide identical or superior functionality included with your plan.
With a paid plan, you can upload any WordPress theme from the many thousands of designs by any theme creator or even a theme you designed yourself.
Access traffic stats and insights into visitor behavior. Analyze views and visitors by days, weeks, months, or years. Select a specific date range to view traffic to your site during that time.
You can keep an administrative eye on all activity across your site using your Activity Log. While free sites have access to the 20 most recent events, upgrading to any WordPress.com paid plan will provide additional access to your full activity for the past 30 days, and the ability to filter events by type and date.
Upload audio files like mp3s to your website with any paid plan subscription. See our Audio guide for more.
WordPress.com allows you to accept credit and debit card payments for goods, services, subscriptions, memberships, donations, and more. Fees are lower than in the free version of WordPress.com, so as you collect more supporters, it may make sense to move to a higher plan to retain more revenue.
On the Personal plan and above, you can import an unlimited number of subscribers from another platform.
The Personal plan includes more themes not available on the free version of WordPress.com.
The Personal plan offers 6 GB of storage for your images, audio files, and documents. Learn more about storage on WordPress.com.
With the ability to install plugins, third-party themes, and custom code comes added risk. That’s why our plans includes daily backups to keep your site safe. You can rest easy knowing that whatever happens, you can restore your site to exactly how it was at any previous time before an issue occurred.
Sites with plugins installed are automatically backed up every day to make sure that none of your site changes are lost. We retain these backups as long as your site has an active plan and an additional 30 days after plan expiration or deactivation to ensure that you can quickly get your site back up and running.
On the Personal plan and above, you can add custom code like JavaScript, iframe, and more. You can also add code to your site’s header that is common for verifying your site with Google Adsense, MailChimp, and other services.
On sites hosted with WordPress.com, Jetpack Scan is used to detect vulnerabilities and security threats in plugins, themes, and user-uploaded files. Jetpack Scan uses data from WPScan and the WordPress.com security team to keep sites safe from malware and security breaches. While sites on other hosting providers need to pay extra for Jetpack Scan, it is integrated into your plan. Learn more about everything we do to keep your website safe.
On the Personal plan, you will have 24/7 access to our Happiness Engineers. We’re here to help you build a successful website or blog. Need help? Reach out today!
