WordPress.com Creator Plan Review After 5 Years Usage

WordPress.com Creator Plan

Here is my honest review of WordPress.com Creator Plan after five years of hosting my website on this managed WordPress hosting platform.

Application Category: Web Hosting

Editor's Rating:
4

WordPress.com is one of the largest WordPress hosting platforms, thanks to the millions of users on their Free and Starter plans. The open-source WordPress CMS powers all websites hosted on WordPress.com. Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com also owns WooCommerce – the most popular eCommerce solution for WordPress, Jetpack – the all-in-one plugin for WordPress, and Akismet – the one-stop solution for fighting spam on your website.

Fun fact: They also own the popular microblogging website Tumblr.

In this review of the WordPress.com Creator Plan, I’ll be sharing with you the pros and cons of hosting your website on WordPress.com.

I have been on the Creator Plan since 2018 (previously known as Business Plan) and I’ll be with them as long as the hosting cost doesn’t burn a hole in my pocket. Now, if you haven’t had a chance to check them out, do check them out by clicking on the button below.

Customization

Unlike the Starter and Explorer plans where users cannot install custom themes and plugins, the WordPress.com Creator Plan allows users to install custom WordPress themes and plugins.

Many people still think that they’re limited to only a few themes and plugins that come with the Creator Plan. This is the number one reason why many WordPress users stay away from WordPress.com. But the truth is, you can install almost any theme or plugin you want.

Reliability

WordPress.com is very reliable compared to regular WordPress hosting companies out there. Over the past 5 years, there was only one instance where my site went down because of issues at their end. To make up for that, they extended my plan by a few months and I gladly accepted their offer.

Only a few companies offer features like unlimited bandwidth, global edge caching, and scalability at this price.

Stability

After moving my website to WordPress.com, my site never crashed due to WordPress updates. Thanks to their rigorous testing and quality assurance – I could proudly say that my site never went down due to any WordPress update. Also, downtimes if any are negligible.

It’s so much time saved for me which I could use productively instead of worrying about restoring my site when it goes down.

You can also create a staging area and experiment with your site before pushing changes to your live website on the Creator plan.

Speed

Speed is one thing that comes out of the box with WordPress.com. But make no mistake, most of their in-house themes are bloated with unnecessary CSS and JavaScript. Just install any good WordPress theme and your site will be loading in under a few seconds.

Also, they have enabled page and object caching by default for all websites hosted on their cloud. So, you needn’t worry about setting up a caching plugin although you can couple it with a plugin like Autoptimize to improve your performance further.

Some people might find this frustrating since you’re not allowed to install a caching plugin of your choice. I’d say that it’s one less headache for you.

If you’re still worried about improving your WordPress site performance, you can check out the linked article to learn how it can be done no matter where you host your website.

Backup and Restore

Their backup and restore feature is AMAZING! There have been many instances where I was playing around with plugin settings and got my site into a mess. But thanks to their backup and restore feature, I could roll my site back to a previous version that undoes all the changes made to the database.

Security

5 years with them and my site hasn’t been a victim of any hacking or malware activity. Their rock-solid security with features like Web Application Firewall (WAF), malware protection, site isolation, and DDoS protection makes sure that I can sleep peacefully without worrying about my site falling into the wrong hands or hackers.

Also, their Activity Log feature helps me keep track of all the changes that happen on my website in real time.

If you’re still not on WordPress.com but would like to improve your WordPress security, do check out the linked article.

Support

Their support people or as they’re popularly known as Happiness Engineers could help you resolve most of the issues within a day or two at the maximum. It surprised me that they were ready to help me with customizing my site even though it was out of their scope.

On the other hand, even though I was promised live chat support I couldn’t take advantage of it at times. To be honest, it worked only initially. After that, my requests went straight to their email. So, that’s a bummer. But, I wouldn’t worry about it since they always got back pretty quickly.

Jetpack Integration

WordPress.com Creator Plan comes with Jetpack premium integrations out of the box. Most of the WordPress.com features on the Creator Plan are powered by Jetpack. Some of these premium features include –

• Real-time backups and one-click restore
• Activity log
• Malware scanning
• VideoPress (Video Hosting)
• Advanced Search, etc

If you don’t want Jetpack to slow down your site, you can disable the modules that you don’t need.

CDN

WordPress.com supports serving images uploaded to your website through their global CDN (formerly Photon). Although you might feel this can improve your website’s performance, I’m sorry to disappoint you but it does the opposite. It increases the number of calls to their CDN URLs where your images are hosted. It would’ve been great if they had just served them from one single server. Instead, it gets served from multiple subdomains.

Also, the images are cached forever. If you want to replace the image with a different image, the old URL doesn’t get updated. Instead, a new URL is generated for the new image.

It offsets the benefit it offers like serving images in next-generation WebP format. So, I’d recommend you go with Cloudflare or any other CDN that doesn’t affect the performance of your website.

Technology

I could always try out and stay on the latest version of PHP and MariaDB officially supported by WordPress. It makes sure my site is always updated and can take advantage of the latest improvements and security features offered by PHP and MariaDB.

As I’m updating this review, my site is running on the latest version of PHP (8.1) and MariaDB (10.4) supported by WordPress.

By the way, you will get access to SFTP and Database as well using which you can work locally and push your changes to production. On top of that, you get 50 GB of storage with an option to buy more if required, unlimited traffic, a free SSL certificate, and more.

Google Analytics Integration

I don’t understand why this is listed as one of their main features when this can easily be done in a better way by using a dedicated plugin like MonsterInsights or CAOS. I felt my site took a bit longer to load when I used their Google Analytics integration.

Advanced SEO Tools

This is also an unwanted feature. Instead, they could have partnered with Yoast SEO to give us something amazing or just integrated it with their hosting instead of trying to provide us with a half-baked solution. I think it would be better if they could have just left it to the pros instead of trying to be a Swiss army knife of the WordPress hosting world.

Payment Processing

I didn’t get a chance to take advantage of this feature although I felt it makes sense to allow users to accept payments online through their website. Nowadays, many people are selling products and services online and this could be a good addition for them.

Video Hosting

If you want to self-host videos by directly uploading them to your website instead of uploading them to a separate video hosting platform like YouTube or Vimeo, this feature makes sense.

On the other hand, you could lose a lot of potential views that you would have normally gotten if you had uploaded your video to YouTube. So, think wisely and use their VideoPress hosting solution only if you have a strong use case or business requirement.

WordAds Program

If you want to monetize your website by displaying ads from WordPress.com’s in-house ad network, then you’ll be automatically eligible for the WordAds program. But, you should be aware that most of the time they display ads promoting their in-house services and sometimes from ad networks like Google Ads, Amazon, AOL, and more.

You might or might not find this useful if you’re aware of these ad networks and actively use them. People with websites getting large amounts of traffic but having no idea how to monetize it can find this solution useful – especially if most of their traffic comes from the United States and Canada.

Overall Verdict

If you can afford the WordPress.com Creator Plan, blindly go for it. It can save you a lot of time and you don’t have to worry about maintaining your WordPress site. On the flip side, they’re priced slightly higher than traditional web hosting plans.

This can deter a lot of people from signing up in the first place since it takes a bigger chunk of the initial investment. If you already have a popular site, this might be a good choice for you. On a scale of 1 to 5, I’d rate it 4/5.

So, what do you think about this WordPress.com Creator Plan review? Would you be willing to give it a try or are you an existing customer? Do let me know in the comments section below!