WordPress.com review: the $4 plan got interesting in April

A WordPress.com review written eighteen months ago would have reached a fairly blunt conclusion: pay $25 a month for Business or do not bother, because everything that made the platform interesting sat behind that wall. That review is now out of date. Since 2 April 2026, installing plugins from the 50,000-plus directory, uploading your own themes and writing custom CSS have been available on every paid plan — Personal included. The floor moved from $300 a year to $48, and the desk has had to reassess accordingly.

This is an assessment of the hosted service at WordPress.com, judged as a place to write: what the tiers cost, what the storage actually holds, whether the editor gets out of the way, and what comes out the other end if you leave. It ranks second on our best blogging platforms guide, and the gap between it and first place is narrower than it was.

The plan ladder, with real numbers

Read from the WordPress.com pricing page on 19 September 2026. The first figure is the monthly-equivalent rate when you pay for a year up front; the second is what the same plan costs paying month to month.

• Free — $0, no expiry. 1GB storage, a wordpress.com subdomain, limited theme choice, and advertising placed on your site that you neither control nor earn from.
• Personal — $4/mo annually ($48 a year), or $9/mo monthly. 6GB storage, ads removed, free domain registration for the first year.
• Premium — $8/mo annually, or $18/mo monthly. 13GB storage, the full premium theme library, video uploads, payment button.
• Business — $25/mo annually, or $40/mo monthly. 50GB storage and 24/7 priority support.
• Commerce — $45/mo annually, or $70/mo monthly. 50GB storage, the full WooCommerce experience and zero transaction fees on sales.

Two things to notice. The annual discount is steep — Personal is 56% cheaper paid yearly than monthly — which means the advertised $4 is only real if you commit for twelve months. And the free domain is free for one year; afterwards it renews at whatever that TLD normally costs, which nobody puts on the pricing page.

For a blog, the interesting tiers are Free, Personal and Premium. Business and Commerce are priced for sites doing commerce, and paying $300 a year for a writing blog is money spent on capability you will not open.

What actually changed in April 2026

The old shape of WordPress.com was: cheap plans are a nicer-looking free tier, and the real product starts at Business. Plugins, uploaded themes and custom CSS were Business-and-above features, and that single line in the comparison table did more to shape the platform’s reputation than anything else about it.

On 2 April 2026 that line was removed. Plugin installation from the directory, uploading themes you found or built elsewhere, custom CSS and the global styling controls including custom fonts are now available on Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce alike.

The practical consequence is that the capability ceiling on a $48-a-year plan is now extremely high. If there is a thing you want your blog to do, there is very likely a plugin that does it, and you no longer need to be on a $300 plan to install it. That is a materially different product from the one most published comparisons are still describing.

Two caveats the desk would flag. Storage did not move with it — Personal is still 6GB, and plugins are exactly the sort of thing that encourages a site to get heavier. And a plugin is a piece of software you are now responsible for choosing well; the freedom to install anything includes the freedom to install something that slows your site down or stops being maintained.

The storage arithmetic

Storage is where the cheap tiers bite, and the numbers deserve working through rather than glancing at.

1GB on the free plan sounds generous until you photograph anything. A modern phone photo dropped in unedited runs several megabytes; a few hundred of those and the tier is finished. 6GB on Personal is a genuine working allowance for a text-led blog with sensibly sized images, and a tight one for anything photographic. 13GB on Premium is the point at which a picture-heavy blog stops having to think about it.

The mitigation is unglamorous and it works: resize images before uploading rather than after. A 2,400-pixel-wide JPEG at reasonable compression is a few hundred kilobytes and looks identical on screen to the five-megabyte original. Do that from the first post and 6GB will outlast your enthusiasm.

The editor question

WordPress.com writes in the block editor, and reactions to it are unusually polarised for something so mundane.

The case for it: the block model makes complex layouts approachable without touching code, reusable patterns genuinely save time, and the editing surface has improved steadily rather than in lurches.

The case against it: every paragraph is an object with its own interface, and for long-form prose that is friction. Writers who work in continuous drafts — start at the top, keep going, fix it later — tend to find it interrupts a rhythm that other editors leave alone. There is no supported classic-editor alternative on the hosted service, so this is not a preference you can configure away.

The desk’s position is that this is genuinely a matter of temperament, not a defect. It is also the single thing most likely to decide whether you stay. Write two or three real posts in it before you buy a year, and read the editors, compared if you want the fuller picture. Anyone for whom the block editor is a dealbreaker should be looking at Ghost instead.

Getting your writing back out

This is where WordPress.com quietly wins. The export produces a WXR file — a standard XML format containing your posts, pages, comments and metadata — and more publishing software can read that format than any other on this page.

That matters in a way that is easy to underrate while everything is going well. An export is only worth what another system can do with it, and a file that four different platforms can import is a genuinely different asset from a folder of styled HTML. If you attach a custom domain, the URLs are yours as well, which means a move does not have to cost you the links people have already made to your work. We took every platform on the list apart on exactly this question in the portability audit.

Who should buy which plan

Nobody, at first. The free tier has no expiry. Write six posts on it and find out whether you are the kind of person who writes six posts. The ads are the price, and they are a fair one.

Personal, $48 a year, for most blogs. Post-April 2026 this is the value pick of the entire hosted category. Ads gone, a domain included for the first year, 6GB of storage and the plugin directory open. Start a WordPress.com plan here unless you have a specific reason not to.

Premium, $96 a year, if the blog is visual. The extra 7GB and the full theme library are the reason to move up, not the payment button.

Business or Commerce only if you are selling. For writing, they are capability you will not open, at four to nine times the price of the plan that does the job.