Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
Over the course of June I’ve written four posts about WordPress.com and its various features. It’s been a pretty intensive overview of a service I’ve used for years, and I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.
Now that the series is complete (for now?), here are the entries I penned over the course of June 2026:
What do you think of WordPress.com? If you were to start blogging (if you weren’t already), would you use it, or opt for one of its competitors? Would you use multiple platforms? If you already use WordPress.com, what made you pick it over competitors? Have you ever considered jumping ship to another platform? Do you cross-post across multiple platforms?
Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
As we head into the end of June and reach the end of my series of pieces on WordPress.com (read the other installments here, here, and here). Last week I compared WordPress.com to Blogger/Blogspot, the platform I used to start my blog way back in 2009. This week, we arrive at the final boss of blogging platforms: Substack.
Even as I went to Substack to retrieve a link to it, the site and its writers sucked me in for a solid fifteen minutes. It’s why I’ve taken to calling the platform “Subcrack,” because it’s really good at roping in readers.
The secret to Substack’s appeal seems to be its unique blending of X’s short-form observations (“Notes” in Substack) and WordPress.com‘s long-form content. But there’s something more, too: the minimalism of Substack’s interface makes it a pleasure to read, especially when put in “Dark Mode.”
Yes, users have a degree of customization with their individual Substacks. They can change the homepage’s layout and the colors, but the customization is fairly limited beyond that. In some ways that limitation can be a strength, as it gives the sensation of experiencing many branches of one service, but I’ll get into that below.
I setup my own Substack page earlier this year, and I’ve been cross-posting my content from WordPress.com to Substack. While I still almost all of my long-form writing natively in WordPress.com‘s block editor, I use Substack primarily for its “Notes” functions—and to reach an audience that is almost entirely separate from the WordPress.com ecosystem.
As with last week’s post, I’m going to compare WordPress.com and Substack in three areas: overall interface (looking at the home screen, for example, when you first log into your account); the posting interface/editor; and the final published content (what the blogs look like when published).
Note that Substack is free for authors/creators. With WordPress.com I have the Premium plan, which is $8 a month when paid annually (or $18 a month otherwise). Substack does not have any inherently paid options for creators, but enables readers to pay for a subscription to their preferred creators. One way that Substack functions like X is that there might be many users, but only a handful of actual creators, although I’ve found that the Venn Diagram overlap is very high on Substack. Similarly, people can have a WordPress.com Gravatar without actually maintaining a blog, but that pool seems very small.
To illustrate, here’s a Venn Diagram I created in MS Paint based totally on vibes:
“Readers with an account” means those users who have an account with the service but only use it for commenting or “liking” posts, and not for writing posts or maintaining a blog-like presence themselves.
Regardless, the basic functionality of posting, checking analytics, etc., is analogous enough between Substack and WordPress.com to compare the two. I think it’s especially important because, right now, it seems like Substack is WordPress.com‘s biggest potential competitor in the blogosphere.
Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
Back in 2018 I shifted The Portly Politico from the old Blogger/Blogspot to WordPress.com, and I’ve never looked back—until now.
I’ve dedicated the last two Wednesdays to highlight some of WordPress.com‘s functionality; you can read those posts here and here (for those of you that read last week’s post, I’m happy to report that I was able to deactivate the “Classic Editor” plugin with no ill effects—everything converted back to the blocks editor seamlessly). I thought it might be interested to go back and remind myself why I made the leap to WordPress.com, and to see if maybe I was too hasty in making the change.
I decided to compare Blogger/Blogspot to WordPress.com in three areas: overall interface (looking at the home screen, for example, when you first log into your account); the posting interface/editor; and the final published content (what the blogs look like when published).
Note that I have the free Blogger/Blogspot account that anyone with a Gmail e-mail address can get, while with WordPress.com I have the Premium plan, which is $8 a month when paid annually (or $18 a month otherwise). Blogger/Blogspot does not have any inherently paid options, but lacks the ability to purchase a domain name from Blogger/Google directly. You can purchase a domain name from a number of third-party providers (that’s my approach with www.tjcookmusic.com, which I built using Google Sites), but it’s not integrated into Blogger/Blogspot the way domain name purchases are in WordPress.com.
Regardless, the basic functionality of posting, checking analytics, etc., is analogous enough between Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress.com to make fruitful comparisons.
Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
Last week I wrote about adapting to blocks in WordPress.com, as well as looking at some other changes WordPress.com has introduced recently, like badges and/or achievements for reaching certain milestones. My overall verdict was that, while I miss the Classic Editor, blocks do offer a degree of versatility that make editing easier, even if there are some shortcomings to them.
While writing and researching that post, I noticed that there is a plugin native to WordPress.com that restores the Classic Editor—indeed, an almost even more “classic” version of it than I realized!—and realized that I had to give it a whirl. Could it be that WordPress.com still had the coveted feature that many bloggers still crave? And how would it stack up to the new block editing regime?
Everything you’re about to read is possible in any of the paid WordPress.com plans, including the Personal plan, which is $4 a month when paid annually (or $9 a month otherwise). I use the Premium plan, which $8 a month when paid annually (or $18 a month otherwise). I’m not sure if the Classic Editor plugin can be re-enabled in free plans; that said, if you use a free plan and it works, let me know!
