Introducing WordPress Pro: One Plan, Infinite Possibilities
source link: https://wordpress.com/blog/2022/04/05/introducing-wordpress-pro-one-plan-infinite-possibilities/
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Introducing WordPress Pro: One Plan, Infinite Possibilities
Michael Pick
Our mission has always been to democratize publishing, one website at a time. Now we’re making all the benefits of WordPress available to more people, with one simple pricing plan.
Hello, Pro
One thing we heard over the years was how hard it can be to choose the right upgrade plan when you’re ready to scale up from Free.
WordPress Pro radically simplifies that decision by rolling the very best of managed WordPress hosting into a single, affordable plan at just $15/month (paid annually).
50,000+ Plugins in Your Pocket
Plugins are powerful add-ons that make it simple to add limitless functionality to your website in just a few clicks. No coding necessary. With WordPress Pro we’re opening the doors to this unlimited array of extra features at half the price of our previous Business plan.
A Universe of Beautifully Designed Themes
Along with thousands of free themes available, Pro also unlocks a range of beautiful, Premium themes, with more to come in the future. Whatever your goals, you’ll find a hand-crafted, flexible theme to transform your design in minutes, not months. No designer necessary.
From Site to Store in a Couple of Clicks
If you’re ready to start selling, WordPress Pro includes everything from simple payments, donations, and subscriptions, to full-blown stores.
WooCommerce – one of the most popular ecommerce platforms on the planet – is baked into your Pro plan. Not only does that bring raw, almost infinitely expandable options to your store, it also means you’ll pay significantly less than those other e-commerce options you see in ads everywhere.
Anytime Support, Any Time You Need It
Sometimes you need a little extra help getting it done. WordPress Pro customers can get a helping, human hand with Premium Support over live chat and email. If you’re stuck, we’re here to get you unstuck.
Managed WordPress Hosting For the Rest of Us
WordPress is all about the right to do it yourself.
With cheap hosting, or even a Raspberry Pi on your counter, you can put up a site in minutes for pocket change. But you’ll run into hours of hands-on maintenance, quickly hit speed, security, and hosting limits, and spend a significant amount of your time keeping it running. Managed Hosting takes away that pain, but often at a significantly higher price.
WordPress.com and the new WordPress Pro plan aim to give you the raw power, flexibility, and hassle-free experience of Managed Hosting, without the huge price tag that usually comes with it.
In addition to the headline features of Pro, you’ll get:
- Custom domain names without a separate subscription
- SEO features that make your site easy to find.
- Social media tools to promote your website.
- Hyper-secure protection from DDOS, brute force, and other attacks that could take your site down overnight
- Super-strong, real-time, automated backups spanning multiple locations, so if the worst ever happens, you’re covered
- The fastest site speeds of any managed hosting on the planet
- SFTP access to your files
- And much more
That means you’ll enjoy a fast, secure, search optimized site, without having to spend countless hours on updates, fixes, and technical maintenance.
What About Free?
Our Free plan isn’t going away.
It’s important to WordPress.com that anyone, anywhere can put up a blog or a site, whatever their situation. With the Free plan you’ll still be able to get the word out, create a beautiful site, and take advantage of the fastest WordPress managed hosting on the planet. And when you’re ready to scale up your ambitions, WordPress Pro will be waiting in the wings.
How This Affects Your Current Plan
While we’re making a few changes to the Free plan, rest assured that if you’re already signed up, nothing will change for you. Ditto, if you’re on one of our legacy plans, nothing will change unless you want it to.
Going forward, new signups and sites will integrate smoothly into our new Free and Pro plans.
Your Money Goes Further. And Further.
WordPress Pro is more than just a simple, competitive way to enjoy rock-solid, super-fast, hyper secure WordPress hosting without the hassle.
Every dollar you spend on your plan helps us to:
- Support WordPress.com Free plan users around the world, whatever their circumstances. This is more important than ever in 2022.
- Sponsor the work of 90+ dedicated developers working on the free, open source WordPress project as part of the Five for the Future initiative. That helps to ensure that WordPress will always be free, open, updatable, and hostable by anyone.
We’re Here For You
We’re listening to your feedback, and want to be clear that it will, as always, shape the future of WordPress.com.
With that in mind, we’re committing to:
- No traffic limits on either the Free or Pro plan. You’ll enjoy the same unlimited traffic you’ve always had.
- The new Free plan storage limit will include 1GB of Free storage, and existing Free users will keep the 3GB they already have on hand.
- Additional storage will be available for purchase at a very reasonable price, very soon.
- As-you-need them add-ons for both plans, to give you a la carte upgrades. Coming soon.
It’s important that we keep things simple, honest, and clear in everything we do, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you about your plans, feedback, and ideas!
More Questions?
We totally understand that you might have additional questions about the changes. We’ve answered more of your questions in our FAQ here.
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25 Comments
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Just an opinion: Would have been better to keep the other plans as are, and put this one between the Premium and Business plan… Now you’re going to force people to pay more than they probably need to for features they don’t need where the Personal and Premium plan would have been better for them. For those who do need more features, being able to build their stores could save money for some possibly by not having to use 3rd party services like Etsy, Storenvy, etc. My comments are not complaints. I just think having only the two options available now might not be the greatest for some. On the other hand, WordPress is making lots of changes lately, so you may have a hit on your hands with this new Pro plan. Also I’m getting ready to start my website over. I was planning on upgrading to the Business plan for the 200GB storage for my photography. I don’t how this new plan is going to work out for that. I do like the new price. $180 a year is definitely more affordable. I guess I’ll see how the 50GB limit will work out in the long run.
Liked by 12 people
sissue2020
I do agree on the purchase price for the pro is more than what some of my clients need. They need just a landing page with a real domain name not an extension of the wordpress.com name.
Liked by 2 people
That’s great to see that the storage limit on the free plan has been bumped up to 1 GB. I saw a number of people expressing concerns over the last couple of days about the 500 MB limit.
Liked by 4 people
Author, writer and playwright. Really enjoy and appreciate the opportunity given by WordPress to meet my readers, so to speak, outside of published works. It is difficult to forward advertise new books without the benefit of a mainstream publisher who has the eyes and ears of media to promote through. I am hoping to publish a third action mystery novel, in a series. First novel, was published in 2015. Joined WordPress in 2016. Best wishes, Colin.
Liked by 1 person
Massive kudos for considering the feedback of the community and making changes on the basis of it – one of the many reasons why WordPress.com will always have a special place in my heart.
Liked by 3 people
So in an effort to “simplify”, you’re making things even more complicated by adding “option” upgrades without any firm data to give us. That’s the WordPress I’ve come to know. Thanks for confirming that nothing has changed behind the scenes….
Liked by 4 people
Marvellous.
Liked by 1 person
How about this? Stop screwing up the way we build web and blog sites and get away from that stupid block system which isn’t good for anybody. Why do you insist on complicating things every few months? Oh wait. I know the answer. To many employees with too few real jobs to do. Do a real job and fire people. Just so you know, I’m about to leave WordPress because I don’t have an engineering degree that is needed to use simple tasks.
Liked by 5 people
I started my daily blogging two months ago. My plan was to upgrade to a WordPress Personal by the end of the year, I thought it wasn’t too expensive and covered all the basics. But now with this PRO plan, I just don’t see the point of having so much features that I won’t ever use. I just blog, without the intention of making money, I was willing to pay to sustain this hobby/passion.
I get the economic sense of this plan but it feels truly constrained for simple bloggers.
I’m thinking of leaving the entire WordPress ecosystem and move to a more indie plain text style blogging platform. 
Liked by 6 people
I think WordPress has shot itself in the foot here. Either pay nothing or pay $15 a month. Many hobbyists, bloggers etc would be willing to pay around $7 – $8 a month, which was the plan that WordPress used to offer before it changed them without telling anyone. Now the price has doubled for users looking to upgrade from free. That’s just too expensive. I’m already looking at the other options and most of them work out to $80 – $100 a month. So long WordPress.
Liked by 7 people
i have 8 .com domains that I’ve just today turned off auto-renewal on because of this mess. Some of them I had already allowed their plans to expire, but was holding the .com domains. The reason for this was because over the last few years I’ve had idea after idea for a website, got started on it, and then found I didn’t have the time to work on them due to life and day jobs getting in the way. So I was going to build the websites up and then add their plans back so that I could reassign their associated .com domain… but not anymore. I refuse to in the future pay $180 a year for domains I’m accustomed to paying $48 or $96 plans on. Nice job losing that business.
Liked by 4 people
sissue2020
I really was basing my business on your multiple hosting plans. Now I have to start over and find another dashboard like platform to host some of the budget sites that support wordpress templates. I hate it that you did away with the legacy hosting plans for new sites. It was truly working for me and now I have to rethink what I am doing. it hurts. really it does.
Liked by 7 people
At this stage you should just restore the 3GB. I’m not sure many people will consider a four-sixths reduction rather than a five-sixths reduction to be ‘good news’.
It’s nice that you have seen sense and removed the limits of views, but these artificial limits smack of a very 1990s attitude towards the internet, which is not encouraging in 2022.
Several bloggers I know who were previously on the cheaper paid plans are now looking to move away completely, since the price jump is too high to justify, and the new free plan is considerably more limited than it was just 5 days ago. Ten out of ten if that was one of your objectives with these changes.
Lastly, you have burned up a lot of trust and goodwill over the past few days. I guess you will find out how that translates into paying customers over the next few months as people make their decisions.
Liked by 12 people
First of all, thank you for listening to our feedback and upping the limit on new free site storage and removing site visit limits.
WordPress.com has been my home on the web since 2006 and there have been umpteen changes to the platform since then. Just about every time a change takes place, it’s done in a way that catches existing customers unprepared and taken by surprise, causing a lot of very unnecessary ill will. One would hope that given past experiences, and with a customer base of WordPress.com’s size, both the design and marketing teams are involved in designing the launch of new features and products so to avoid negative customer experiences. Perhaps the Pro plan will suit your customers’ needs, but, for now, existing customers likely won’t remember that WordPress.com made the full-featured Business plan more accessible to them by reducing the price, but how it was launched and how that made them feel.
Liked by 8 people
Thanks for this.. Woo is out of my price point but if some of it is included in Pro then I’m game. Think it would be great to get some sort of special offer 
…just jumping out asking. Looking forward to upgrading soon.
Liked by 1 person
There are a few things to learn from that I’m hoping you (wp.com) are already aware of:
– Having the pricing plan options appear before an official announcement caused a lot of unnecessary confusion and panic.
– Not releasing information (specifics) on add-ons has put many people in an uncomfortable place, especially those whose business planning depends on knowing what their site(s) are going to cost them over the next year.
– Not releasing add-on information along with the plan realignment feels half-baked and the opposite of transparent.
– Choosing between two plans, each on the other extreme ends of the scale, alienates all of the people whose sites are “in-between”. This action told all of those customers that they don’t matter.
– This is against the “open web” philosophy that you claim to support.
Liked by 8 people
Ace
Downfall of WordPress.com….GARBAGE themes (they removed all the beautiful free simple themes) and almost all the premium themes are BAD. GARBAGE block system. and now the new GARBAGE PLANS. MAKE WORDPRESS GREAT AGAIN!
Liked by 4 people
Add 1 more plan at $5 per month without WooCommerce and you’ll thank me later
Liked by 5 people
This will price me out. I will have to ask followers to contribute or take the site down, it is disappointing. I sell nothing nor do I have advertising. I have been flying with WordPress since 2013.
Liked by 2 people
Jkund
Welp, I’m glad I’m not the only that was confused on seeing this new pricing 2 weeks ago with no information and lack of decent themes.
We need upgrades to be made available urgently, especially storage upgrades, ad removal and domain mapping.
Also, presenting the “free plan” in a more positive light helps a lot. For example, in addition to focusing on what it has that is different from the “pro plan”, it would be interesting to show what it has in common, such as unlimited posts and pages.
Liked by 2 people
I have alwasy thought WP.com was much better than any other similar services such as Wix. Today you just became another Wix. Congrats.
Liked by 3 people
This is dumb. You had just made sure that I will never upgrade to a paid plan, ever. This new PRO plan is simply too expensive for me while offering a lot of garbage options that I simply do not need. From now on, it is either a free plan or nothing for me.
Bring WordPress as it was six/seven years ago back — everything was much better then.
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