The WordPress.com Show

Episode Summary: A chapter from Mike's eBook How To Podcast on Wordpress.com, sharing 14 reasons to consider WordPress.com as a combined podcast and website host. Note: plan names and pricing reflect 2018 and have since changed.

What You'll Learn

• 14 reasons WordPress.com made sense as an all-in-one podcast and website host in 2018
• The three WordPress.com plan tiers at the time and what each unlocked
• How WordPress.com handled reliability, customization, and multiple/private podcast feeds
• Monetization options available through WordPress.com hosting

Mike's approach to recommendations: he only endorses tools he genuinely uses and believes in, because trust — that he knows what he's talking about and actually believes it — is the foundation of the whole brand. These are the 14 reasons that were compelling enough to write an entire eBook about it: How To Podcast on Wordpress.com: The Step-By-Step Guide.

14 Reasons to Use WordPress.com

1. Simplicity. One price covers both podcast and website hosting. Mike's own setup at the time wasn't simple — separate bills to Libsyn, Siteground, and Sucuri (for security, after a website hack) — which made the WordPress.com all-in-one approach appealing.

2. Trust. WordPress has a long track record and roughly 30% of websites run on WordPress.org or WordPress.com. Paid plans included email and live chat support.

3. Affordability. Every paid plan bundles podcast, blog, and website hosting plus a free custom domain. Note: the Free Plan doesn't support audio uploads, so podcasting requires at least a paid tier. At the time: the Personal Plan ($4/month, 6GB — roughly 200 thirty-minute episodes worth of storage), the Premium Plan ($8.25/month, 13GB, premium themes, video support), and the Business Plan ($24.92/month, unlimited storage/bandwidth, plugin installs, custom themes like Divi, automatic backups, e-commerce). See current WordPress.com pricing for today's plans and rates.

4. Reliability. WordPress.com's server infrastructure is built for uptime, security, backups, and heavy bandwidth — with enough redundancy that an individual site going down independent of a platform-wide outage is unlikely, unlike smaller shared-hosting setups.

5. Customization. The base tier is limited to free themes; the mid-tier unlocks hundreds of premium, mobile-responsive themes; the top tier allows full custom theme uploads (Divi, in Mike's case). For a podcast that just needs a home base, the entry-level plan is often enough.

6. Domain name included. Paid plans include a free custom domain for the first year (renewal was $13/year at the time), replacing the default yourpodcast.wordpress.com address — or you can bring your own existing domain.

7. Social sharing. One-click publishing to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, plus automatic email alerts to blog subscribers when a…

Read the complete show notes and resources on mikemurphy.ai.