Are You Thinking Of Upgrading Your WordPress Plan?
Today, I thought I would talk about how to know when it is time to upgrade your plan. A lot of people have asked me about whether they should upgrade their plan. And whether it’s even necessary to upgrade to a paid plan. A lot of times deciding whether or not to upgrade your plan can get a bit complicated. And it is difficult to decide when the perfect time is for an upgrade. However, if you are seriously considering upgrading to a paid plan there are some factors you should take into account first. Yes, the payment and plan are reversible but that does not always workout.
When I went from the Premium Plan to the Business Plan I was kind of disappointed. So, I decided to switch back to the Premium Plan. Unfortunately, during the process of switching back I lost all the likes/comments on several of my posts. And the posts became duplicated for some reason. The customer care people at WordPress were unable to help. Therefore, I decided to write a post on some things you should consider when you are thinking about upgrading your plan so that you can make an informed decision and don’t have to go through what I went through. These factors will help you decide whether or not you should upgrade your plan:
Why are you blogging?
You need to think about what you are planning to achieve from your blogging journey. If you are blogging as a hobby and are not currently looking to start blogging full-time/make an income blogging then there is not much of a need for you to upgrade your plan. I would highly recommend sticking with an unpaid wordpress.com site. If you are planning to make some sort of an income from your blogging than you may need a paid plan. If you want to monetize your blog using Ads you will need to upgrade your plan to a paid plan as those offer revenue from Ads. Furthermore, sponsors are more likely to want to work with someone who owns their domain/site rather than a site that has wordpress.com/wordpress.org on it.
Income
When considering an upgrade you should take into consideration how much you are currently earning through your site because you should be earning at least equivalent before you decide to invest. You should be ambitious and invest in yourself if you have the capital to do so however if you don’t have that kind of money I would recommend waiting till your blog is making at least the amount you spend on the plan before upgrading because you are not going to make more than a couple of dollars of the Ads unless you have a huge following. It’s just a better idea to have some sort of income before you invest in your blog.
Better/more options
If you are looking for options like plugins, better themes and more than you may not have any choice but to upgrade. For example, plugins are only offered on the Business Plan and the eCommerce Plan. If you absolutely need to use plugins than you will have no choice but to upgrade. However, I will warn you some of the features offered are not really worth it and some of the plans are not explained well by WP. If you want to know about my personal experience with upgrades and how WP kind of messed it up click here.
Customization
If you want to customize your site to make it look a certain way you should consider upgrading your plan. Because the paid plans do offer a lot more customizing options. They offer more themes, the ability to customize how your site looks and more. However, you can also customise by switching to a self-hosted site.
Your following/traffic
Your following and traffic should be one of the main things you consider before deciding to upgrade your plan. If your blog is consistently growing in both following and traffic and you predict that it will continue to do so I would recommend thinking about an upgrade.
However, if you feel like your blog is not growing that much you may want to wait until your blog has at least 5-10K followers and 1k views a day. It is difficult to make money off your blog if you don’t have a large following/audience. And an upgrade will not be able to fix this problem. Sponsors want to work with people who have at least a few thousand followers and Ads only make a decent amount of revenue when you have a certain amount of daily views.
On the other hand you can make a decent amount of money even on the free plan if you have a large following/traffic. To find out how to grow your following click here. To find out how to grow your audience click here. Once your blog is growing at a good rate you can decide to upgrade to a paid plan.
Related post:
What Plan Is The Best For My Blog
Your Thoughts
So that is how to figure out if it is time to upgrade your plan. What plan are you currently on? Do you have a paid plan or are you currently using the free plan? If you have a paid plan are you fully satisfied with it? If you have a free plan are you thinking of upgrading in the future? Or are you satisfied with the free plan? Let me know in the comments below because I am always interested in what you guys have to say!
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