International SMM

WordPress.com

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RegionUSA and Canada

Platform · this deep dive is built from the official pages of the platform itself and of the tools that support it.

Overview

WordPress.com is a hosting service for sites and blogs running the WordPress engine, operated by the company Automattic. What distinguishes it from a self-installed WordPress is that the server, updates, domain, email and backups sit on the service's side; what distinguishes it from an ordinary site builder is that under the hood there is standard WordPress with its themes, plugins and export format.

The platform describes itself briefly: "Create your site. Share your voice. Earn online." For SMM this is not a social network but a property of your own: no algorithm hands out an audience here, it comes from search, newsletters and outside channels. In exchange the terms are open: pricing, content rights, the export procedure and the advertising rules are all published in full.

Who's here

There are no public audience statistics for the platform itself — how many sites, how many readers, in which countries — on the pages we checked. The only figure the service gives about its own reach appears in the description of its advertising programme: WordAds shows ads on tens of millions of sites and reaches more than a billion people a month. That is the platform's claim about its ad network, not a measurement of the WordPress.com audience as a product.

The interface languages are listed in the site's footer: among them German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese in both simplified and traditional script. The platform does not publish a country breakdown of its audience. An indirect sign of geography is the pricing: during our check the pricing page was served in euros, meaning the currency and possibly the amounts are substituted according to where the request comes from.

Getting started

Registration is by email, with no separate document check. The age threshold is named in the terms: the services may not be used by anyone under 13, or under 16 in Europe; anyone under 18 (or under the age of majority in their country) may use the service only under the supervision of a parent or guardian.

A free plan exists, but with two caveats stated outright on the pricing page: free sites show WordPress.com advertising to visitors, and storage is capped at 1 GB. The address of such a site is a subdomain of the form yourgroovysite.wordpress.com.

At the time of our check the paid plans looked like this: Personal — €9, Premium — €18, Business — €40, Commerce — €70 per month when billed every 12 months; storage — 6 GB on Personal, 13 GB on Premium, 50 GB on Business and Commerce. Billing for 24 and 36 months brings the prices down. A domain for the first year is included in the annual plans, and from the Personal plan up the platform's advertising to visitors is switched off.

Refunds come with numbers attached: annual plans are refundable within 14 days of purchase or renewal, monthly ones within 7 days.

What you can publish

The formats are posts and pages in the standard WordPress editor; on every plan the platform promises unlimited pages, posts, users and visitors; video hosting comes with the Premium plan, and Business and Commerce include VideoPress with 250 GB of dedicated storage.

The prohibitions are gathered in a separate document: illegal content, infringement of intellectual property rights, sexually explicit material (although nudity in itself is permitted), running an online casino, malicious code, impersonation, threats of violence and publishing other people's personal data.

Two points matter specifically for marketing. First: advertising is not allowed unless you take part in the WordAds programme or have bought a plan that permits ad networks. Second: spam is taken to include sites created mainly to drive traffic to outside resources, to inflate SEO, for phishing or for affiliate marketing, as well as sending unsolicited emails about your site — even if the site is not on WordPress.com.

How to grow

There is no algorithmic feed handing out reach here — and the platform does not claim one. The growth tools are of a different kind.

Statistics. They differ by plan: on the free plan, basic data for the last 7 days; on Personal, the full history with filters; from Premium up, extended analytics with UTM tags and a device breakdown.

Advertising your own posts. The Blaze tool promotes a page or post across the whole WordPress.com and Tumblr network and beyond, from $5 a day; the campaign goal is picked from four — traffic, sales, awareness, engagement — and the ad goes through review. The Business plan comes with $200 in Blaze advertising credits.

Newsletters. Paid and free subscription tiers are configured in the Monetize section; to take money you need a Stripe account, and the free tier is created automatically alongside the paid one and can be hidden.

Path to monetization

There are two main routes, and both are described with numbers.

Advertising (WordAds). The participation requirements: the site must be public, the plan must be Premium or higher, the domain must be registered and set as primary, plus a free PayPal account; sites flagged as mature cannot join the programme. Earnings are counted on impressions, not clicks, and the platform warns honestly: for noticeable income a site usually needs tens of thousands of impressions, and below that level it earns "a few cents or nothing".

The payout threshold is stated plainly: money is paid out once the balance exceeds US$100, otherwise the amount rolls over to the next month; final earnings are published at the end of the month following the reporting one, and placements in North America pay noticeably more than in other regions.

Paid subscriptions and accepting payments. Payment buttons through PayPal and Stripe are available from the Premium plan up. The terms of service separately note that for some features the fee is calculated as a percentage of the site's revenue, and that the platform takes no part in refund disputes between a site owner and their readers.

Tools and automation

Content rights and export are the platform's key distinction. You grant Automattic a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable non-exclusive licence to use, reproduce, modify and publish your content in order to provide and improve the services and promote your site; that also covers passing public content to certain third parties through the Firehose. One clause in the terms is worth reading before you launch: you agree to attribute your site's traffic to Automattic's account and must not assign it to another party — meaning that in industry rankings your site may get no credit of its own.

Export is handled fairly: content is exported to an XML file (WXR) — a standard format that WordPress and many other platforms can read; it includes posts, pages, comments, categories and tags, but the media library is not in the file, only links to it, so the original site has to stay public while the new one copies the images.

The API. The platform has a documented REST API with three namespaces — /rest/, /wp/ and /wpcom/, OAuth2 authorisation, a developer console, a reference for the Users, Sites, Posts, Comments, Taxonomy, Media and Stats sections, and rules on responsible use. For local development there are WordPress Studio, WP-CLI and deployment from GitHub — on the Business plan and above SFTP/SSH access is open, and from Personal up you can install extensions from the catalogue, where the platform counts more than 60,000 plugins. Plugins are the main route to automation: scheduling, analytics and integrations are added through them rather than through platform settings.

Limits and rules

Who it's for

It suits you if you need a site of your own on your own domain rather than an account inside someone else's feed: the content stays yours, export goes to a standard format, and moving to self-hosting does not mean rewriting your material. It suits editorial teams and newsletter authors (paid subscriptions, emails and payment collection are built in) and developers and agencies: the REST API, SSH, WP-CLI, deployment from GitHub and the plugin catalogue add up to a full working environment.

It does not suit you if you are looking for organic reach "from inside the platform" — none is handed out here. The free plan does not suit a business presence: someone else's advertising on your site and 1 GB of storage will not do. It does not suit projects built around affiliate links and SEO inflation — that is explicitly called spam. And the traffic attribution clause is worth weighing: if your own numbers in industry counters matter to you, the terms work against you.

Tools for this platform

The list is built from the tools' own facts: every line is a tool's statement that it supports the platform, with the source named. A tool missing from the list only means we have no such statement.

Scheduling and publishing:

Other tasks:

Verified data

The checked data this deep dive rests on.

About the platform

the platform describes itself as follows: «Create your site. Share your voice. Earn online.»

Self-description: this is the platform's claim about itself, not an independent assessment

source, checked 2026-07-28

Content

content export is an XML file (WXR): posts, pages, comments, categories and tags; the media library is not in the file, only links to it, so the original site has to stay public during the transfer

Above roughly 1000 posts and pages the export arrives by email as a zip archive containing several XML files

source, checked 2026-07-28

Advertising

Blaze promotes a page or post across the WordPress.com and Tumblr network and beyond — from $5 a day; campaign goals: traffic, sales, awareness, engagement; the ad goes through review

The page is marked «Last reviewed on July 16, 2026». The Business plan includes $200 in Blaze advertising credits

source, checked 2026-07-28

Analytics

statistics by plan: free — basic data for the last 7 days, Personal — the full history with filters, Premium and above — extended analytics with UTM tags and a device breakdown

source, checked 2026-07-28

How the money works here

WordAds requires: a public site, the Premium plan or higher, a registered domain set as primary, and a free PayPal account; sites flagged as mature cannot join the programme

The page is marked «Last reviewed on July 7, 2026»

source, checked 2026-07-28

a payout is made once the balance exceeds US$100; a smaller amount rolls over to the next month; final earnings are published at the end of the month following the reporting one

Earnings are counted on impressions, not clicks; placements in North America pay noticeably more

source, checked 2026-07-28

the platform states: WordAds shows ads on tens of millions of sites and reaches more than a billion people a month

This is the reach of the ad network, not the audience of WordPress.com as a product

source, checked 2026-07-28

paid subscription tiers are configured in Jetpack → Monetize, and a Stripe account is needed to take money; a free tier is created automatically and can be hidden

source, checked 2026-07-28

Pricing

storage by plan: free — 1 GB, Personal — 6 GB, Premium — 13 GB, Business and Commerce — 50 GB

source, checked 2026-07-28

free sites show WordPress.com advertising to visitors; switching the advertising off starts with the Personal plan

source, checked 2026-07-28

refunds: annual plans within 14 days of purchase or renewal, monthly plans within 7 days

source, checked 2026-07-28

as checked from our network: Personal €9, Premium €18, Business €40, Commerce €70 per month when billed every 12 months; billing for 24 and 36 months is cheaper

The currency is substituted according to where the request comes from: prices in other currencies may differ, and the page was served in euros

source, checked 2026-07-28

Restrictions

advertising on a site is not allowed unless the owner takes part in WordAds or has bought a plan that permits ad networks

source, checked 2026-07-28

spam is taken to include sites created mainly to drive traffic to outside resources, to inflate SEO, for phishing or for affiliate marketing, as well as sending unsolicited emails about your site

The rules state explicitly that interpretation rests with the platform

source, checked 2026-07-28

the user grants Automattic a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable non-exclusive licence to use, reproduce, modify and publish their content; public content may be passed to certain third parties through the Firehose

Rights to the content itself remain with the author

source, checked 2026-07-28

the site owner agrees to attribute their site's traffic to Automattic's account and must not assign it to another party; the site may get no credit of its own in industry reports

Material for projects that care about their own numbers in traffic counters

source, checked 2026-07-28

the services may not be used by anyone under 13, or under 16 in Europe; anyone under 18 only under the supervision of a parent or guardian

source, checked 2026-07-28

the contract is with Automattic Inc.; for residents of the «designated countries» (Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia and every country in Europe) — with Aut O'Mattic A8C Ireland Ltd.

source, checked 2026-07-28

API access

the home page carries a link to developer documentation: https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/ — the page opens and shows the marks of documentation

CORRECTED the previous version declared any address containing the word api or dev found on the home page to be a developer section. All 57 such records were checked by opening the address: 24 turned out to be documentation. See data/technical/dev-links-verified.tsv and docs/research/S195-догадка-по-адресу.md

source, checked 2026-07-28

a documented REST API with three namespaces — /rest/, /wp/ and /wpcom/ — OAuth2 authorisation, a developer console and a reference for the Users, Sites, Posts, Comments, Taxonomy, Media and Stats sections

source, checked 2026-07-28

the Business plan and above open SFTP/SSH access, WP-CLI and deployment from GitHub; from Personal up you can install extensions from the catalogue, where the platform counts more than 60,000 plugins

source, checked 2026-07-28

Languages

the interface language of the home page: en; declared language versions: ar, de, el, en, es, fr, he, hi, id, it, ja, ko and 12 more

The language is taken from the markup attribute, the versions from hreflang. The "and N more" figure is OUR count of the remaining hreflang links in the markup, not a claim by the source: that number does not appear on the page.

source, checked 2026-07-28

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