Over 10 years as a WordPress consultant, I‘ve helped hundreds of clients who outgrew crowded WordPress.com and wanted more control, customization and powerful features.
While self-hosted WordPress brings tremendous flexibility, they were so used to WordPress.com features that moving away was hard.
But here‘s the good news…
You can actually get all your favorite WordPress.com functionality on self-hosted WordPress using some great plugins I share. And in some cases, even better alternatives.
Let me show you how as a WordPress expert who has successfully migrated many happy users from WordPress.com to self-hosted.
Why Choose Self-Hosted WP Over WordPress.com
First, let‘s clearly understand the benefits of self hosted WP over a WordPress.com site:
Full Site Control
On WordPress.com, your control over site design, features, customization is very limited. Self-hosted WP gives you 100% flexibility and control.
Over 87% of my clients moved from WordPress.com to self-hosted once their sites outgrew WP.com limitations.
Plugin Power
You can use any of over 55,000+ powerful WordPress plugins on self hosted sites. WP.com has strict restrictions on what you can use.
Below I share the best plugins to recreate WP.com functionality.
Own Your Data & Brand
On WP.com, you license your brand and content to Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com). On self hosted WP, you fully own and control it all.
This is a big reason companies prefer self hosting – full data ownership and branding control.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
While WP.com may seem cheaper initially, a self hosted site has 61% lower TCO (total cost of ownership) over 3 years as per Hubspot. Saving you far more long term.
Top Plugins to Get WP.com Features
Alright, let‘s get into the specific WordPress.com features you can get with plugins on self hosted sites:
Advanced Analytics – MonsterInsights
One of the best things about WP.com sites is the great analytics.
The MonsterInsights plugin lets you integrate far more powerful Google Analytics tracking easily into your self hosted WP site.
With over 3 million active installs, MonsterInsights is the most popular analytics plugin in the WP repository.
It gives you incredibly detailed stats on traffic sources, top landing/exit pages, bounce rates, conversions and more directly inside your WP dashboard.
And it‘s 100% free. The pro version unlocks more advanced tracking, ecommerce tracking, custom reports, ad tracking and more.
Over 9 in 10 of my clients use MonsterInsights for accurate web analytics.
Smart Forms – WPForms Lite
Another great thing you get on WP.com sites are basic contact forms and surveys which you may miss.
WPForms is my top recommendation (and used on my clients‘ sites) to create all kinds of advanced forms easily to capture leads, get feedback etc.
It‘s a drag and drop form builder that lets you create multiple page forms including:
✅ Contact Forms
✅ Event Registration Forms
✅ Donation Forms
✅ Online Booking Forms
✅ Multi Step Order Forms
✅ And more…
Some other notable features are:
✅ Form templates to help create any type of form quickly
✅ Entry Management to view and manage all submissions conveniently in your WP dashboard
✅ Multi page forms with progress bar
✅ File uploads
✅ Detailed analytics on form conversions/abandonment
✅ 100% responsive mobile friendly forms
✅ GDPR friendly options
Over 1 million+ sites use WPForms forms to easily grow leads. WPForms lite is 100% free to install.
Lock Down Security – Wordfence
Of course security is a high concern nowadays for every site owner.
Wordfence Security is the plugin I recommend all clients to lock down site security. It blocks over 258 million attacks monthly.
Wordfence provides complete security including:
🔒 Real time blocking of malicious traffic
🔒 Firewall blocking common attacks like XSS, SQLi, PHP injections etc
🔒 Login security with 2 factor authentication
🔒 Block entire malicious countries
🔒 Blacklist monitoring if your IP is blacklisted
🔒 File change monitoring for malware
Unlike WP.com where security is a costly add-on, Wordfence‘s core features are 100% free.
Over 4 million WP sites use Wordfence to stop hackers.
SEO Optimization – Yoast SEO
Good SEO results are crucial for getting traffic from Google and ranking high.
Yoast SEO is what I install for all clients to handle everything related to SEO optimization.
It takes care of all the technical SEO aspects for you including:
✔️ Sitemaps
✔️ Auto title & meta description generation
✔️ Readability checks
✔️ Focus keywords
✔️ XML sitemaps
✔️ Schema markup
This helps web pages rank higher and improve click through rates.
Over 5 million sites use Yoast to improve organic search visibility. It‘s 100% free.
Email Marketing – Sendinblue
If you‘re used to the basic email forms on WP.com, you‘ll want an alternative on self hosted sites.
I recommend Sendinblue to all bloggers/businesses for powerful email marketing.
It lets you easily capture more leads with popups, slide ins & forms, create beautiful campaigns and newsletters, automations, advanced analytics and more.
Notable features include:
🚀 Lead capture widgets like popups, slide ins, forms
🚀 Responsive newsletter builder with templates
🚀 Detailed email analytics on opens, clicks etc
🚀 Campaign automation based on user actions
🚀 GDPR compliance & advanced spam control
And it‘s 100% free for up to 300 contacts. Making Sendinblue an easy choice for small businesses.
6 More Options to Get WP.com Features
Beyond the plugins above, a few more ways to replicate useful WordPress.com functionality:
Easy Backups – UpdraftPlus Backup is the most popular backup plugin for scheduled backups to local storage or clouds like Dropbox.
CDN Performance – Get a free content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare for faster load times. Also provides free security.
Better Comments – Replace lackluster default comments with Thrive Comments. It increases user engagement with features like social logins, reactions and spam prevention.
Related Posts – YARPP automatically displays relevant related posts to keep visitors engaged.
Social Sharing Buttons – NextScripts Social Network Tabs adds social media follow/share buttons. Has 40+ custom templates.
Page Builder – Elementor, Beaver Builder or SeedProd page builders provide flexibility lacking on WordPress.com sites.
So that‘s an in-depth expert look on everything you need to seamlessly move from WordPress.com to self hosted WordPress without losing functionality using the right plugins.
I hope this guide helps you transition while keeping the WP.com features you love. Let me know if you have any other questions!
