WordPress.com Free Is 1GB and Someone Else's Adverts
Unlimited posts, unlimited users, one gigabyte of media, and advertising you cannot switch off. The limits sit somewhere nobody expects.
WordPress.com's free plan gives 1GB of media storage, unlimited pages and posts, unlimited users, a wordpress.com subdomain, and free hosting with automatic updates. It also serves WordPress.com advertisements on your site, which cannot be removed without upgrading. The Personal plan is $9 a month billed monthly, or $4 a month billed yearly, and removes the ads.1
The oddity of this free tier is where the limits are. Most free hosts cap the number of pages. WordPress.com does not. Most cap the number of users. WordPress.com does not. What it caps is storage, at a single gigabyte, and what it adds is advertising on a site you built.2
The plans, measured
| Free | Personal | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $9/mo, or $4/mo yearly | $18/mo, or $8/mo yearly |
| Storage | 1GB | 6GB | 13GB |
| Pages and posts | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Users | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| WordPress.com ads | Yes | No | No |
| Custom domain | No | Free for 1 year | Free for 1 year |
| Plugins | No | No | No |
Prices measured on 22 October 2026. Vendor plan terms, allowances and prices change without notice, so treat every figure on this page as a dated snapshot rather than a permanent fact. Where a number here differs from the vendor's own pricing page, the vendor's page is correct and the figure above is simply older than it.
One gigabyte is the real ceiling
A gigabyte of media is not much. Compress carefully and it holds perhaps 250 photographs at typical phone resolution, or a few hundred images at web sizes. Add a handful of short videos and it is gone.
The saving grace is that text costs almost nothing. A thousand posts of ordinary length consume a few megabytes because they are stored as text, not as rendered pages. If your site is written rather than photographed, 1GB is years of publishing.
| What you are uploading | Typical size | Fits in 1GB |
|---|---|---|
| Blog post images, web-sized | 150KB | About 6,600 |
| Phone photo, full size | 4MB | About 250 |
| PDF download | 2MB | About 500 |
| Minute of compressed video | 30MB | About 33 |
Free means WordPress.com ads, not no ads
The phrase worth reading twice on the pricing page is that free sites display WordPress.com ads to visitors. These are not your ads and you earn nothing from them. They appear because you are not paying for hosting.
For a personal blog read by friends, this is a minor cosmetic irritation. For anything that represents a business, advertising for another company injected into your pages is a real problem, and it is the single most common reason people upgrade from free.
What you actually get for nothing
Managed hosting with automatic WordPress updates and no maintenance on your part. That is not trivial: a self-hosted WordPress site needs updates, backups and a security posture, and none of that is your problem here.
You also get the block editor, a large theme library, basic traffic stats for the last seven days, and unlimited contributors. That last one is unusual. A small editorial team can all write on one free site without paying per seat.
What you do not get is plugin installation. Plugins require the Business tier, which is a much larger jump than Personal. If your plan depends on a specific plugin, WordPress.com free is not the platform for it, and self-hosting is.
When the free plan is enough
A writing-first blog with modest images. A newsletter archive. A portfolio where the work is text and a few screenshots. Anyone learning WordPress who wants the editor without running a server.
It is also a reasonable permanent home for a personal site. The ads are the price, and a personal blog can pay it.
When it stops being enough
When the ads become embarrassing, or when the media library fills. Personal at $4 a month on the yearly cycle is one of the cheapest upgrades in this entire directory, and it removes the ads and raises storage to 6GB.
If you need plugins or e-commerce, the jump is to Business or Commerce, not Personal. WordPress.com deliberately keeps those two capabilities far above the entry price, which pushes serious commercial sites toward self-hosting.
How it compares
Against Wix, WordPress.com allows far more content on one account and unlimited users, while Wix gives a stronger visual editor. Against Webflow, WordPress.com is dramatically more generous: Webflow caps free sites at two pages.
Against Netlify, the split is audience. Netlify is a developer deployment platform with no content editor; WordPress.com is a publishing platform with no code deploy.
Frequently asked questions
Is WordPress.com free really unlimited?
Pages, posts and users are unlimited. Storage is 1GB and that is the limit you will hit.
Can I remove WordPress.com ads for free?
No. Ad removal starts with the Personal plan at $4 a month billed yearly.
Can I install plugins on the free plan?
No. Plugin installation requires the Business tier or higher.
Can I use my own domain?
No. Free sites use a wordpress.com subdomain. A custom domain requires a paid plan.
Is WordPress.com free the same as WordPress.org?
No. WordPress.org is the free open-source software you install on your own host; WordPress.com is a managed service with its own plans.
Limits and prices verified against WordPress.com's own pricing and plan-features pages on 23 October 2026.
Sources
- WordPress.com pricing: wordpress.com/pricing.
- WordPress.com plan features: wordpress.com/support/plan-features.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 22 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
