A Premium Upgrade

~ beetleypete

For a few years now, I have paid an annual fee to have a ‘Personal’ Plan with WordPress. That gave me no advertisements, easier access to tech help, and extra storage space for photos. Considering my blog is my main hobby, I didn’t think the fee was excessive, and for the first year, it included my ‘dotcom’ blog name too. (I now pay a little extra for that)

Then along came the Block Editor.

Regular readers will remember my long campaign against this being forced on users, without the option of retaining my preferred ‘Classic Option’. So I seriously considered giving up blogging, once the Block Editor became the only choice.

I am currently still using the old Classic Editor though (not the Classic Block offered on the new version) and that was supposed to have disappeared by March 2021. No doubt it will go at some stage, and meanwhile I have experimented with some posts using the Block Editor, eventually discovering that I am able to manage my very basic blogging using that. But only when it comes to it of course.

(I don’t intend to start another for and against Block Editor debate with this post. That ship has sailed.)

As I want to stay blogging for as long as I am able, I recently upgraded my payment plan to ‘Premium’. The main benefit of this over the Personal Plan is to greatly increase the space allowance. If you have a free WP blog, the space allowance of 3GB can soon be eaten up by adding photos and images. Moving up to the Personal Plan at £36 a year doubles your storage allowance to 6GB, and after a few years I have still not reached that limit.

The Premium Plan costs £84 a year, and boosts that space allowance to 13GB, which should last me a long time. And I think that £1.61 a week is a small price to pay to be able to relax and enjoy my hobby without worrying about running out of available storage space. I am hoping it will be many years before I have to think about the next option, the Business Plan, which currently costs £20 a month.

(Note that all plan upgrades include the storage already used, and do not start from scratch. So if you have already used 3GB and upgrade to 13GB, you will in effect have 10 GB available)

77 thoughts on “A Premium Upgrade”

    1. 3GB for a free plan, 6GB for personal, and 13GB for premium. It’s only really photos that use up the space though. Text doesn’t need so much. If you access your ‘Media Library’, the space used and space remaining is shown at the top left. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  4. I upgraded a while ago, and it is well worth the price for all the extra storage. On top of that, you get immediate live chats if you ever have a question or a problem. Like you, I still use the Classic and don’t intend to change.

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  5. Thanks, Pete. I changed my blog a few years back to WordPress.org, but I think I will eventually go back to .com (I’ve kept my free blog there, but only post links to the current one), so it is useful to know what the options are. And great to read other people’s opinions as well. It’s good to know you’re planning on posting more photos in the future. I’m useless at those but enjoy surveying other people’s talents.

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    1. I held back on photos because I was worried about using up too much space. Now I have increased my allowance, I am hoping to get back to taking lots more over the coming year.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  8. I struggle with every change they make. Haven’t been able to get back into the rhythm of regular blogging again … yet … but hope springs eternal. One of the draw backs is the ridiculous knots I tie myself up in every time I try to post. Yes, if I posted regularly, that wouldn’t happen. Is this what’s called a catch22? 🤣

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    1. Taking long posting breaks and then coming back to blogging makes you acutely aware of the small changes that accumulate over time, and some of the major structural changes of course. I hope you manage to overcome that Catch 22 situation soon, Lois..
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  9. I’m on the premium version, though I wondered if I needed to go that route. Unlike many people who have frequent complaints about WordPress, I’ve been pretty lucky in the 2+ years that I’ve been with them. Recently, I discovered that I got deleted somehow from a couple of regular bloggers I follow. It occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything from them for some time, and I mistakenly assumed they had not been posting and were taking a break. Since I re-upped with them, I seem to be getting their posts again.

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  10. I have been on Premium plan for a couple of years now its so lovely not to be bombarded with ads and get virtually instant answers to questions or problems from the happiness engineers at a small weekly cost 🙂 x

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  11. This is a great post, Pete. Thanks for sharing the details about these options which I have sort of seen but never really looked at. I decided to delete a bunch of old post when I started running out of storage space. I deleted 600 posts. I’m still not sure if I did the right thing doing that.

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    1. I never wanted to delete any posts, Robbie. Even the bad ones! These plan options are great value until they get to Professional, but for anyone self-employed, even that is tax deductible. Not like me to praise WP, as you know, but the Personal and Premium plans are definitely worth the money.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  14. Pete, as you know I have two different blogs, both of which use extensive photos and video…I have been premium for several years and find it a great value – I have no limits for how much I can post and will never run out of space!

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  15. I’m amazed that you need more space as you rarely post photos. I have the personal plan for two of my blogs, but mainly for the ad free feature as the ads annoy me. I still haven’t used my initial 3gb of data, but I do edit all my photos to Web sizes of well under 1mb.

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    1. I post less photos these days, but hope to go back to posting more, Jude. I reduce the files in Photoshop (thanks to you telling me to do that) and most come out around 3mb at 50-60% reduction.
      With my allowance now expanded to 13 GB, I am showing a 20% use of space. That remaining 80% should last me a long time.
      Best wishes, Pete. x

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  16. Thanks for telling your experiences, Pete! I am sure the premium plan is a good choice. I would have taken this for a long time, if we were allowed to use wordpress.com at all, here in Germany. The plugin that enables commenting and relogging – Jetpack – is not allowed, according to the German interpretation of the GDPR. ; – / There are some morons in our parliament. xx Michael

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      1. Oh, they have not banned Jetpack, but all Online information about the GDPR in Germany is full of the not allowed data exchange this plugin is doing. So its much more saver not to use. In my own situation with a lot of unfriendly lawyers – if you had studied this by yourself they dont like you, in Germany Lol – its very useful staying away, if possible. xx Michael

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  18. Like you, I ranted and railed against the block editor for many months. But I blog exclusively from my iPhone and about six months back, WordPress removed the classic editor option from its iOS app. So it was a shit or get off the pot moment for me: either embrace the block editor or stop blogging on WordPress. I chose to embrace it, and much to my surprise, I’ve grown to like it better than the classic editor…at least the iOS version. Live and learn, eh?

    I also reduce the size of the images I post on my blog by using an iOS app called Resize It. I’m on the Personal plan, so it helps. After four years on that plan and with at least one image per post, I’m still at only 40% of my 6 gig allotment.

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    1. Glad to hear you embraced it, Fandango. I couldn’t blog on a phone, (too small for my eyes and fingers) and I don’t have anything Apple anyway. I can use the BE if I have to, but I will be surprised if i ever end up prefferrring it. Stranger things have happened!
      Best wishes, Pete.

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      1. It surprised me, too, that I ended up preferring it over the classic editor. And I’m still aggravated that WordPress unilaterally decided to deactivate the classic editor over the objections of many of us. But, I guess as The Rolling Stones pointed out, you can’t always get what you want.

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  19. I have been using WordPress for a decade and finally signed up for the Premium plan a few years back. I can’t take the Block Editor so I use the classic editor which will most likely be fazed out soon. If you use the block editor, Grammerly will not work with WP. The classic editor allows Grammerly to work with your blog, this saves having to copy and paste. WordPress needs to make some changes to make it easier to navigate.

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    1. It did state the the domain name was free ‘for one year’, so i expected a charge when I renewed first time. I have paid more than £84 for a restaurant meal for two, so I think it’s definitely worth it for a year of blogging.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. I feel much the same, Carolyn. I only use about 30% of the tech stuff that is available to bloggers, and after 18 months using Windows 10, I confess I know nothing about it other than the very basic operation of it. I am still at the ‘Turn it off and turn it on again’ level if anything goes wrong. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  23. i’m with you on this, pete. to me, it is worth a small bit of money to support an activity that i so enjoy and can do anywhere at anytime. i too, found out that removing pics from my media library, removed them from my posts and now i need to find the time to fix and replace those posts.

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    1. Thanks, Beth. I reckon £1.61 a week is great value. If I dropped that much in the street, I doubt I would bother to turn around and go to look for it. 🙂
      I noticed the missing photos quite quickly, fortunately. I had to replace around 20 at the time.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  24. I have the premium. Since my blogging has diminished, I contemplated dropping down in price. Once this book is written, I’m taking a break writing novels and want to focus on blogging again. I really miss the instant gratification and the friendships I have made along the years. Anyway, it is your main hobby and worth the price for it!

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  26. For my “Pit’s Fritztown News” blog, on which I post quite a few photos, I have the business plan, and despite having used it for quite a few years now, I still have more than 50% of the storage space available. I do reduce my pictures in size, though, to around 1.5 KB, before uploading them.
    With your plan, you should be able to post for many years to come – which I hope!
    Best wishes,
    Pit

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  28. Putting pictures in your gallery at full size will always take up your space – and quickly. They give you the option to edit the images, which also includes size.

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  30. I am in my first year of personal plan and was happy with how easy it was to upgrade _ a lot easier than demolishing my original 1&1 website which we started years ago and was far less suitable than WordPress. My reasons were the same to get rid of ads and store more pictures – I love taking photos and using them in my blog. I don’t like block but I have been using it. Going up to Premium sounds a good idea if I want more pIx.

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    1. I can’t think of anything else costing just £1.61 a week that would supply me with so much interest and pleasure, Janet. Can’t even buy one decent cup of coffee for that in town. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. I tried out a couple of theme changes yesterday, David. But I am sticking with the Penscratch Theme for now, and the widgets I already have. I mainly upgraded for the extra space, though it does offer me ‘unlimited themes’ in the package. Some themes look smart, but they alter where things are on the page. I am a rather boring blogger, and have only changed themes once in 9 years. I might do a survey of readers and see what they think. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  33. I’m glad to hear you intend to continue blogging, Pete.
    I’ve always had a free WP blog (I only pay WP for my .com domain) and do a regular cull of posts and media to keep my storage down (currently 66% of my 3GB allowance after 8 years blogging). I off-load old redundant posts and reblogs, plus associated media, that aren’t informative for authors and writers), but your blog has mainly unique content, so upgrading is best.

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    1. Thanks for your thoughts, Chris. On the free blog, I got to something like 88%, so upgraded to Personal Plan to avoid any issues. I have been holding back on adding more photos this year, as the storage allowance was potentially becoming an issue, so 13 GB should keep me going for a long time yet. I discovered early on that if I tried deleting any photos or images from the Media Library, they immediately vanished from the posts! 🙂
      Even with the recent upgrade, I am already using 20% of my total allowance.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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