After having a pricey WordPress Business Plan for two years, my site was coming up for renewal today, so I had to decide whether to pull the plug on it and downgrade. But if I did, how was this going to affect my site?

When I ventured into the blogging world, I quickly upgraded to the somewhat pricey Business Plan to mess around with the extra bells and whistles; plus, I had the lofty dream of someday earning some of that sweet, sweet, Google Ad revenue, so I wanted to optimize my posts. The Business Plan also had extra features I liked. This included plugins that provided additional functionality, expanded SEO capabilities, and tools for improving a post’s readability (i.e. it pointed out things like paragraphs that are gigantic walls of text, passive writing, overly long sentences, not enough subheadings, etc. — pretty useful stuff). But in the end, the $300 price tag wasn’t really worth it.

So after much hemming and hawing, I dropped down to a Premium Plan and saved $200. The Premium Plan is a step up from the Free Plan and does a lot of the same things as the Business Plan. However, switching to it cost me my plugins and SEO functionality, and I also lost automatic site backup, and my media storage was chopped from 200 gigs to 13 gigs. But I doubt my SEO optimization was driving that much extra traffic to my site, and I don’t have a lot of images stored, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. The main bummer is the loss of the plugins. The plugins, created by independent developers, can really add some cool elements and functionality (things that should probably already be in WordPress). I’ll probably miss my Secondary Title plugin the most — I liked being able to add short humorous quips under my main title. Sadly, the ones I had in my existing posts are all gone now. Oh well, c’est la vie, I saved $200. Now, you’ll just have to imagine I typed something pithy under my main title.

Alas, my strategy to become an advertising juggernaut also officially died with my Business Plan, as I lost the ability to have Google Ads featured on my site when I downgraded. One of the Happiness Engineers (Yes, that’s their official name) who helped me downgrade pointed out that I was throwing away my chance to earn ad revenue, I suppose, in a last-ditch effort to keep me on the Business Plan. I pointed out that I’d only generated a little over $16 in ad revenue in over two years. Now, if you’re thinking, —‘Hey, that’s a start’ — Google doesn’t pay ad money until you reach $100, so at my pedestrian rate, I was looking at at least a decade of blogging before seeing any of that sweet, sweet ad money.

The good news is people should be able to reblog my posts now. Some of you may remember me bitching about how my Business Plan actually made that impossible, which had to do with it being considered a custom site. WordPress admitted to me they were aware of the issue and hoped someday it would be fixed (to my knowledge, it hasn’t been).

So, when I finally authorized the switch, the Happiness Engineer did his thing and then asked me to look the site over and see if it was okay — apparently, this can be a dodgy undertaking, and sometimes they have to revert to the old site to fix it. But that’s a lot of info to go through, and there was no way I was going to do an in-depth assessment. However, I did notice I lost about 12 featured images, so I’ll have to see about adding new photos to those posts — if I ever get around to it. There was some weirdness after they downgraded my plan with double posts — that I think are fixed (maybe?) — and I got a notification about a really old post my website may or may not have spontaneously republished, so my apologies if anyone got lured to the site yesterday expecting new content.

Now, where to waste this extra $200?