How To Pick The Best Blogging Platform in [2024]

What Blogging Platform to Use?

Are you ready to start your blog but you’re stuck at what blogging platform to use? how to pick the best blogging platform for your blog and we’ll cover nine different blogging platforms so you can get a better idea of which one is best for you. When you’re looking to pick a blogging platform to start these are some of the things that you want to be thinking about when choosing the blogging platform. The biggest thing is you want to make sure that it’s easy to use for you and that it’s beginner-friendly.

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You don’t want to have to know a lot of technical things to get started. You also want to make sure that it’s feature-rich or that their features are available for what you want your blog to do and then do you have room to grow? Both in terms of the features that you need and the functionality but also you may not be thinking about earning money yet if you want to make it earn money in the future is their ability for you to add things like advertisements on your site, affiliate marketing, and things like that. So having all of those things in mind let’s start looking at the different platforms that you can use for your website.

The first one we’ll talk about is WordPress.org. This is open-source software which means it’s free for you to use and it’s also free for you to contribute. Now, WordPress.org is different than WordPress.com and you’ve probably heard many people say just get a WordPress site up and we’ll talk about WordPress.com in a minute. Many of the pros of WordPress.org is that you have maximum control over your site. No one will be able to shut down your site because you’re not following whatever their rules are.

How To Pick The Best Blogging Platform in [2020] — **How To Pick The Best Blogging Platform in [2024]**

The next thing is the most robust features out there anything that you think you want to do with your blog to take it to the next level whether it be adding features like a forum, membership site, or eCommerce if you wanted to’s all available to you by using the WordPress.org platform. There are thousands on thousands of plugins, these are the things that help you make your site do what you want it to do by adding the extra functionality.

Now coming with that maximum control over your site some of the cons are that you are tasked with maintaining your blog yourself and that means you must update your site and keep all the plugins and themes updated and you’ll also be tasked with making backups of your site. Now if you do it right a lot of times the hosting provider that you work with can help you with some of these items so the price for using WordPress, as I said before, the actual software itself is free but you have to have a server to post this on and the server or the hosting company that you get the server from they’ll charge a fee and depending on which hosting company you go with, that can range in price and but the average range is about $12.99 a month.

But as a WPBeginner visitor, you can get it for as low as $2.75 a month through Bluehost and we’ll have a link down in the description below for you to get that discount. With that, you’ll also get a free SSL certificate for your site, that secures your site for visitors and you will also get a free domain registration. Normally domain registrations if you don’t go with that are usually about fourteen dollars a year to renew your www.mysite.com, that’s your domain name.

1. Wix

The next one we’ll look at is Wix and some of the pros of Wix are that it’s a fully hosted platform meaning you just go and sign up. They have many templates to choose from to get up and running quickly, they have built-in functionality for you to get started, but some of the cons are it shows Wix branding, there’s a free version of it but it shows Wix branding unless you pay for a higher tier.

Another thing is they’ll show ads on the site but you don’t get those ad revenues they will get the ad revenue for that also moving can be difficult it’s one of the more difficult sites to move if later on, you’ve decided you want to host your blog somewhere else it’s very difficult to move it off of Wix. The price range is free. For the free tier, you get your site with the Wix branding in the URL. If you want to pay for then the range is between nine and twenty-six dollars a month and earlier I talked about WordPress.org and now we’re gonna discuss WordPpress.com.

So WordPress.com is using the same software as wordpress.org but they’re hosting it and their housing it on their servers and you’re simply paying them to do it all. So some of the pros for this are there’s no setup required you simply log in start paying and you’re ready to go. It’s also really easy to use and manage. Now the cons for this is you do have limited functionality for your blog, it also means that you can’t run ads on your blog and you don’t own your blogs.

If you do something on your site or write about something that they don’t agree with they can shut your blog down and whatever traffic or whatever visitors you’ve built up you’ve lost that. The price structure for this is it’s free for the bottom tier where you could be your site.WordPress.com. You can get custom domain names and the range for the paid tier is between four and eight dollars a month.

2. Blogger

The next Blogging platform let’s talk about Blogger. So Blogger is owned by Google, Blogger was acquired by Google in 2013 and is offered up to people to use as a blogging platform and some of the pros are that it’s free. It’s completely free to log in and use as you want it’s pretty easy to use and it’s a Google product so it’s secure and reliable you know that the security of it is pretty high up there. Some of the cons to it are you have limited features, it’s not their main source of income, nor is it their main focus and so you have limited features.

Also, they can suspend your account any time if you write about something that they don’t agree with so again you don’t own your information or your blog. Other things that they can just simply shut down the whole service so if one day they decide they don’t want to deal with Blogger anymore, then that’s a real possibility. As I said blogger is free to use.

3. Tumblr

The next blogging platform that you can look at is Tumblr. Tumblr is a microblogging service, it’s really geared towards like sharing images and videos and cat pictures and things like that but a lot of people really enjoy using Tumblr for this and obviously, some of the pros are that it is free and easy to use and get set up. It is integrated with social media so it’s a lot easier to share things through there. It’s a really easy platform to blog videos or images and audio as well.

Some of the cons for Tumblr are limited features, and difficulty in migrating the blog if you ever want to move away to a different platform that’s very difficult to do. The cost for Tumblr is that it’s free and it’s usually yoursite.tumblr.com or if you want to add a custom domain then there will be a cost for that. The next platform we’ll talk about is Medium Medium launched in 2012 and is geared more towards strictly writing and blogging and very few networking capabilities and some of the pros are that it’s free and easy to use.

With Medium, you can reach an existing community online since Medium shares your articles with people who have similar interests to what you’re writing about. It allows you to focus solely on writing and that’s simply because there are no themes involved in it at all. Now some of the cons on the flip side of those pros and the fact that there are limited features, you’re not going to set up, you can’t set up an eCommerce, site you can’t set up your forum, and things like that.

Next, it’s Medium’s audience and not yours so yes they can send you some traffic but if you ever wanted to do anything with, that audience it’s not your traffic they’re not coming to your site to read about your stuff. Also, you can’t run ads and you can’t set up your commerce site or things like that so if you want to make money then this being your sole place of blogging is not going to be great for that. It is free to use although they are doing kind of a paywall for readers where people have to pay to continue to read and there will be some interesting changes over the next couple of years to see how this changes over, the months to come.

4. Squarespace

So the next one let’s talk about Squarespace. Squarespace is a great blogging platform and it uses great easy-to-use drag-and-drop features. Most of the people that they’re looking for are more like small businesses to create an online presence so that’s their main focus of their people. Some of the pros for Squarespace are that it’s very easy for beginners it’s a great drag-and-drop feature, beautifully professionally designed templates for you to use, and a lot of people like that. You can also add an eCommerce setup if you want.

Cons are that it is a proprietary platform and so the features are pretty limited it’s just based on what they’re pushing out so if you wanted something different then you might not get the feature that you want for your site. There are also limited integrations since it’s a proprietary platform there are not too many third-party developers who can create something to integrate with your website and the personal plan is pretty limited you only get 20 pages for your plan You do get your blog and then you only get two contributors. The price structure for this is it can range from $12.99 a month to $18 a month depending on if you pay upfront or not and then if you want to add an eCommerce then it bumps it up to $26 to $40 a month as well. And you have to purchase your domain name separately.

5. Ghost

The next one is Ghost it’s a minimalist blogging platform and they’ve pared down on all the features that they offer so that people just focus on writing that’s one of the biggest pros for that is you’re only focusing on your writing and your blogging. It’s also very clean and clutter-free and it’s fast because it’s built on JavaScript so it’s fast. If you go with their hosting version then there’s no setup that you have to worry about. Some of the things to consider are it’s not easy to customize with apps because of the limited features. there are limited integrations as well as limited themes, if you’re trying to do the self-installation it’s complicated and not very easy to do. The price structure for this is it’s $7.99 a month and you also pay $14.99 a year for a domain name.

If you let them post it for you then it’s $19 a month for one blog and you get a limit of 25,000 page views finally, we’ll talk about Weebly. Weebly is another blogging platform that hosts everything for you and they have a great clean drag-and-drop feature for you to get up and running. Some of the pros are it’s fully hosted, the drag-and-drop design for you you’re able to test features on a free plan to see if that works for you, and if you want to go up to a different tier.

6. WordPress.org

Some of the cons for Weebly are that they have limited features, like with Squarespace they have limited third-party integrations, and migrating the site is quite difficult if you ever decide to move to a different platform. Now if you ever are on Weebly and you want to migrate to WordPress we have created a Weebly to WordPress migration tool and I’ll link to that in the description below for you.

The price for Weebly is its free tier if it’s yoursite.Weebly.com. Other than that it’s as much as eight dollars a month if you’re billed annually with limited features and then it can go up to $49 a month if you want to unlock all of the features that they have and you have to buy the domain separately.

Now obviously for us, we always think that WordPress.org is the best one to do and we think the combination of WordPress.org and Bluehost is your best option when just getting started. If you want to take your blog seriously and you want to eventually grow this into a money-making venture then WordPress.org is the best place to start the beauty of WordPress.org installation is you can start as simply as you need to and then as you grow, as your needs grow it can grow with you and if you’re ready to make that choice then go ahead.