When looking for the right blogging platform, you should always keep in mind exactly what you do and what goal you want to achieve. If this is your first blog, you need a versatile platform that will do everything you need it to do for you.
Those who are more technically advanced may be willing to sacrifice usability for additional control over the creative part of the blog and functionality.
Either way, the platform you choose should help you make an attractive blog and provide enough customization tools to allow you to accurately convey your vision.
As your blog grows, the platform should remain flexible, giving you access to enough additional features. Most importantly, the platform’s services should not cost too much. Blogging should be a joy, not a financial hardship.
Wix: overall the best blogging platform (and the easiest)
As one of the most popular website building tools, Wix also offers awesome tools for aspiring bloggers as well. But what I personally like most about Wix is that this platform offers a fully integrated blogging solution that is very easy to use.
With Wix, you can create and launch a blog in less than an hour (or even a few minutes if you choose an Artificial Design Intelligence based tool).
The process is even easier if you choose one of Wix’s blog templates (there are 72+ options for 7 different destinations), which already have the necessary blogging features built in.
One potential downside is that once you’ve chosen a template, you can’t change it to another without losing all your edits.
That said, Wix offers so many customization options (from fonts and color schemes to buttons and markup) that you won’t have trouble changing a template that doesn’t 100% reflect your brand. Because the drag-and-drop editor is so easy to use, it can all be done with just a few clicks.
In terms of blogging features, Wix offers more than enough for both beginners and experienced bloggers. To make things as easy as possible for you, the platform offers a dashboard where you can create new posts, add categories, manage comments, and view blog analytics.
Your readers will be able to create subscriber profiles, leave likes and follow posts, comment and even become writers for your blog. There’s also an automatic email subscription feature that will allow you to collect contacts of interested users right on the site.
Wix offers a free subscription, but it’s pretty limited and your site will have the Wix logo on it. It’s a good option to get started and determine if the platform is right for you, but most bloggers will likely decide to upgrade to a paid plan.
WordPress.com: the best balance of power and simplicity
When just thinking of starting a blog, WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, immediately comes to mind.
WordPress.com is a modified version of WordPress.org (I’ll write more about this platform as well below), which has become a more multifaceted solution than its predecessor. Here there are services for hosting, personal domains, backups, protection, so you don’t have to do all this routine work yourself.
That said, learning how to use WordPress.com is much more difficult than Wix, and it will take time for you to get used to the tools. However, the rewards are worth it: WordPress is a more powerful platform than any other, and there are incomparably more customization options. You could say it’s the most scalable option.
If you have big plans for your blog and are willing to spend time learning, this could be the solution for you.
The templates here aren’t as attractive as the Wix library, but WordPress.com templates can become literally anything.
There are over 70 free blog templates here, as well as hundreds of premium templates, so you’re sure to find something suitable. There’s also unlimited customization options here, meaning you’ll literally have an unlimited choice of colors, fonts, and markups. That said, if you want to edit CSS code, you’ll need to buy a paid subscription.
As far as blogging features go, WordPress.com is rightly considered the gold standard. Here you’ll have the ability to sort posts into categories and tags, schedule posts to be published and shared on social media, control the layout of posts down to the size of blocks of text, the location and shape of photos, the color of titles to posts, and so on.
WordPress.com does offer a “free forever” plan, but in this case your blog will have a subdomain and the site will display WordPress ads. This is a great way to get used to the platform, but WordPress.com will only show itself in its full glory if you get access to the platform’s extensive library of plugins, which is only possible on a Business plan or higher.