Are you on the right platforms for your audiences, your content, and what you strive to achieve? These are the crucial points to inquire about yourself before you agree to invest your time and resources. In an increasingly complex marketing landscape, there is no one means to do it flawlessly, nor selecting the facets that benefit you.
Questions like "What is the best blogging platform?", "How should I decide which blogging platform to use?" and "Are these platforms free or paid?" might boggle you right now, but fret not because the truth is: Which platforms you should be on hinges on your objectives and what you can profitably keep.
Whether you are a small-scale or large-scale business, you do not just follow the masses because everybody says it is the fairest and best platform. When in doubt, check out the five (5) different options on our list.
1. WordPress
As an open-source content management system (CMS), WordPress allows you to create and manage a blogging site effortlessly. Probably the most popular, WordPress is completely customizable, search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly, secure, and here to stay. There are two different versions of WordPress – WordPress.com (managed hosting) and WordPress.org (self-hosted). Its latest version, Version 6.0, released in May 2022, introduces improved template creation and enhanced performance.
SEO: WordPress.org offers you better versatility in improving the platform to suit your needs than WordPress.com. It is also extra-adaptable and will earn more SEO results than WordPress.com. Furthermore, the former has endless control over your SEO, while the latter depends only on available plugins.
Safety and security: WordPress.org gives you the responsibility to keep your site updated. In this case, you must ensure that your web host installs malware scanning, web application firewalls, and intrusion detection solutions. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is responsible for the maintenance of your site.
Customization: WordPress.com limits you with the features it offers, while WordPress.org entitles you to unlimited customization choices.
Scalability: With reliable web hosting, WordPress's scalability will boost with time. Hence, you must look for an experienced team of experts to help you monitor the entire hosting environment to reap triumphant scalability chances.
Budget: For WordPress.com, higher-level plans provide extra features at different pricing, whereas WordPress.org expects you to learn and spend for a hosting company of your choice.
WordPress.com is a reasonable choice if you do not have plans to monetize your blogs or do not mind branding and ads; WordPress.com is a good choice. Otherwise, WordPress.org is a fairer choice if you plan to expand your site, customize it, or earn from it. Note, however, that you are liable for maintaining your site secure.
2. Medium
Roughly 30 million users visit Medium every month. A growing number of industries are utilizing the platform for their company blogs, and several publishers are beginning to crowd and allocate their whole content collection. With no required technical design or web expertise, Medium is popular among bloggers for its two functions: a blogging platform and a publisher. Anyone may sign up and begin writing – the blogging factor. Yet, with your consent, the platform also compiles posts and endorses them to its free or paid user base through "Topics" – the publisher part. Hence, it is a place to read, write, and connect. Additionally, Medium is a prodigious dwelling for long-form, informative, and logical content, so if your blog or website suits these categories, Medium is unquestionably a platform to ponder.
SEO: Medium formats your content, rendering it handily readable on desktop and mobile while creating SEO-friendly content. It has very high domain authority and has recently improved its built-in SEO tools for writers. For most Medium articles, the keywords (one of the main elements of SEO) are essential as they are the words or phrases that best describe the topic you are writing.
Safety and security: Backups are the whole shebang in blogging. Not backing up your content as it should be is among the most disastrous slips bloggers create. Medium, nevertheless, does not make backups for your work. It only protects whatever you write in one place in conjunction with others. On the other hand, Medium does not host the content exhibited on their services. Users take the capability to publish content essentially hosted by a third party but embedded in the platform's pages.
Customization: Not everybody has a visually artistic eye, but anybody can brand their Medium space to appear exceptional and professional. You can modify some portions of your Medium profile, some artificial, others extra in-depth.
Scalability: Medium has tremendously tall Domain Authority (DA), a search engine classification score that calculates how probable a website is to score in search engine result pages (SERPs). Thousands of bloggers who compose their blogs struggle to attract organic traffic and rank in search engines. It is partly because their sites usually generate short DA.
Budget: While the price of constructing your self-hosted website has turned out to be more inexpensive nowadays, it still needs a certain level of preliminary financial obligation. Medium is utterly accessible for everyone to use, further dropping this obstacle to entry.
3. Weebly
Whether you hope to start a blogging site or want to position a little blog with your store or business, Weebly holds a picture-perfect set of blogging tools to assist you and your readers. Now the center for more than 50 million websites (comparable to 4% of all websites presently live) global, Weebly continues as a website constructor you can utilize to develop your blog, site, or even an online store. Its prevailing tools make it easy to construct a professional, mobile-optimized site and propagate your business with cutting-edge analytics and assimilated marketing. In addition, Weebly is great for e-commerce and has the whole enchilada you need to begin setting up an online shop yourself.
SEO: Aspects such as keywords, site content, and links perform a part, so SEO tactics and strategies work for Weebly. With this nitty-gritty out of the way, here are three phases you should conform instantly to get the most out of the levels of your Weebly site: enhance page titles, update page descriptions, and appraise your URL and submit your sitemap.
Safety and security: Weebly does not use an "HTTPS" certificate. It means that whatever information you come into the platform, together with your username and password, is not encrypted and can be captured by third parties. However, you may spontaneously complement a security sockets layer (SSL) certificate to your Weebly site. SSL guarantees visitors traverse your area above a sheltered 128-bit encrypted connection. For e-commerce, this feature aids customers in registering straight on your domain.
Customization: Despite its limited drag-and-drop customization, Weebly is Grade A platform for constructing a free website, especially for beginners. Weebly bargains built-in themes for your site, and you can tailor the templates to ensemble your site's advanced needs. While it only allows basic customization, users do not have the flexibility to interchange site components compared to other platforms.
Scalability: While this platform is idyllic for forming modest websites and not distressing about site management, it is a better means for scaling a site, with sundry built-in functions obtainable in the Weebly App Center. It allows you to kick start small and progress at your identifiable pace.
Budget: If you are searching for a genuine, reasonable, or one-person marketing team, Weebly might be just the thing. You can start on the platform for free and build your platform in just a minute, even as a beginner. Meanwhile, if you plan to avail of premium features, Weebly bids up to a $26 per month performance plan.
4. Squarespace
Squarespace is a multipurpose website maker that lodges bloggers, creatives, and even e-commerce site users. Recognized for its templates' painterly charm and expert design, Squarespace can support you in crafting a professional-looking site. Besides, Squarespace is very user-friendly. To start your website, you only need to sign up for an account. Then as soon as you register, its system will ask about your yet-to-come spot. It will then lay out the info to catch the aptest prototypes.
SEO: Instead of personally instigating SEO, Squarespace incorporates SEO tools. Contained within are programmed markup to search engine indexing, site maps, and SEO settings for items and pages so you can tailor and develop your site's SEO effortlessly.
Safety and security: On queries about security, Squarespace uses many approaches to safeguard its clients, with consistent security scans to uphold its Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) agreement and use industry-developed and registered tools to protect against possible trespassers, attacks, and other susceptibilities.
Customization: Indisputably, you do not share a similar flexibility level that you can acquire on particular non-hosted platform alternatives, but you can, without question, customize a Squarespace site. You can enhance custom code, Cascading Style Sheets, plugins, or even more by retrieving the Squarespace Developer Platform.
Scalability: Users have the preference to elevate the website's properties and resources to sustain its growth. Meanwhile, although no blogging platform can pledge an excellent workup, Squarespace has an outstanding oddity for attending high-traffic sites. That is to say, Squarespace's specific website is its site, which functions from a similar substructure they offer to their customers. The considerable traffic growth they handle productively adhering to their Super Bowl ads is an example of what your site can lever.
Budget: Squarespace has four critical plans open: Personal at $19 per month, Business at $33 per month, Basic Commerce at $36 per month, and Advanced Commerce at $65 per month. A two-week free trial is also accessible, with an extension available upon demand.
5. HubSpot
What you need in a marketing platform, or blogging, to be specific, is a stress-free way to catch content on your website – a vivid image of who stays at your site and why, and numerous other techniques to engross these invitees grounded on their activities. HubSpot is exceptionally great and does all these well. HubSpot is a cohesive platform of marketing, client service, processes, deals, and customer relationship management (CRM) software intended to empower your team and assist your business in propagating.
SEO: HubSpot accounts have admission to SEO references. Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise accounts and CMS Hub Professional and Enterprise accounts can access SEO topics and the endorsements in the platform’s SEO tool.
Safety and security: HubSpot has many advantages to secure your website, with a built-in SSL certificate, a devoted security lineup, ongoing updates, and refined anomaly recognition. It also prioritizes data safety with constant data backups in physical securities and transit encryption.
Customization: Through HubSpot CRM, you can customize your procedure to tie the approaches each team at your business performs with customers. More than that, custom objects help in effortlessly consolidating more data you need to prepare your business inside your CRM. HubSpot also has the flexibility to label the thing, regulate its assets, and choose what supplementary objects it can connect.
Scalability: HubSpot is augmented to facilitate scalability for go-getting businesses. The listing of enterprise tools is cultured with features providing grander, more innovative teams, better tractability, and control. Whether a marketing starter or an expert, you can straightforwardly shift into enterprise-level plans as your drills intensify without distressing about a platform relocation.
Budget: HubSpot pricing ranges from $23 per user per month to over $120 per user per month. It is worth noting, of course, that you can bash HubSpot for free with no time bounds to acquire a zest for exhausting the platform.
