What is best blog platform
How to Pick the Best Blogging Platform in 2021
Are you ready to start your blog but you're stuck at what blogging platform
to use? Well keep watching in this video I'll walk you through 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. 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 but if
you want to make it earn money in the future is there 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. First one we'll talk about is
WordPress.org. This is the open source software that 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 for WordPress.org are 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. The next thing are 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, ecommerce if you
wanted to that'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.
They're also thousands of themes both free and paid to make your blog look
exactly how you want it to look. 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 actually 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 the
free SSL certificate for your site, that secures your site for visitors
and you would also get a free domain registration. Normally domain
registrations if you don't go with that is usually about fourteen dollars a year
to renew your www.mysite.com, that's your domain name. The next one we'll look at
is Wix and some of the pros of Wix is 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 and also
moving can be difficult it's actually 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 basically 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 own 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 you 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. 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 also 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,
then that's a real possibility. As I said blogger is free to use. The next blogging
platform that you can look at is Tumblr. Tumblr is a micro blogging 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 real easy platform to blog videos or images audio as well.
Some of the cons for Tumblr are limited features, difficult to migrate 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 is geared more towards
strictly writing and blogging and very little networking capabilities with it
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's 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 really going
to set up, you can't set up an ecommerce, site you can't set up your own forum and
things like that. Next its Medium's audience and not yours so yes they can send you some
traffic but if you ever wanted to do anything with those, that audience it's
not really 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 you commerce site things
like that so if you're wanting 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, over the months to come. So the next one let's
talk about Squarespace. Squarespace is a great blogging platform and it's using
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 great drag and drop feature, beautifully
professionally designed templates for you to use, and a lot of people really
like that. You can also add an ecommerce set up 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's not too many third-party developers who can create something to
integrate with your website and the personal plan it's pretty limited you
only get 20 pages for your personal 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 wanted 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
The next one is Ghost it's a minimalist blogging platform and
they've really pared down on all the features that they offer so that people
just focus on writing and that's actually 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 is it's not easy to
customize with apps because of the limited features. there's 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 and 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. 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 it's 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're wanting to take your blog seriously and you're
wanting to eventually grow this into a money-making venture then WordPress.org
is the best place to start and 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 and
click on the next video in this playlist where I walk you through step by step on
how to get WordPress installed for your blog. Did you learn today's video if so
subscribe to our YouTube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you
manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching
