Want to create your own Blog? looking for the best blogging platform to start your first blog? Selecting a solid blogging platform is the most important part of starting a new blog.
Why Blogging?
Blogging is one of the great tools to connect with the world. Whether you blog to express your passion for your hobbies, blog to connect on a personal level with others or blog to help promote a business, it is certainly a great way to express your opinion and put it out there for others to see.
Since Blogging is not just about writing a good story or posting few videos or photos, finding the best platform to promote your creativity or niche is very much important, because you don’t want to lose your hard work very casually. Therefore, you need a good solid blogging platform to promote your ideas, good customization tools to make your site more dynamic and refreshing for those who visit your site and will love to come back again.
Before figuring out which blogging platform most suitable to you, you have to consider several factors which suits your needs
- Purpose– What you want from blogging, i.e to showcase your creativity or to promote a business
- Your Ability– What is the level of your coding skills, can you create, design or maintain your own website or you want to hire any designer to create the site on behalf of you.
- Niche– Which is the best blogging platform suits your niche.
- Flexibility– How flexible your blogging platform, i.e how it offers to grow in future
- Affordability– The blogging platform must be affordable for you, ie the price you have to pay to maintain your blog.
You must decide your needs before selecting any blogging platform because once you create your blog in one platform, it will be very difficult to switch over to another with all the contents that you have created.
Best Blogging platform to start a new blog 2018
Here’s some best blogging platform where you can start your blogging journey free
1.WordPress.com
WordPress.com provides basic hosting service free with limited features. The website created by Matt Mullenweg, the man behind the creation of WordPress and Automattic.
Features:
- The basic plan is free to use
- No set up is required and easy to manage
Limitations:
- Very limited features
- Can not monetize your blog
- No custom domain name, you will have example.wordpress.com like the domain name.
- You will not have total control over your blog and your blog may shut down any time if you violate any Terms & Conditions.
- You can not use any premium theme, like Studiopress or Elegant theme, You have to choose from a limited number of the free theme.
- You can not use third-party plugins.
Price: Basic Plan is totally free, but if you want to upgrade your blog on WordPress.com hosting, then you have to pay. WordPress.com hosting service is costlier than other company operating in the market.
WordPress.com great suits for creating community websites or low key experimental websites. Lured by the name WordPress, people often create their blog in WordPress.com. But wordpress.com and wordpress.org are two separate entity.
2.WordPress.org
WordPress, without any doubt, is the most popular free and most powerful blogging platform amongst the bloggers’ community. Around 31 percent of self-hosted blogs in the world today use WordPress to host their sites and there’s the solid reason for that. If you want to create a self-hosted blog, the downloadable version of WordPress is an excellent option, with total flexibility. You can download WordPress source code from wordpress.org to start building your site immediately. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL.To function, you need to install WordPress on a web server which would either be part of an Internet hosting service provider or any network host. You can find so many excellent hosting service providers like Siteground or Bluehost where you can start your blogging site from as low as $3 per month.
Features:
- Most robust and customizable free blogging platform today and it is totally free.
- Availability of lots of Plugins and generous storage. (35000+)
- Active WordPress community or forum where you will find the solution to your every problem.
- Availability of lots of free and paid themes (3000+) like StudioPress, Elegant Theme, Thrive themes, etc.
- The writing interface is very simple like desktop word processor suitable for newbies.
Limitations:
- As with another blogging platform, WordPress is not drag & Drops affairs, you need to have a bit of coding knowledge. It’s a great learning experience for the non-technical bloggers to build the site in WordPress platform.
Price: WordPress is free software but you have to pay for the hosting or domain registration. There are numerous cheap hosting available on the market.
People often get confused between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress refers to a self-hosted WordPress blog.
You can find some best managed WordPress hosting here.
3.WIX
Wix is a great free drag and drops the site builder for new users. Wix is the only drag and drops site builder with HTML5 capabilities. You will find over 500 designers made templates and plenty of additional features and apps to make your blogging site stunning and beautiful.
You can create a stunning website within 5 minutes using Wix’s Artificial Intelligence-based Wix ADI.
Features:
- Drag and drop site builder with HTML5 capabilities, extremely helpful for beginners or for those who have limited coding skills.
- Plenty of designers template and apps to make your blog stunning and beautiful.
- WIX Adi
Limitation:
- In free Wix account, you will have limited features and customization options and your blog will show Wix branding.
- Limited storage even in paid version as compared to WordPress.
- Limited flexibility.
- No monetization option in free plan
- Limited E-commerce customization options.
Price: You can create your blog completely free in Wix. But if you want your own custom Domain and remove Wix branding, then you have to upgrade to a paid plan of Wix. Their premium plan starts from $5.00 per month.
4.Weebly
Weebly is also another most popular website builder system with a drag-and-drop editor that lets you choose which elements to add to your site, and where. The key features of Weebly site builder is that
Features:
- Simple and powerful blog-building tool
- Build in JavaScript which increases the loading speed
- It lets you preview your unpublished post, and even share it with others via email before releasing it to the public.
Limitations:
- Limited features
- Limited integration with third-party add-ons
- Not suitable for E-commerce websites
Price: Weebly is completely free to publish contents, but starter plan starts from $8/month and Pro plan starts from $12/month with a free domain.
5.Bloggers.com
Blogger is another superb blogging platform offered by Google. Though as not as powerful as WordPress, but more accessible for new users. Blogger offers an excellent selection of templates and all are optimized for the mobile version. It is a really sensible addition as most of the users nowadays access your site content through smartphones.
Features:
- Less complex but more powerful post-editing tools
- Completely free
- Google’s robust platform and integration with Google’s several features
- More customization options and accessibility with HTML code
- Monetization program with Adsense.
Limitation:
- No custom domain name, the site will have yoursite.blogspot.com title.
- Less customization option are available, you have to choose from a few low-quality templates.
- Less control over your site, Google may suspend any time if you violate their terms and conditions.
Price: Blogger.com is completely free.
6.Medium
The brainchild of Twitter founders, Medium is a powerful blogging and content syndication platform and it is free to use. It is an easy-to-use blogging platform with limited social networking features. Medium is sort of like Twitter for long content, except it has an algorithm timeline.
You can also join Medium partner program to earn some extra passive income from your blogging.
Features:
- Easy to use and no coding skill required, suitable for new users.
- Great import tool to import your existing content from anywhere on the web and edit.
- Automatically connects you with existing Twitter and Facebook connections.
- Monetization with medium partner program.
Limitations:
- Very few features in terms of design or building the website.
- You can’t also make money from your site, once your blog gets popular.
Price: Medium is free to use.
7.Joomla
Joomla is also an open source software content management system (CMS) like wordpress.org, therefore you can have your custom domain and need a hosting service provider to host your website.
Features:
- Joomla is extremely powerful and flexible just like WordPress.org, you can build any kind of site or blog using this platform.
- Hundreds of templates for customization of your site
Limitations:
- Very few support forums are available.
- You have to manage your blog yourself like WordPress.org.
Price: You have to purchase a domain and hosting the same as WordPress.org. You can host your Joomla blog on Siteground or any other hosting providers as you like.
8.Squarespace
With Squarespace also, you can make stunning websites with its drag and drop tools.
Features:
- Simple and beginner friendly drag and drop tools to build your website.
- It provides some beautiful templates.
- Easy to use
- Custom domain name available
Limitations:
- More expensive
- Limited features and tools for integration
Price: Personal $12 per month and Business $18 per month billed annually.
9.Tumblr
Tumblr is like between WordPress and Twitter, it’s a kind of microblogging platform which allows you to upload short stories, videos, and photos. You won’t need to worry about publishing permissions or managing complex coding here. It has also built-in social media sharing tools.
Features:
- No coding skill required and perfect for newbies.
- Easy to integrate with different social media platforms.
- Free to use
- Built-in styles for various content
Limitations:
- you cannot move your blog to another platform like WordPress
- A limited set of features as compared to WordPress.org
Price: Free to use
10.Hubpages
Hubpages is another very popular and free blogging platform where you also earn some affiliate income.
Features:
- The hub is very customizable: you can add polls, links to products, news links, links to other hubs, pictures, slideshows, videos, and more.
- You can link polls, products, and pages using drag and drop to make them appear however you want and its free.
- Hubpages also help you make money using Hubpages Ad program, eBay Partner Network Ads & Amazon affiliate program.
Limitations:
- You don’t have control over your blog.
- Too many adds
- Not a very good blogging platform for professionals.
Price: Free
All of the above are the most popular, free and the best blogging platform to start your first blog almost free. There are also a few other not so popular blogging platform available in the market. Here’s some list of these websites
1.Ghost
2. SETT
3. Svbtle
4. Typepad
5. The fallen heroes.
Final Thought:
In my view, WordPress.org is the most robust, dynamic and user-friendly Website building platform suitable for beginners to pro bloggers. It has tons of add-on Plugins (more than 35000 with every day a new Plugin is coming out) to customize your site. You can also choose plenty of free beautiful themes (more than 3000), just you need a good hosting service provider and a domain name. Though domain name is not necessary, you can still publish your first blog in WordPress.com with very limited features. But, in my view, try to purchase a Domain and good host and start publishing your content.
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