3 Best Blogging Platforms to start in 2020

Blogging is one way to start your online presence. In fact, many people find it useful for making money online.

There are millions of search made each day on Google. And getting the visibility of your content is easy if you do it on the right path.

Blogging is the process of writing meaningful and useful content (articles) for your visitors to read it online. Basically, the place at which we publish our articles is called a Blog. And each article present on it is also known as blog posts.

Best-Blogging-Platforms

But you need to know that managing a blog is complicated without using any CMS ( Content Management System ). For blogging, we can use platforms like Blogger, WordPress or Ghost.

So, which is the best?

Currently, I use Blogger for this blog.

But, I insist you build your blog on something self-hosted. It can be done using WordPress or Ghost.

WordPress is the most widely used CMS for blogging. Many top bloggers publish their blog with the help of WordPress. It has tons of features you can add to customize your website according to your wish.

On the other hand, Ghost is another great CMS for blogging in 2020. It is very simple and easy to manage.

And Blogger is something easy to manage by anyone. And it is free to use.

What are the Best Blogging Platforms for new Blogs?

Find about the best blogging platform for you to manage your blogs online.

1. Blogger Platform

What about Blogger? Why is it on this list?

Blogger is a platform made for people who write on various topics. And is maintained by Google. 

In fact, you won't need to worry about anything related to hosting problems, which includes Bandwidth problem, CPU usage, Memory issues, etc...

Why not Blogger?

It is still growing. You can find the ranking of Blogger.com in Alexa site info. It ranks less than 300 top websites around the globe.

Alexa-rank-of-blogger.com

Blogger platform can be used for beginners who start their blogging carrier. And it is the most affordable platform for anyone since it is completely free to use.

All your blog posts are maintained by them. You will be able to publish any amount of articles to your blog. Also, you can upload any number of images. Google is taking care of hosting your images free for you.

You can also connect your own domain name for free. 

Here's the deal:

You will get everything for free from Blogger. But they collect certain anonymous information from you and your visitors to improve their platform and targeting ads.

As far as I have concerned, Individuals looking for no troubles and almost free hosting services, and trying to earn some money through blogging, Blogger would be there first and best choice.

What are the cons of Blogger?

  1. Blogger cannot be heavily customizable by yourself. You may need to assign a template designer to customize the design and structure of the blog.
  2. You'll not be able to install addons/plugins according to your wish. Addons can really help you to add more features to your blog. 
  3. You cannot convert your blog for PWA (Progressive Web App) or AMP ( Accelerated Mobile Pages ) ready.
  4. You will not be able to upload custom js or CSS files to blogger.
  5. Cannot customize the article URL. You cannot remove the year and month from the URL using blogger settings. It can be done using js only. And is not really recommended for SEO.
  6. The inbuilt email newsletter tool is not great to use. You will not have much control on your email campaigns or subscribers list. It is better to use a third-party service to manage your newsletter. I have explained in detail about email marketing on my blog post.
Note: Still I recommend Blogger for absolute beginners
 

 2. WordPress Platform

One of the most popular and widely used blogging CMS in the world. It is an open-source project and anyone can contribute to the development of the software.

The best thing with WordPress is that you can self-host WordPress CMS on your hosting space. And you still receive all the core updates and patches right on time.

Why WordPress?

It has an amazing community, and you got a ton of tutorial on the internet if you find difficulty in doing anything with WordPress.

wordpress-for-blogging

You will have the option to choose from a sea of WordPress theme according to your design needs. Still not satisfied with free templates. You can purchase Premium or custom made themes for Blogger, or you can create your own design using tools like Elementor.

The Plugins option available for WordPress is too awesome. You can install any plugin to your website with very simple clicks. Many services made for WordPress do provide Plugins, so you can customize or add more features to your website. 

Need to load faster on mobile?

You can make use of the AMP framework on a mobile device. You can install the Official AMP Plugin from the plugins library. Need to know How to Install AMP on WordPress?

What's the best part?

The SEO of your blog. It can be optimized according to your niche with the help of the popular Yoast SEO Plugin. On the free version, it gives you more options to optimize your SEO of the blog.

What are the cons of WordPress?

  1. WordPress seems to be not a good fit for absolute beginners. You need to constantly take care of updating the plugins, themes and other core updates and make sure nothing brokes.
  2. Vulnerability issues, if not taken care of it properly, there is more chance your blog will be vulnerable to attackers.
  3. It is bulky and needs a good hosting space to manage a WordPress blog with a decent amount of blog posts, comments and other files.
These cons will fade away when you familiar with the Dashboard and knowing common things related to hosting, security, etc...

Did you know?

Still now, WordPress powers more than 37% of websites on the Internet. And is considered as the fast-growing CMS along with its community.

Wordpress-vs-non-wordpress

And there are 70 million blog posts are published each month with WordPress CMS.

3. Ghost Platform

There comes the fast, very beginner-friendly CMS for anyone. It can be installed easily and requires less space. I recommend you to use Digital Ocean for managing your Hosting Ghost blog.

Why Ghost on this list?

The interface of the Ghost CMS looks very clear and easily configurable. Ghost is the new blogging platform for many developers out there.

And many find it easy to use building a static blog with the help of Ghost + Gatsby to deploy it to Netlify. Netlify allows you to host static websites without much cost from your side. And using Jamstack has become popular nowadays.

Unlike WordPress, it focuses on bloggers and publishers. Whereas WordPress can be used for e-commerce websites as well. And has many more advanced features.

Ghost is a super simple ecosystem for anyone to set up a very basic blog which loads faster on mobile and desktop versions.

Ghost is headless CMS.

What do you mean by that?

Headless CMS help you show your content as data through API instead of web page rendering.

What are the cons of the Ghost platform?

  1. It is only made for blogs.
  2. You cannot use it to make e-commerce websites.
  3. Less number of themes available for you when compared to WordPress or even Blogger.
But I find Ghost is super helpful for those who just need to manage a simple blog.

Managed WordPress and Ghost

Even though both CMS is an opensource platform to host blogs. Sometimes we find it difficult to self-host these CMS by ourself.

In that case, we can go for a managed solution.

What's the Managed solution?

In this scenario, we need to only take care of publishing our content on our website through CMS. Everything related to hosting problems, updates, etc will be taken care of by the Engineers of the Managed hosting provider.

Even though there are lots of websites provide you with a managed WordPress hosting platform and some number of the Ghost hosting platform.

Here, I want to explain about the service provided by the Official site.

1. WordPress Managed Solution

WordPress.com  offers a free plan for everyone, the paid plan starts from $4/month.

Wordpress-managed-hosting-plans

It offers 4 paid plans for its users. The problem with WordPress Managed solution is that it doesn't offer to remove WordAds of the smaller plans as well as installing plugins options isn't available on smaller plans.

Without having the option to install plugins, it is not a good option to choose for serious blogging.

Why WordPress Managed Hosting?

Use this solution for very basic learning and exploring the platform. Also, it offers free hosting without the requirement of submitting your payment card information.

And you can serve your content to any number of people (Unlimited Pageviews). There is no throttling in that.

2. Ghost Managed hosting

Unlike WordPress, there is no free plan available with Ghost to start for Managed hosting. But they do provide a free 14-day trial. 

Currently, their plan starts with $29/month. Global CDN is included with all the plans.

ghost-pricing

Why Ghost Managed Hosting?

It has more features available for setting up a simple and very fast blog. It allows you to send newsletters to your subscribers in every plan.

You can see the comparison of Ghost vs WordPress from the official site.

Popular Guest Blogging websites

Unlike the above three blogging platforms, guest blogging can be used to drive more traffic to your own website or blog. This can be done by providing backlinks in the articles you write on the Guest post.

Here's the benefit of Guest Blogging:

When you do guest posting on other websites, it will not only help you build quality backlinks but also help you in SEO. Read more about the importance of Guest posting on SEO.

Let go to the list:
  • Quora
  • Medium
  • Dev.to (for web developers)

guest-blogging-for-traffic

1. Quora ~ Question and Answers

Quora is an amazing platform to share your thoughts on anything. You can ask questions, write answers for questions asked by people. And even post articles on Quora.

Quora also allows you to build a community around your name. You need to provide your real name to start using Quora.

That's not all...

Many bloggers use this platform to drive more free referral traffic to their website without spending any money. For that, they only need to answer one question which is related to the blog post they have already written on their blog.

Quora also allows you to build a page ( Quora Space ) around any topic of your interest. Where you can invite your followers to the space to build a relationship, share ideas and thoughts and even help you earn a little.

And the traffic from Quora...

In 2018, the active userbase of Quora grow to 300 million users from 200 million in 2017. This can clearly show you the potential of guest posting on Quora.

quora-growth

2. Medium Platform

Medium is used for modern marketing campaigns. In fact, the trust built by the Medium platform is very high when compared to other guest blogging website.

Even though it only provides nofollow rel attribute to external links, the traffic that can be generated through Medium is high.

Why Medium is not for Blogging?

I personally use the Medium platform to publish articles. But I don't recommend it for blogging. Why? Because every content you publish on the platform, you will not have the rights.

In the early release of their platform, they used to allow using your own custom domains with them. But now they don't provide the option anymore.

If you wanna just build a community around you along with some traffic, Medium can be good for you.

3. Dev.to Platform

This blogging platform is excellent for reaching mostly web developers. Those who love coding, this blogging platform is a great place. 

Dev.to is a kind of social media for developers. Anyone can share their blog posts with Dev.to for free.

There are many developers out there on Dev.to to publish content based on coding and the latest technologies

When should you use Dev.to?

Use this platform to share your content on anything related to web development or coding. And sharing other than things that are not useful for developers is a bad idea.

Final Words

As the world moves forward, the features provided by popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Ghost will continue to improve even more. For now, these above platforms perform well for your blogging carrier.

Using the best CMS for your blog according to your needs can really help you solve all the problems related to blogging. I hope, I have covered on that too on this post.

If you have anything to add on it, please do mention it on the comment box below. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive more tips on growing your online presence.

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