Pros & Cons Of Common Blogging Platforms

Did you realize that the number of bloggers is expected to reach 31.7 million in 2020? This is an amazingly large amount of people that are blogging around the world.

To get an even better idea of the amount of blogging that occurs, there are over 2 million blog posts published on a daily basis.

Google also loves blog content, especially long blog content.  As a matter of fact, the average word count of top-ranked content in Google is between 1,140-1285 words.

With all of the blogging going on, you might be aware that there are several different platforms that you can use.

Some of the most common ones are WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Weebly, Medium, Joomla, Wix, Blogger, and Tumblr.

What I want to do today is to share with you some of the pros and cons of these common blogging platforms and help you understand what you should invest in.

So let’s dive right in!

1. WordPress.org

WordPress.org is my blogging platform of choice because I’m in love with the user interface and plugins that they have to make your life ten times easier.

Pros

• The best thing about WordPress.org is that you have complete control over everything including domain name, hosting, content, and design options.
• WordPress has tons of awesome plugins for just about anything you need for your website.
• They have some of the most incredibly designed themes that you’ll ever have the opportunity to use, and the developers that sell these are constantly coming up with new ones all of the time.

Cons

It’s tough to find a lot of cons with WordPress.org just because I love using it so much.  But the few that I can think of are as follows:

• If you don’t have a lot of experience with hosting your website through a company such as BlueHost or HostGator, you will have a tougher time figuring this out and controlling your website.
• You have to install WordPress.org on your own server, and this can sometimes cause a big headache for beginners who don’t understand the whole process.

2. WordPress.com

WordPress.com as about to WordPress.org is a free blogging platform for the most part unless you decide to buy one of their premium themes.

Pro

• A free blogging platform that comes with free hosting, free subdomain, and free themes if you choose.
• Easy to use.

Cons

• You can’t do much customization.
• Don’t have as much control.
• You don’t have your own unique URL.
• You can’t use Google Analytics unless you want to upgrade to their premium plan.
• com will run paid ads on your site in order to pay for the free accounts they provide to their users. If you want to get rid of these ads from running on your site, you can pay them to upgrade your account to remove the ads.
• If you need to have an online store, you won’t be able to do that on WordPress.com.

3. Weebly

Weebly is another great blogging software for beginners and advanced users alike.  Weebly is a very easy to use platform that has some really good features to it.

Pros

• Weebly allows you to sign up for free and test it out before you pay for it. This is different than some of the other platforms.
• They also use a drag and drop feature that makes it really easy to create blog posts and web pages.
• Weebly offers a good choice of themes for e-commerce businesses especially.

Cons

• They are a bit limited on the features that they provide compared to WordPress.org, for example, that has tons of plugins for just about all of your needs. You can’t easily add any extra features than what is already offered by the platform.  Not a lot of integration involved.
• If you ever wanted to try and move to another platform, it’s not that easy, and the system can really mess you up. Be careful when trying to migrate the site to another platform. It’s not very user-friendly.
• When inputting photo galleries or images, the platform gets a little heavy and burdensome at some parts and doesn’t do it as smoothly as WordPress.org for example.
• Weebly’s pricing starts at $5/month and moves up from there. Not really a con, just a note on pricing.

4. Medium

Medium is another microblogging platform that allows you to host a blog on their servers.  Any post that you post on your medium site goes out to their community.  If you are trying to get some articles published quickly, Medium is good for that.

Pros

• Easy to use as a beginner.
• Free platform.

Cons

• Cannot use your own domain name.
• Limited features are available.
• Doesn’t allow for much design elements. More for simply writing.

5. Joomla

Joomla is a great blogging platform that is probably closest to how WordPress.org operates, which means you can use your own domain name and your own hosting company.  Joomla gives you a lot more control than other platforms.

Pros

• Joomla has a lot of beautiful designs or themes to choose from.
• You can also use the many extensions that they offer, which is refreshing. They have many different extensions for almost anything you need. Similar to WordPress’s plugins.

Cons

• You need to make sure you backup all of your data because Joomla won’t do it for you.
• Joomla has a smaller community so it can be harder to get help when issues arise.

6. Wix

Wix has primarily been aimed at small business owners, and they really focus on branding themselves as an easy to use, customizable platform for all of your business needs.

Pros

• Probably the biggest pro to Wix is that they have the drag and drop tool that makes it quick and easy to set up.
• You don’t have to have a lot of experience to use this platform.

Cons

• The biggest negative part of Wix is that with the free version they are going to show their Wix logo at the bottom of your website. So their branding will be on every page of your site.
• Another big con is that once you pick a theme that you like, you can’t change it. I’m not sure why they do this, but it can be a bit annoying if you want to change later.
• If you want to have any type of e-commerce store on your website, you have to upgrade to the paid version.

7. Blogger

Blogger is Google’s free blogging platform. It’s one of the oldest platforms that are on the market today.

Pros

• Blogger is a free blogging service and includes hosting on their subdomain.
• Very user-friendly and you don’t have to know much about web design or coding to get started.

Cons

• Since Blogger is such a basic platform it doesn’t allow you to add more advanced features as your business grows.
• The themes that Blogger offers are very minimal and not the best quality.

8. Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging community that claims to have over 463 million blogs on its platform. It’s quite a bit different than the others because it has a social media platform built into it.

Pros

• Tumblr is set up like the other free platforms. You can have your blog hosted with Tumblr using their subdomains such as “www.yourwebsite.tumblr.com”.
• It’s considered a “microblogging” platform which means blog owners can publish content that is seen automatically by other members of the platform.
• It’s very easy to use and a great choice for beginners.

Cons

• Just like the other free blogging platforms, it makes it tough to grow your blog as your business grows. These blogging platforms might be best for personal use but not for business purposes in my opinion.
• Because the platform is so simple, they don’t offer many additional features such as what WordPress.org would offer.

Conclusion

Although blog creation isn’t complex these days. However, it’s important to carefully determine what blogging platform suits you. A lot depends on your skill level and your goals. Are you blogging just for fun or are you starting your own business?

The above summary of the pros and cons should help you in making the right decision.  Good luck and happy blogging!

Author Bio:

[thrive_testimonial name=”” company=”” image=”https://dsim.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Roberto.jpg”]Roberto Garvin– I am Roberto, co-founder of Mofluid. It is absolutely amazing to see how technology continues to evolve, from email to browsers, search engines, mobile, AI and now blockchain. I am fortunate to witness it all. Really excited to see what’s next. You can connect with me on Twitter @mofluid.[/thrive_testimonial]