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Blogging platforms offer the ability to customize your blog experience and features based on your point of experience and long-term goals. In this guide, blogging sites were evaluated based on their ease of use, optional pricing and fees, customization points, and additional features. and visitor support. Forbes Advisor chose WordPress. org, Wix, Weebly, Drupal, Craft CMS, Write. as and Medium as the most productive free blogging platforms of 2024.
Wix’s free plan offers a mapped URL (site cuenta. wixsite. com/dirección name), 500 MB of storage and bandwidth, and hosting. Creating a Wix blogging site is an undeniable process. You can choose from over 800 website templates and use their “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) to create a traditional site, or answer a few questions and Wix will create the site for you. You’ll probably want to tailor the automated site more to your wants and desires, but Wix’s automated internet sites are a smart start to creating a fast and engaging blog.
As with many flexible plans, there are some restrictive points that will likely inspire you to upgrade as soon as possible. Wix classified ads appear on each and every page of the online page. You also can’t upload a traditional domain even if you acquire one elsewhere. Finally, you can’t sell any parts on the loose site. However, you can create a fully functional online blog page with the loose plan and then upgrade to a premium plan when you can.
Their max Combo plan costs $16 per month and offers 2GB of storage, a traditional domain (free for a year), an SSL certificate, and 24/7 support. Its productive max cost Pro plan is $27 per month and offers everything in the combo, plus a logo, social media logo files, ad vouchers, 50GB of storage space, and guest analytics (so you know how consistent your posts are with settings). Professional and eCommerce plans charge between $27 and $59 per month. .
Learn more: Read our full Wix review.
Who uses it:
Wix is ideal for businesses that want a blog tailored to a niche market, such as a tech, music, or education blog. With plenty of templates, specialized bloggers can temporarily create a blog that uniquely targets their specific audience.
Weebly’s free plan provides a WYSIWYG editor for creating a free blog. Design features include traditional fonts, reveal and parallax animation effects, a symbol editor, video backgrounds, and traditional design features via HTML/CSS and JavaScript (JS). The add-on plan provides an SSL certificate (for online page security), a shopping cart, unlimited eCommerce items, stock management, a tax calculator, search engine optimization, and lead capture equipment, as well as chat and email support.
Weebly’s free plan offers a garage limited to 500 MB. You’ll also want to use a Weebly-branded subdomain instead of a traditional domain that matches your brand. You’ll also want to upgrade to a premium plan to use a traditional domain. It doesn’t offer phone if you run into a challenge while creating or managing your blog. Finally, unless you upgrade to the Professional or Performance premium plan, Square classifieds will appear on your blog pages.
While Weebly’s free plan offers a way to take advantage of your blog, its premium plans will certainly offer more features to take your blog to the next level. Starting with the very affordable $10 per month private plan (if billed annually), you can attach a traditional domain to your blog. Their $12 monthly Professional plan (if billed annually) also offers blogging-friendly features, adding unlimited storage, analytics, a free domain, an ad-free blogging experience. and telephone support.
Learn more: Read our full Weebly review.
Who uses it:
With over 50 online page themes to choose from, a WYSIWYG editor, free online page hosting, a dashboard where you can manage your entire online page from one place, a drag-and-drop photo editor, sites automatically optimized for mobile devices, and an extensive library of copyrights. – Free images, Weebly is one of the most undeniable blogging platforms. As such, it’s best suited for brands or Americans looking for a fully customizable and personalized blog design experience.
WordPress. org is open-source software, which means you can use it to create your blog for loose. Its many features presented via plugins and themes make creating your blog undeniable in comparison to some other open-source options. There are over 55,000 plugins to be had to users, many of them for loose, adding drag-and-drop builders. You can mix this drag-and-drop feature with loose templates to smoothly create a tradition blog site.
As open source software, WordPress. org does not come with online page hosting or a domain. You’ll want to purchase them elsewhere and attach them to your WordPress account. However, many hosting facilities offer a free domain with their paid plans. GoDuploady, for example, offers a free domain with WordPress hosting starting at $8. 99 per month. Customer support for hosting providers is willing to help plan users upload hosting and a domain to a WordPress account.
Learn more: Read our full WordPress. org review.
Who uses it:
WordPress. org is ideal for bloggers who need a deeply personalized experience without the need for coding experience.
Drupal is an open-source and flexible content control formula (CMS). You can download the software for free to create your blog. The great thing about Drupal is that it can be used for blogs with high volumes of traffic and be custom designed with granularity. An infinite diversity of plugins allows you to expand the capacity of your blog. If you can believe it, you can build it with Drupal. But most Drupal developers customize their blogs using coding, which requires a steep learning curve.
Drupal allows you to reach large and varied audiences. Their analytics provide the ability to deeply segment audiences and then email content based on demographics, interests, and behavior. Accessibility teams allow you to reach audiences who need unique assistance accessing your content. , as structured metadata that can be read by screen readers. Additionally, Drupal’s multilingual features automatically translate content into over a hundred languages.
Although this is open-source software that cannot be easily downloaded, creating software that can be published through Drupal can be expensive in the end. You have to pay for hosting and for a domain name. A hosting provider will ensure that it can be made available to your audience once created. Also, if you need a traditional Drupal blog site and are not familiar with coding, you will have to pay a developer.
Who uses it:
Drupal provides the opportunity to succeed among a wide audience, but its design procedure comes with a steep learning curve. For this reason, it is suitable for developers who create blogs for big brands and their giant audience.
Craft CMS offers a free plan for everyone with content organization features (like categories and fields), the ability to run multiple connected sites on a single account, localization capabilities, and a single administrator account. The platform offers complex content control functions. as built-in for categories, tags, and structures (which store content in a hierarchy or explained order). Matrix by Craft CMS also allows you to easily create mixed content posts.
If you’re a content manager at an agency, you may need to create content projects for clients. The flexible plan limits your ability to do this by restricting users to a single admin account, dashboard branding (which adds a professional look to (traditional) and developer support. In addition to those limitations, such as loose open-source software, you have to pay for a hosting solution and a traditional domain.
Therefore, if you need to create a professional blog with a complex content strategy for a client, it is more productive to go for Craft CMS paid plans. The good news is that you can pay according to the project. Their $299 Pro plan according to Project, for example, gives you unlimited user accounts, improved content previewing, formula customization, consistent development with support, a year of updates, and more. Afterwards, upgrades charge $59 per year. You can pass this charge on to consumers or make them pay a fee to keep the blog updated.
Who uses it:
Craft CMS is ideal for content strategists looking to create a wonderful reading experience with a highly organized blog, features such as tags, content categories, and content hierarchies. It’s also aimed at other people with technical developer skills who want to create custom content. enjoy blogging.
Write. as used to offer a free platform to create a minimalist blog. However, in the last year, it switched to fully paid plans. To continue serving others who need to write blogs for free, the open platform Write. as provided. WriteFree software source. With WriteFreely, you can create a minimalist blog without the distractions of classic blogging. This means no applause, likes, alerts, or comments to distract you from your main writing task.
However, as open source software, it does not offer free blog hosting. You’ll also want to pay for a traditional domain if you want to traditionalize your site. Therefore, you will most likely want to turn to Write. as’ paid plans. to facilitate the implementation of WriteFreely. The Write. as Pro plan costs $6 per month (if billed annually) and hosts up to three private blogs, unlimited posts per day, unlimited posts per month, a traditional domain with SSL, email publishing, and up to 500 newsletter subscribers.
Who uses it:
Bloggers who are looking for a distraction-free environment that will help them overcome writer’s block and express their ideas freely deserve Write. as. Also, writers who need to publish their minds anonymously deserve Write. as.
Medium is a blogging platform to which you can upload content. Similar to creating a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, users simply create an account, create a profile, and post content. The good news is that Medium already has a giant audience. Since its inception in 2012, it has amassed an audience of one hundred million people and enjoys a 140% increase in visitors year-over-year. You can create a non-public blog on the platform or a post with a branded domain.
Of course, the problem with creating a free blog on Medium is that you can’t design an online page or use a traditional domain that represents your brand. You also cannot have participants on your blog.
Medium Publications can get around those limitations, but you have to pay a $5 per month subscription to do so. A subscription allows you to leverage a traditional domain, promotional blocks for your post’s homepage, links to a featured page, a lead generation form, a post or an external link (such as your website), background colors, and symbol and callout options. Action buttons. You can also invite collaborators to your post based on their topic according to your topic. You can even attract readers by sending stories to their inbox.
Who uses it:
Businesses that need an instant audience on a shoestring budget deserve Medium.
While Forbes Advisor reviewed the platforms for possible inclusion in this list of the best, we looked for providers that presented undeniable blogging experience, but were also considered as other degrees of technical expertise from our readers. We also evaluate the inclusions found on additional pricing and fees, degrees of customization, additional features and functionalities, and visitor support.
Here’s a closer look at our method for deciding inclusions on this year’s Best of list:
When opting for a free blogging platform, it’s critical how simple it is to create a blog on your selected platform, your customization options, and the additional costs you’ll need to pay to meet your needs. This charge research deserves short-term and long-term pricing to help you meet your immediate and long-term needs.
Some free blogging platforms offer the equipment and space to create your own blogging site. Others will offer a pre-built blogging platform where you can log into your profile and publish blog posts. If you want a free blogging platform that allows you to design your own blog site, be sure to explore how undeniable the design process is. If you’re new to coding, look for a blogging platform with a drag-and-drop builder for an undeniable design experience.
Some blogging platforms do not offer customization features through a minimalist or ready-made blogging platform. Others allow you to customize background colors and upload pre-made content blocks or blog features to customize the look and feel of your blog. Others allow you to deeply customize every square inch of your blog through coding. Decide on the customization point you want and locate a platform that meets it.
Once you’ve selected the design ease and degrees of tradition you prefer, take a look at the prices you’d likely have to pay even if you’ve selected a flexible platform. For example, open source platforms may require you to pay for hosting an online page and a traditional domain. Similarly, loose versions offered through online page builders, such as Wix and Weebly, do not offer a traditional domain. So, if you’re looking for a branded online page, you’ll eventually want to upgrade to a paid plan.
Blogging sites that are most productive for beginners include those that offer an easy-to-use drag-and-drop online page builder so you can design an online blog page with no coding experience. These come with blogging platforms, such as Weebly and Wix. Medium is another beginner’s option for a blogging site with no learning curve. Medium doesn’t require any design or coding experience. You can create an account and profile as you would on a social media platform and then publish your blog posts.
You have several features to publish a blog for free. You can create a blog under a free subdomain, like the ones featured on Wix, Weebly, or WordPress. com’s free plans. You can also open an account on a social media platform. , such as LinkedIn or Medium, create a profile and then publish your blog to your publishing tools.
Unsurprisingly, all of the most productive blogging platforms have degrees of security. When deciding on a blogging platform, you should look for various security features, including two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA), documentation that shows general security updates and fixes, intrusion detection, user activity monitoring, data encryption. and privacy protection.
Some free blogging platforms are actually free. Wix, WordPress, and Weebly, for example, offer free unlimited plans that you can use to design an online blog page and publish your articles. However, they are actually free. Blogs will offer limited features, restricting the amount of space you can use and the number of pages you can publish. You must also use a subdomain that includes the free platform call and the platform’s classified ads will be able to appear on your blog pages.