Blogging is far from dead. As the last two years of X-formerly-Twitter drama has shown, allowing a social media platform to control your access to your audience has big risks. A blog is unbeatable if you want a platform where you can properly share your thoughts and maintain control. In addition, you can always share your blog posts via newsletter, social media, and other channels. The fact that your content can be used however you see fit is the whole point of a blog. Similarly, adding a blog to your website is frequently the most effective method if you run a business and want to provide customers with resources and recommendations. Best of all, your blog content gets indexed by Google—unlike almost all social media posts—so you can drive potential customers to your business through content marketing (and without having to pay for ads). Look at the blog you’re reading right now: Zapier blog posts get millions of views per month and are one of the most valuable ways of getting new customers at Zapier.
After testing all the most popular blog sites out there, these are the five best. And yes, two of them are WordPress, but there are a few great WordPress alternatives in here too.
- The five best blogs WordPress.org for complete command WordPress.com for getting started quickly
- Ghost for an alternative to WordPress
- Wix for easily building more than a blog
- Blogger for using your own domain for free
- What makes the best blogging platform?
How we evaluate and test apps
Our roundups of the best apps are written by people who have used, tested, and written about software for a lot of their careers. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We value the trust our readers place in us to provide honest evaluations of the categories and apps we review and are never compensated for app placement in our articles or links to other websites. On the Zapier blog, you can find a comprehensive explanation of our method for selecting apps to feature. Since blogs have existed since the beginning of the internet, most people are aware of what they are, even if they have never really thought to explain it. I see it this way: a blog is a website with a feed of blog posts arranged in reverse chronological order, maybe with a few other pages. There’s a thin line between the software you need to create a blog and the kind of content management systems (CMS) used by large companies to power their websites. Many tools like WordPress and Drupal can be used to both build a blog or power a regular website (or do both at once).
I used two criteria to determine whether the tools I was testing were fundamentally blog-friendly when compiling this list. They had to make it quick and easy to set up a real blog, and the backend where you write blog posts had to be nice to use and fully-featured. For instance, Squarespace is an excellent website builder that also lets you create a blog. However, the backend is terrible to use and the setup process is not particularly straightforward. Drupal is an incredible CMS, but it’s just too hard for non-developers to get started with to really be considered a universal blogging platform. I’ve tried it—it’s just not worth the hassle for most people. On the other hand, starting a blog with WordPress is quick and simple for anyone, and the backend is easy to use and understand. Therefore, you will only find tools on this list that pass the crucial blog-iness test. But that was insufficient. Additionally, I demanded that each blogging tool be: Customizable. A big part of blogging is having a customized site, rather than just another generic Instagram account. I wanted tools that let you pick a theme and make your own blog with your own branding. The more straightforward the task, the better. Well supported. While I wanted the tools on this list to be as easy to use as possible, when you’re setting up a website, you’ll almost always encounter some weird technical stuff. I wanted these tools to have either a dedicated customer support team or a community of users who write tutorials and help people solve problems. (Which support option you have to rely on generally comes down to how much you’re prepared to pay per month.)
Affordable. This isn’t a list of the cheapest blogging platforms, but affordability and value for money were still key criteria. You can start a blog on free blogging platforms; however, if you anticipate a significant amount of traffic or require premium support, you will need to pay. I’ve been a tech writer for well over a decade—which is to say, I’ve been a blogger for a long time. I started with a list of about 25 potential blogging platforms, the majority of which I had already tried, reviewed, or used in my career, to select the best ones. A few good CMSes, website builders, and newsletter services were quickly cut for being too hard to set up or not having enough focus on blogging, and a few other options were too small to readily recommend or seemed to be discontinued.
That left me with roughly ten options, the five best of which I will fully test. I would love to say that there are some hidden gems there, but when it comes to powering a secure, fully-featured blog on the open internet, you really need to go with one of the big guys.
