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If you have landed here, I assume that you are looking for some free blogging platforms. Many of you have just been curious about blogging to make money online, whether some of you want to learn how to blog for free just to share your interest with society, friends, and family.
Considering your interest, here are some free blogging sites that you can take advantage of by creating your free blog with many benefits. These free blogging platforms have some limitations, some benefits, and some lacuna as well.
Going forward I’ll cover all this information corresponding to every free blogging resource mentioned later in this article and suggest you the best blogging platform for you to create your blog for free. Before that let me tell you when it is best suitable for you to utilize these free platforms and when you should not.
When you should opt for Free Blogging:
- If you are not good in the technical aspects of creating a site and managing it on your own
- Money constraint
- Time constraint
- Your interest is just in sharing the information and looking for an easy, less effort solution
- When you have no resources like computers and want to start a blog for free which you can easily manage through your smartphone.
When you should not go for Free Blogging:
- On free blogging platforms, you will have less control over your own blog. I mean, choices would be limited. For eg. If you want to change the theme of your blog, you would have to opt only from the list, you don’t have a choice to add a new theme. Where on a self-hosted blog you would have full control. You can download multiple free and paid themes to create your blog.
- Less monetization potential. Explanation: Let say if you want to place a banner ad along with Adsense code you would not have such a thing on a free platform.
- Low in design, may seem out of trends and unconvincing
- In some cases, your website load time may be higher. Explanation: Just because your hosting would not be in your control, it may be an overloaded server and you will have to bear with it.
- Low data storage capacity
- Uncertainty about company services. If the company vanishes your blog would also vanish.
There could be many other reasons also, which advocate that if you are going for serious blogging then you should upgrade your knowledge and learn to manage your own blogging platform. For serious bloggers, WordPress is a good platform for starting your blogging career.
My Advice: If you’re a beginner, you can go for free blogging sites. Eventually, when you learn to use these platforms hassle-free and want to achieve a competitive edge, you can look forward to having your own blog.
Without talking much about it, let’s move to the top free blogging platforms, where you can start your blog for free, just in 10 minutes.
Top Free Blogging Platforms:
1. WordPress:
Starting from my favorite free blogging platform. It has 2 different versions.
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- WordPress.org
- WordPress.com
WordPress.Org vs WordPress.Com
a) WordPress.org –
Img source: https://wordpress.org/
Recommend Score: 10/10
Because: Here you get full control of your own blog. Full means 100% control. You will utilize any monetization option as you wish.
This is the best free blogging platform with around 60+ million users, easy, deeply customizable, and with the highest numbers of plugins supported. Once you log in to your interface will look like this. Where you have a left-side menu option for Posts, Pages, Blog Menu Themes, Plugins, Settings, Tools, etc. Here you can have full freedom to create any style you want. To support this many free and paid plugins and themes would be available.
One free great plugin of WordPress is Elementor site builder. It’s amazing. A deep customization option is available even in the free version. And believe me, as a beginner you don’t need a paid version, you can create anything from scratch using free themes like OceanWP and site builders like Element. If you want to go advance in the future you can purchase the Pro version, but believe me this free version also would solve almost 95% of your requirements.
I would recommend WordPress as the most preferred platform for beginners to advance bloggers. The Key Feature of the WordPress.Org blog would have:
- It is completely customizable
- Responsive for mobile versions
- SEO friendly
- Easily manageable, super easy to learn
- Highly secure (*for beginners you may have to learn security guidelines)
- Easy and vastly supported Media Management
The above key features you will get just by using this platform. You don’t have to put extra effort into incorporating such features in your blog whereas on other blogging platforms either you need to customize a lot or you would be bound to use paid tools.
WordPress.Org is the best free blogging platform though you have to install it first. Considering that many hosting services are giving easy one-click support to install WordPress for free. I suggest using those hosting services where you get free WordPress installation and free lifetime SSL.
I would recommend going for it and don’t look much around. This will save time and effort. Because in the end you’re gonna choose only this platform.
b) WordPress.com
Unlike WordPress.Org on WordPress.Com, you will get a simple interface to publish your blog but here you get far fewer options of customization for Free.
Not only this, your free blog will be including the wordpree.com extension in the URL of your blog. For example look at this https://canadianaviationnews.wordpress .com/, https://studioadanse.wordpress .com/.
Img Source: Downloaded in desktop Blog Img folder
If you are a new blogger or just want to practice, you can use this platform for free. Here it is super easy to write and publish your blogs. Yes, at the later stages when you get some professionalism and want to own this blog, you can host the same on your own domain and hosting platform by paying some nominal fees.
I was surprised when I saw many plugins (*for example – Yoast SEO, WooCommeerce, TinyMCE plugins) which are freely available on WordPress.Org at least their basic versions are available here only under Business Plan. Here on this platform mostly everything is paid if you want to go beyond the basic layout.
2. Medium (www.medium.com)
Recommend Score: 5/10
Medium is a good option for all those who don’t care about having their own blog space; they just want to share their views in front of a wide audience.
- It is super easy to create your blog on Medium. You just sign up with your mail ID and instantly you can go for writing your first blog.
- The platform has a very simple layout. In the blog, you can do some basic style modification and add some images, the rest you can’t do much.
- Here you can save your blog for future edits and while publishing can add some 5 tags for SEO purposes. Rest nothing much.
- Your blog URL would be containing medium.com/ as an extension. It will not be straight.
One more amazing feature which I like most about Medium is its Import option. Through which you can import any blog page on the Medium platform. These imported blogs would be having mentioned the source name from where it is imported at the bottom of the page.
Pros and Cons of Medium.com Free Blogging Website
- Medium has around 200 million per month visitors. Your blog would be exposed in front of a wide audience. Also, you may get a lot of traffic from Google as well because due to the high PR of the Medium website, your post will be boosted in SERP. That means you will get recognition in the long run if you do well.
- The bad part is: all your posted blog is Medium’s property now. You can’t use it somewhere else as it has been crawled by Google and it will be considered plagiarised. So with this lot of effort, you would be ending with just one monetization option and only when Medium approaches you for monetizing your high-rated posts.
3. Weebly (www.weebly.com)
Recommend Score: 9/10
Super simple drag and drop feature. eCommerce friendly. Coding allowed. Pricing plans are reasonably considerable. But not recommended for free blogging.
Weebly is a popular website builder and hosting platform where you can have your blog published with the Weebly subdomain extension for free. If you want to use a custom domain without a Weebly extension you will have to pay for it.
- You can build a professional website with simple drag and drop features. Not only a simple blogging website, with its all-in-one eCommerce tool you can easily create an eCommerce online store comprising all necessary features to run an online business, just like WooCommerce in WordPress.
- Weebly also offers integrated marketing tools for business growth. Though as a blogger you don’t need it initially, later on, you can leverage these analytical and social media tools to grow your audience.
- SEO Mobile friendly responsive themes, easily manageable features to create Galleries, Slideshows, Custom background.
- You can add many Weebly-owned and third-party applications as per your need.
Weebly has both free and paid plans. Under the free plan, you will get a Weebly extension domain, with 500 storage and an SSL certificate. Storage capacity is very less that after some time you must have to upgrade your plan. Under the paid plans PRO plan is reasonably cheaper and has good features also.
4. Blogger (www.blogger.com)
Recommend Score: 6/10
Blogger is Google-owned free blogging platform launched in 2003. It is very popular among new bloggers. In the last few years, its value has deteriorated due to rising competition.
- The interface is very simple. The writing dashboard (editor) has been made similar to Microsoft Word so that new users can easily pick it up.
- To use Blogger you just have to have a mail ID and you can directly login to Blogger.com.
- All your free blogs published over Blogger would be hosted with subdomain blogspot.com. But if you wish to have your own domain, you can easily integrate the new domain for free.
- You can choose Themes from the choices given. All these themes are basic, simple, sober, and do not have much dynamic functionality. These themes are designed in such a way that the main focus comes over the matter of the blog.
- Through the Layout option, you can easily customize your blog a little more by the drag and drop option available for the sidebar and footer, where you can add multiple gadgets from the list, freely provided by Google.
One great thing about Blogger.com is its monetization option. I mean, on your blog you can add your Adsense code and make some money once it gets popular. Though there has been a lot of competition in the free blogging industry, this Google platform is highly recommended for new bloggers who don’t have any technical skills and want to learn blogging for free. Though your blog would not look so professional still you have a choice to export your blog and move on to some advanced blogging platform later.
5. Wix (www.wix.com)
Recommend Score: 9/10
Wix, a popular web builder, is an Israeli software company founded in 2006. It is a free cloud-based website builder which is super easy to use. It provides easily manageable drag and drops features almost for everything. You can create anything from basic to advanced whether it is your simple blog, business website, or eCommerce stores.
- Here you will get two options either to create your website on your own or answer some questionnaire to get the Wix AI (Wix Artificial Intelligence) to design your site by itself.
- If you use a questionnaire and get a site created by Wix AI, still you can edit the same as per your needs.
- To set up a site on your own you will have to choose a template from a wide range of more than 500 design templates, get it customized using drag and drop elements from the menu in the live PREVIEW mode. You can add multiple elements including multimedia widgets, menus, forms, background, or custom codes, etc.
- For a free website, you will have to bear with the Wix subdomain extension. Whereas for a paid plan you will get the domain name for free which will be integrated with your Wix site. You don’t have to get into any technicality from the backend.
- Wix’s site would be mobile-friendly and good for SEO. You can use a mobile editor to design your page through your mobile to make it more optimized.
- Underpaid plans backup points will be created for your site. From where you can restore your site to any backed-up point as you wish. This way you will never have a chance to lose the data.
Undoubtedly Wix is a great website builder but it is more inclined towards business. It is a professional solution for your serious blogging. If you are really interested in Blogging and want to make it a living, Wix could be a good platform like WordPress.
Friends! These 5 above free blogging platforms are popular and really good for beginners. Though there are many other websites that are equally good and offering free blogging services. More or less I personally used these platforms so that I wanted to give my genuine review about the same.
As I guess you are looking for some free online blogging platform but it would always be great, if you can open some opportunity to upgrade your work at later stages. Considering this I would recommend don’t run around finding many sites but using WordPress.
In the comment section please let me know which above platform you find the most interesting and why?
