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Blogging platforms offer the ability to customize your blog’s experience and features based on your experience and long-term goals. In this guide, we rate blog sites based on their ease of use, optional pricing and fees, customization points, additional features, and visitor support. Forbes Advisor chose WordPress. org, Wix, Weebly, Drupal, Craft CMS, Write. as, and Medium as the free blogging platforms of 2024.
Wix’s free plan offers a mapped URL (account name. wixsite. com/site address), 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 customize the site further. automated to your wants and desires, but Wix’s automated websites 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 classifieds ads appear on each and every page of the online site. You also cannot upload a traditional domain even if you purchase one elsewhere. Finally, you cannot sell any pieces on the site alone. 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 one year), an SSL certificate, and 24/7 support. Their productive maximum price Pro plan is $27 per month and offers everything included in the Combo plus a logo, social media logo files, promotional coupons, 50GB of storage space, and guest analytics (so you know how your posts are consistent with the post). Business 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 blog about technology, music, or coaching. With plenty of templates, specialized bloggers can temporarily create a blog that uniquely targets their specific audience.
Weebly’s free plan offers a WYSIWYG editor for creating a free blog. Design features include traditional fonts, parallax and reveal 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 undoubtedly 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. Its $12 monthly Professional plan (if billed annually) also offers blog-friendly features, adding unlimited storage, analytics, a free domain, an ad-free blogging experience. and phone 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, automatically optimized sites for mobile devices and an extensive copyright library. – Free images, Weebly is one of the most undeniable blogging platforms. As such, it is 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 free. Its numerous features presented through plugins and themes make creating your blog undeniable compared to other open-source options. There are over 55,000 plugins available to users, many of them for free, adding drag-and-drop builders. You can combine this drag-and-drop feature with loose templates to seamlessly create a traditional blog site.
As open source software, WordPress. org does not come with online page hosting or a domain. You will 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. Hosting providers’ visitor support 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 want a deeply personalized experience without the desire to code.
Drupal is an open source and flexible content management system (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 through 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 want exclusive support for your content, such as structured metadata readable through screen readers. In addition, Drupal’s multilingual features automatically translate content into more than 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 ability to succeed with a wide audience, but its design process comes with a steep learning curve. For this reason, it’s suitable for developers who create blogs for big brands and their gigantic audiences.
Craft CMS offers a flexible plan with content organization features (such as categories and fields), the ability to run multiple similar sites in a single account, localization capabilities, and a single administrator account. The platform offers complex content control features, such as built-in help for categories, tags, and structures (which store content in an explained hierarchy or order). Craft CMS’s Matrix also allows you to easily create combined 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.
So, if you need to create a professional blog with a complex content strategy for a client, it’s best to go for Craft CMS’s paid plans. The good news is that you can pay according to the allowance. Its $299 per assignment Pro plan, for example, gives you unlimited user accounts, improved content preview, formula customization, support-supported development, a year of updates, and more. Subsequently, upgrades charge $59 per year. You can pass this charge on to consumers or qualify them with a payment to keep the blog up to date.
Who uses it:
Craft CMS is ideal for content strategists looking to create a wonderful reading experience with a highly organized blog, features like tags, content categories, and content hierarchies. It is also aimed at other people with technical developer skills who want to create a custom blog. enjoy blogging.
Write. as used to offer a free platform for creating a minimalist blog. However, in the last year, it switched to fully paid plans. To continue serving other people who need to blog for free, Write. as provides the open platform. Source of WriteFree software. With WriteFreely, you can create a minimalist blog without the distractions of classic blogs. This means no claps, likes, alerts, or comments to distract you from your main writing task.
However, as open-source software, it doesn’t 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 resort to Write. as’s paid plans. 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 that can upload content to. Similar to creating a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, users just create an account, create a profile, and post content. The smart news is that Medium already has a giant audience. Since its inception in 2012, it has built an audience of one hundred million other folks and is enjoying a 140% year-over-year building up in visitors. 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 can’t 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 was reviewing platforms for possible inclusion in this list of the best, we looked for providers that featured undeniable blogging expertise, but were also considered 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 more in-depth look at our method for deciding on this year’s most sensible list:
When opting for a free blogging platform, it is essential how easy it is to create a blog on the selected platform, its customization options, and any additional prices you may need to pay to make it meet your needs. your needs. This pricing research should take into account short- and long-term pricing to help you meet your immediate and long-term needs.
Some free blogging platforms offer the equipment and area to create your own blogging site. Others offer a pre-made blogging platform where you can save your profile and publish blog posts. If you want a free blogging platform that allows you to design your own blogging 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 already built blogging platform. Others allow you to customize background colors and load pre-designed content blocks or blog functions to customize the look of your blog. Others allow you to deeply customize every inch of your blog through coding. Decide what level of customization you want and find a platform that fits that.
Once you’ve selected the ease of design and degrees of tradition you prefer, take a look at the prices you’d possibly 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, single versions offered through online page builders, such as Wix and Weebly, don’t 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 more productive and suitable 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 zero learning curve. Medium doesn’t require any design or coding experience. You can create an account and profile just 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 many layers of security. When deciding on a blogging platform, look for various security features, adding two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA). documentation with common security updates and patches, intrusion detection, user activity tracking, knowledge encryption, and privacy protection.
Some free blogging platforms are really free. Wix, WordPress, and Weebly, for example, offer unlimited and free 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 should 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.