8 Best Free Blogging Platforms to Create Your Blog

Blogging is one of the oldest ways for sharing online contents used by writers and content creators to connect with a vast online audience on a wide range of topics. To venture into blogging, you need a blogging platform, which brings us to the question, what are blogging platforms? Simply put, blogging platforms are publishing software that allows users to publish online contents in form of articles, reviews, opinions, posts and so on. They also allow users to interact with their audience and grow their cycle by sharing a post via several mediums such as social media.

There are lots of blogging platforms out there, both paid, freemium and free platforms, which is why in this article, we are going to take a look at the top 8 free blogging platforms to start your blogging career. So, let’s dig in.

1. Blogger

Blogger is a free blog publishing service from google that originally started in 1999 by Pyra Labs but was acquired by Google in 2003 and has grown to be one of the most popular blogging platforms today. Blogs hosted on blogger are placed on the blogspot.com subdomain, which means if you choose to use blogger, your site address will be something like this: www.myblog.blogspot.com However, unlike worpress.com where you have to upgrade to a paid plan to use a custom domain, you can easily use a custom domain on blogger by purchasing a domain name from a third party domain registrar like GoDaddy and afterwards connect it to your blog. Blogger has a drag and drop editing feature that makes setting up your blogger website quite easy.

2. WordPress.com

WordPress.com uses the open-source WordPress script to provide free blogging/website services for users. Freely hosted blogs are assigned a wordpress.com subdomain. However, a user can decide to upgrade to a paid plan which gives the user access to a custom domain name. When using a free plan on WordPress.com, your site address will be something like this: www.mynollycritics.wordpress.com

WordPress.com has a free plan as well as paid plans ranging from Personal plan, Premium Plan, Business Plan and so on. What this means is that users interested in the free plan only get access to limited features, which includes:

• A 3GB storage space
• Access to tons of non-premium themes, which you can further customise some
• Publicize tool for a direct social media connection
• Statistics on visitors to your blog
• Backend access to your blog from mobile devices

For additional features such as increased storage space, custom domain name and additional design features, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan. Please note that WordPress.com is quite different from WordPress.org although they both use the WordPress family name and run a similar interface. For a detailed understanding of the difference between both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, click here.

3. Wix

Wix is a drag and drop website builder that allows users to create a personal blog, online store and other types of website. It comes with more than 500 themes and templates with a beginner-friendly user interface. Also, with Wix, you can track your website’s traffic using Google Analytics.

4. Weebly

Weebly is another drag and drop website builder. Its intuitive blogging tool allows users to create customized blogs from about 50 templates. It is important to note however that Weebly’s free plan is for a limited period after which you’re expected to pay.

5. Squarespace

Squarespace is a website builder that offers easily customizable blogging features. It has tons of professionally designed templates and its ingenious blogging functionality provides easy to use templates, themes, eCommerce features, CMS and lots more.

6. Medium

Medium is a blog publishing software that allows for the sharing of stories and insights. It provides users with a platform for publishing their opinions and ideas, which they can share with the public. It utilizes an easy to use and beginner-friendly editor that takes away the hassle of design customization and allows writes to primarily focus on creating original content.

7. Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging platform that allows users to publish contents together with multimedia on microblogs and social media channels from the same dashboard. Its customization tool allows users to schedule post, post automatically of social media and so on.

8. Write.as

As the name suggests, Write.as is a publishing platform that is for focused writing. It allows users to publish articles and share them on social media, email etc. It also offers easy to use and beginner-friendly options for writing, as well as publishing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is important to note that all free blogging platforms have limitations in terms of how you can customize your site. Also, when using a free blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress.com, you do not truly own your content, you’re subjected to the platform’s terms of service and in the case of WordPress.com, you are unable to monetize your blog. So although blogging is a great way to get started if you’re interested in creating online content and don’t have the budget for a website, however, if you want something real, serious and dependable that is also totally yours, we recommend going for a website. If you’re interested in getting a website, you can click here to know more about our affordable web design service.

Do you have any questing about choosing between Blogging or Blogging Platforms? Let us know in the comment section.

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