The best blog site for building a successful blog
Choose the best blogging platform to showcase your content
The best blog site for building a successful blog in 2025
Choose the best blogging platform to showcase your content.
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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. If you want a platform where you can share your thoughts properly and keep control of things, it's impossible to beat a blog. Plus, you can always share your blog posts on social media, through a newsletter, and anywhere else. The whole point of a blog is that it's your content to do with as you will.
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Similarly, if you run a business and want to provide resources and recommendations to customers, the best way to do it is often to add a blog to your website. 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 5 best blog sites
- WordPress.org for total control
- 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
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Blogs have been around since the earliest days of the internet, so most people have a pretty solid idea of what one is—even if they've never really thought to spell it out. Here's how I think about it: a blog is a website, maybe with a few other pages, but the most important part is the feed of blog posts in reverse chronological order.
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).
When I was putting together this list, I used two criteria to decide on the essential blog-iness of the tools I was testing. 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. Squarespace, for example, is a great website builder that makes it possible to build a blog, but it's not particularly intuitive to set up, and the backend is awful to use. 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. WordPress, on the other hand, is both quick and easy for a regular human to launch a blog—and the backend is intuitive and great to use.
So, on this list, you'll only find tools that pass the essential blog-iness test. But that wasn't enough. I also required all the blogging tools to be:
- Customizable. A big part of blogging is having a customized site, rather than just another generic Instagram account. I wanted tools that would allow you to choose your own theme and create your own branded blog. The easier it was to do, 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 required these tools to have either a community of users writing tutorials and helping people solve problems or a dedicated customer care team. (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. There are free blogging platforms that you can use to start a blog, but if you expect a large amount of traffic or want premium levels of support, you will have to pay something.
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I've been a tech writer for well over a decade—which is to say, I've been a blogger for a long time. To pick the best blog sites, I started with a list of around 25 potential blogging platforms, the vast majority of which I'd already tried out, reviewed, or used over the course of my career. 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 around 10 options to test in full—and these are the five best. I'd love to say there are some undiscovered gems in there, but really, when it comes to something as crucial as powering a secure, fully-featured blog on the open internet, you really need to go with one of the big players.
The best blogging platforms at a glance
Best for
Standout feature
Pricing
Having total control over your blog
Endlessly customizable and extensible
Free (not including hosting, plugins, and themes)
Getting started quickly
The WordPress experience without some of the hassle
Free plan available; paid plans from $9/month
A WordPress alternative
Features like memberships and newsletter subscriptions are built in
Free for self-hosted; paid plans from $11/month
Building an entire website (that also has a blog)
Makes it easy to build a great website
Free plan available; paid plans from $17/month
Using your custom domain for free
Lets you use your own domain for free (that's literally it)
Free
Best blogging platform for total control
WordPress.org
WordPress.org pros:
- Endlessly customizable and extensible
- Widely used, so finding how-to guides and professional developers is easy
WordPress.org cons:
- Generally requires a fair bit of tinkering to get things working perfectly and looking great
More than 40% of all websites run on WordPress, from tiny local sites to major publications. It's the most popular blogging platform and CMS by far, and since it's open source, it's free for you to run on your own server (other than the hosting costs).
If you want to be in control of everything with your blog, from how it looks to what you post, then WordPress.org is the option for you. And while you can run your own server from your basement, it's a lot easier to use a hosting service (like Bluehost or Kinsta) that can automatically install WordPress for you. (Though maybe avoid WP Engine for now, because there's a heap of drama going down between it and WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg.)
Not only does WordPress make the basics easy to do, but it really is endlessly customizable. There are tens of thousands of themes and plugins that change how it looks and what it does. There are themes for photographers and designers to show off their work, plugins that let you sell products through your blog posts, and anything else you can imagine. It's a fairly wild world out there, but there is great community support that can help you navigate it.
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