How to Choose the Best Blogging Platform
Even though there’s a lot of competition in the market, and we’re really spoiled for choice when it comes to platforms/software that can run our blogs, there’s only one leader at the top of the ladder – the single best blogging platform to rule them all.
This is chapter 2 of a bigger guide on how to start a successful blog.
Check out the stats – these are the most popular website and blog platforms on the web (2024 data): WordPress: 43.4% of all websites, Shopify: 4.4%, Wix: 2.7%, Squarespace: 2.1%.
Yes, you are reading this right. WordPress is used by 43.4% of all websites on the internet. Again, that’s ALL websites. This makes it the prime candidate for the best blogging platform award.
- WordPress is nearly 10 times more popular than the no.2 on the list.
- WordPress holds 63.1% of the CMS (content management system) market.
- WordPress is used by some of the biggest brands – BBC, Wired, Time Magazine, The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, New York Post, Harvard University, Jay Z, all use WordPress to power their websites and blogs.
Some of WordPress’ strong points:
- 🤑 It’s free.
- 👐 It’s open source.
- 🏋️♀️ It’s powerful and extremely extensible.
- 🚄 It’s fast.
- 💯 It’s easy to use.
- 🎨 It can be customized to suit your needs hand-in-glove.
That being said, there’s this one confusing thing about WordPress. Namely, its dual nature. Basically, anyone looking for “WordPress” on Google is likely to end up either at WordPress.org or WordPress.com.
And contrary to what common sense would dictate, those are not one and the same. In fact, they’re completely different:
- WordPress.org is THE blog engine that we’re going to be focusing here.
- WordPress.com is a separate online service. While it’s also a solution that you can choose and launch your blog with, the way it’s all carried out is much different.
If you’re curious to find out what the specific differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com are, check out this comparison. Let’s not get into the details here, though. For now, let’s just say that the “.ORG” version of WordPress gives us a lot more possibilities, both in terms of design and functionality, as well as it’s going to be cheaper and more fitting for all non-hobby purposes.
To say it another way, if you’re looking to learn how to start a blog for a business purpose then the “.ORG” version of WordPress is absolutely what you need.
Now the surprising part:
In order to work with the “.ORG” version of WordPress, you don’t actually need to go to the WordPress.org website. Instead, you can get WordPress installed on a web server of your choice and on your custom domain name without having to tinker with any source code. 🧙
The actual simplest way of getting a blog launched on WordPress is to ask your web hosting provider to do that for you. You can read about that in the next part of the guide.
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