When it comes to choosing the best blogging platform, you feel sunk in the ocean of so many popular options. The fact is, every one of us has heard about various available options but the problem is not about availability, it’s about choosing the best one. 

The blogging platforms can be defined as, “a website builder to create a presence for your brand or online business in a simple and fast way”. By integrating domain registration, hosting, and web design into one framework, these tools make site management easier.

Today, here in this article, we are going to discuss about finding the best blogging platform for 2021. So if you are facing any kind of difficulty in choosing the platforms and are confused about the long lists of the builders on other sites, you should read this article for superb guidance. We have not only gathered the basic features but have also discussed the pricing plans. 

WordPress – Best Blogging Platform

Well, now we are going to discuss the world’s largest platform that is second to none. It is currently hosting more than 75 billion websites and has become the most popular CMS throughout the world. So we can confidently say that it is the best blogging platform that is highly trusted and relied upon.

According to an estimate, more than 40% of the businesses rely directly on WordPress for the creation and building of the websites. It allows you to customize your website in various ways. Moreover, you can also create the desired website by buying the premium plugins for your specific needs. 

Here are some of the notable features of this platform that can turn out to be the best blogging platform according to your unique needs. 

Features

  • With this platform, you can create a website in almost any niche of the world. So no matter what is the topic or purpose of your website and how many unique customization options you need, you can easily proceed with WordPress and get the relevant plugins. 
  • It has built-in features such as basic SEO tools and social media sharing options. 
  • The customer support is also very responsive and instantly provides the solution to all the problems that you may face while using this platform. 
  • Moreover, you can also get access to the site analytics using the built-in features.
  • The interface of this website is easy to use and you can see all the relevant options easily on the dashboard. 

However, keep in mind that you have to pay for the separate hosting when you create the website using the WordPress website builder. WordPress itself recommends the purchase of hosting from Bluehost. 

Pricing

The pricing greatly varies depending on which kind of website you want to create using this platform. For example, if you want to create a dropshipping store, you will have to pay as much as $45 as the monthly fees. On the other hand, if you have created only a simple website or blog, you can easily choose to pay $5 per month. However, the most commonly used plan is the $8 per month that most of the users choose. 

Wix

With over 100 million users, Wix is the most popular website builder in the market. They have more than 500 ready-to-use templates to help you design a website in any industry. These ready-made templates are mobile-friendly and come with a range of 100 fonts (or you can upload your own). With scroll effects and advanced designing features such as animation and video backgrounds, their designs are very lovely to use anywhere.

It is emerging as the most important and crucial website creation platform that is serving as the strong competitor of WordPress and Weebly. 

Features

Wix is the most user-friendly website building tool available. With no coding experience, you can almost absolutely customize the look and feel of your site according to your desires. Wix is the best option for small businesses, as they also have Artificial design Intelligence – which first reads your site and then provides the best suitable options.

It allows you to create a perfect custom website with everything you need such as detailed contact forms, images, themes, layouts, and all that stuff.

If you are a small business owner and are in search of a premium tool that can help you in the easy website creation and building, Wix should be your number one choice. 

Pricing:

The basic plan of this website starts from $20 as a monthly payment, however, you can choose to pay higher if you want to proceed with the higher plans. This is affordable for most of the people who need a full-fledged website at low rates. 

Zyro

Zyro is known in the market for its speed and easy-to-use simple designs. It is a website designer dedicated to assisting small businesses in telling their specific stories online. You can quickly and easily build a business website with Zyro because it doesn’t need any coding. Your site loads easily and looks amazing on all screens; all because of its light framework.

With ready-to-use design templates, AI-driven text, a brilliant drag-and-drop grid tool, mobile-readiness, and over one million stock images to choose from, Zyro lets you develop your online business. One of their best features is an AI content generator – which generates content according to needs.

Features:

  • This website has a complete set of SEO tools built-in tools that will help you to rank better in the search engine results and gain more and more organic traffic that will directly land on your site. 
  • With this platform, you can create any number of Custom domains as add-on domains. Moreover, it also provides you with the SSL certificate that ensures the safety of the personal information of the clients that make purchases or input their sensitive information on the contact forms. 
  •  It also works as the graphic designing platform as it has a built-in logo and slogan generator powered by AI.
  • Email and live chat customer service available;  24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So whenever you encounter any kind of problem, you can easily contact the live chat and get the solution right away. Many other platforms have only limited customer support services that usually answer within 24 hours and you cannot expect instant answers from them. 
  • Heatmaps powered by artificial intelligence to boost website conversions and see viewer behavior. It also serves as the analytical tool that gives you insight about the people including the potential customers who land on your site and may or may not make the purchase.
  •  The Website templates that you get with this platform are100%  mobile-friendly and load easily. It not only makes the speed of your site fast but also enables you to rank better. Keep in mind that the websites that have a loading speed of 0.1 seconds usually do not get ranked on the search engines. 

Pricing:

They offer three plans which include:

  1. The first plan is the Free Plan that doesn’t offer a custom domain name but it does offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, an SSL certificate, 500MB of bandwidth, and 500MB of storage.
  2. If you want to access a lot of features at affordable rates,m the best option for you is to choose the Basic Plan($1.99/mo) – In this plan, you can connect your own domain name with the website, increase bandwidth, and storage, and get extra features including ad removal and integrations with Google Tag Manager. Moreover, you can get access to detailed analytical knowledge using Google Analytics, and Facebook pixels. At only 1.99 per month, it seems almost free to pay for the “Basic” plan.

What is the average cost of building a blog?

The answer to this question varies depending on the choice of your plan as well as the features you need. However, to give you a rough idea, here it is worth mentioning that most of the website builders charge monthly fees that fluctuate from $3 to $50 per month. The charges can be affordable for you if you already have bought the custom domain and only need to integrate your website with it. 

Should I prefer Wordpres over Wix or which one is the best blogging platform?

This kind of comparison is not suitable especially when you know that every platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, when you proceed with Wix, you do not have to worry about the hosting, as the website creation covers both website building as well as hosting. On the other hand, WordPress is the platform where you will need to opt for the separate hosting that you can purchase from the WordPress-recommended hosting sites such as Bluehost. 

Some people consider this above-mentioned factor as the plus point while others regard it as the negative point. 

How much minimum cost will I have to pay for the website?

As discussed earlier, the website costs vary from $3 to $50 and it depends on the builder you are choosing or the features that you want to add. Usually, the domain costs you about $10 per year and you only have to pay the yearly fee for the domain name. Thus, if we only consider the hosting and the charges other than a domain name, we can expect that the monthly charges for the website will not be more than $10. For example, if you want to proceed with a site like Weebly, you will be charged only $6.83 per month. 

I had once heard about the Google website builder. Does it really exist? If yes, why are people not actively going for it?

Google indeed has its own website builder and some individuals, as well as small business owners, choose it. It is a very limited option that allows you to create a single-page website without any kind of custom tools, SEO tools, themes, and any other customizable settings. In other words, it is just like a formality and you cannot seek out any practical help using this platform. 

However, if you want a quick solution to ensure your online presence, you can proceed with this option. It is easily accessible over all kinds of devices including mobile phones as well as other desktops and laptops.

Is it possible to create a blog for free? Without paying even a single penny?

It is very easy to create a free blog with a website builder like Blogger. However, with a free website you will not be able to access the premium tools and various other key features. For example, blogger and Wix allow you to create a free website but you cannot choose the custom domain name and must have to mention the name of the builder in your website name. 

We recommend you choose the “dot com” domain due to universality and accessibility. Choosing a paid plan is necessary if you are serious about the creation of the website and want to promote it anyway. 

Now you have read about the most popular blogging platforms and also about the basics of how to find the best blogging platform, now it has been made easier to choose the perfect option.