Ask IH: What's your blogging platform of choice and why?
I recently made the move from Webflow to WordPress because Webflow isn't currently a content platform for serious bloggers. At least from my experience.
To be fair, I tried Webflow for 4 months and I could no longer put up with it's annoyances. I wrote an article, if you'd like to read my thoughts on it.
I'm curious to know what's your blogging platform of choice and why.
https://www.leija.io/post/webflow-vs-wordpress-just-go-with-wordpress-if-youre-blogging?ref=ih
Also, lot's of Medium vs Wordpress here...
I think the best answer to this is: Some posts are made for Medium & other are made for your own hosted blog.
Save the big "Introducing a Big New Feature" posts for Medium. These can catch on via their network and do really well.
Save those "How to easily do X" posts for your blog so they build up SEO creds.
💯
I'm a developer so I really like Wordpress. It's easy to setup, but also allows me the ability to customize whatever I want if I need to.
In addition to that I've also built a simple blogging package for the Laravel framework. I use this for some SaSS apps built on the framework as I can quickly get the blog setup without any extra work.
I'm with you here! I'm a developer as well and I really enjoy that I have full control of the outcome of the site.
WordPress REST API is so handy. I'm currently running a headless theme. React, NodeJS for my theme.
Wait so you're running wordpress, react and nodejs all together for your website? or am I mistaken here?
That’s right. I am using WordPress in one server to be used as a api endpoint. And I’m using Nodejs and React in another to serve as my theme.
My first impression is it sounds like overkill but it probably isn't that bad haha, is the nodejs to server side render the react?
😂 it’s not too bad.
I’m using NextJS to make my life easier on the theme part. There’s isn’t a bit of extra work but I reap off the benefits of performance. I care about 3G/2G network users. So I want to give them the best user experience.
AppDrag (https://appdrag.com)
Well, I often create websites for clients that want to start off by creating a simple landing page, but then eventually want to move onto blogging, and then e-commerce, and then eventually create client-side pages which require a backend.
Instead of looking for 5 different platforms in order to integrate all the requirements, I looked for one that could handle all of them, and that's where I found AppDrag.
I created the landing page, billed it, then was asked for training on how to blog using the CMS, so I did (and billed some more), then they wanted me to manage their newsletter campaign because their landing-page-generated contact list was growing, so AppDrag had that option too (instead of merging onto mail chimp), with templates and all, and when the time came for e-commerce and the backend, AppDrag had what I needed to do that too.
So all in all, I remained on one platform and did it all!
I use also this CMS for all my projects and it's working really well. I love to use it. I save a lot of time if you compare it with other cms
This looks really cool 😎
I’d love to try it out but they got no free tier or trial version.
Can you add embedded code to their wysiwyg?
Hey Ruben, there is a free version. It won't give you maybe a ton of bandwidth time, but it is definitely enough to get a perfect idea of the plartform.
And yes, you can embed HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery into your page.
Medium.com, the users are already there looking for content, so IMO it's the best place to post content that people actually read.
They also pay you, a single article generated over $1300: https://i.imgur.com/nHcGoxp.png
He, that's pretty good! Cha-ching
Medium.com is a great platform for content and it sure does have a lot of users. Do you care about giving Medium all the SEO cookie points?
Personally, I would rather gain the domain authority points to my own domain. That way people may say, "I had a great experience on leija.io." Rather than have people say, "I had a great experience on Medium.com."
With that said, I'm not against using Medium to help leverage my own domain. Thoughts or opinions?
I used Medium early on and leveraged their Network to get some early traction. Ran that way for a month then switched to WP. I never had good results with building SEO to my app domain (obviously).
The combination of WP & Yoast SEO plugin has been great. Took me a year but now we have about 8k people per month that find us via organic search.
This works well if you know people are searching for info on the problem that you solve.
Wow 😮
That’s impressive! I started since last October but I’ve been very inconsistent. How frequent do you write?
I don't really focus on a specific schedule. Looking back, I get about 2-3 posts out a month.
For every 1 blog post (that you expect to post on Medium for a large audience), I try to write 2-3 SEO targeted pieces which usually turn into how-to articles.
Putting my self in my potential customer's shoes and searching what I think they Google makes coming up with article ideas pretty easy.
Shoot me an email (in profile) if you want to discuss more! Happy to share what I have learned.
I'm slowly building a following and an email list, the exposure I got relatively easily from medium would be hard to replicate on my own(I got featured on the homepage), and I'm pretty sure my WP blog would go down at the peak of traffic after hundreds of twitter shares. Which reminds me, I use a static blog if I need to host it myself, works OK for 90% of cases if it's just one editor.
Hey @rleija great article! There was a solid discussion about a week or two ago (May 19th) about blogging platforms that I think you should check out. Some people went really in depth: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-what-platform-do-you-use-for-your-blog-71f8f6b017
Ps. I'm on Github Pages but switching to Ghost if that helps
Thank you for the compliment 😀
And thanks for linking that recent discussion! I just realized I did comment on that a while ago. Revisiting the discussion to see what people have said.
If you want to have control over your site in terms of adding advertisements or a shopping cart later on down the line then select WordPress. If you just want to share your writing then select Medium.
There aren't really any wrong answers here.
I agree with you. Each viable option out there has it's pros and cons.
We prefer using Wordpress. They have great plugin support and you can find developers easily to help with customization.
I'm using WordPress with the Divi theme. I really recommend it.
Divi is a great tool for non-devs. If you do you have the skill I’d recommend going custom to serve 3G/2G users. That’s about 70% of users.
Where are you stationed?
I'm a dev, and I still use Divi, so that I can delegate it to non-devs, and focus on other things. I would only personally consider a custom theme when I can support it with the in-house talent.
I'm based in London, UK. Why?
I formerly used Wordpress with a premium theme, but my site was hacked via unsecured code in the theme. I have since moved to a static blog using Hugo. I find it faster to write a post in vim then just push it up to the site with rsync. I took a free theme and modified it a little. Here is my blog if your interested in an example of Hugo http://www.tysonmaly.com
I can totally understand you reason to move. WordPress is huge that it gets attacked the most. Keeping up with updates and adding security plugins are a must but is not always 100% bullet proof.
I like your site by the way!
Thanks, I do think Wordpress is a powerful platform for people that need to get up and running fast
Medium or Ghost (but ultimately medium for that audience)
Are you into SEO or having domain authority on Google search?
For my personal usage medium and ghost give me what I need in terms of SEO, I understand that wordpress is good for SEO but i'm just not really a fan, if I was doing something for a product that I needed good SEO and domain authority for i'd use something with better SEO
I prefer to Wix. I also use wordpress, but Wix is better if you love designing. For me, i'm getting hard to design the website layout as I want. But by Wix, I can design it as i want.
If you’re a non-dev person, than I can definitely see the benefits of Wix and Webflow. They make it really easy and fun to build sites 😊
Yes, I'm not :D
I built mine myself using Contentful + GatsbyJS (and Netlify for hosting). 100% free, 100% serverless, and wonderful to work in! Blog here: https://shaunasaservice.com/blog/
I also cross-post onto Medium. It doesn't hurt SEO. In fact, it helps: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/217991468-SEO-and-duplicate-content
That’s really good to know. That link you shared has an important question answered.
“How good is Mediums SEO? Will it perform better than my own blog?”
The answer is, yes medium will perform better and that’s makes sense. Which is why I want to reframe of using it for big pieces or big product posts.
I’m all for leveraging its audience tho!
I’ve been meaning to use GatsbyJS. It looks like a lot of fun.
Ghost for the absolute win. WordPress just annoys me at this stage, used it for years but everything about it always felt slow and cumbersome.
If you're just blogging, I love ghost. It also helps me that it uses handlebars for templating which I've used before.
Hi Chip,
What felt slow about WordPress?
I've heard great things about Ghost, but one thing I'm very fond of is WP WYSIWYG editor. It's just to awesome!
I like having the option to embed interactive tweets, animations, graphs and custom code into there. I feel like it allows bloggers to write more rich content articles. Thoughts or opinions?
But also just building for it, theming and running locally. Always needed lots of stuff installed etc. Honestly I'm probably just biased against it at this stage due to the headaches it would cause with client websites. It's usually great for them as they can manage content, but clients, they always manage to fuck it up. (could also just be that I was a bad freelancer of course).
Ghost has a a form of WYSIWYG, although i'll admit it's not perfect.
As far as embedding tweets etc, Ghost uses markdown, so you can pop any html in there that you like and it'll run, so embedding stuff is easy. It's quite refreshing to use and pretty versatile.
😁 fair enough. I haven't looked much into Ghost. Since I've heard great things about it, I'll have to give it a try to see its pros and cons.
I am mostly a developer and recently have been enjoying https://www.getgutenberg.io/ among all the static site generator tools out there (i have used hugo, jekyll and hakyll in the past).
If you are not into static site generators I have been having great success with wordpress on several projects. In particular I highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin: https://yoast.com/seo-tools/
Before I went with my stack (WP REST API, NodeJS, and ReactJS). I was contemplating of using a static site generator. But I got turned off on the idea of, "what if I have 100+ blog posts". I don't want to maintain so many files. Does Gutenberg handle this in a way that I'm not aware of?
And you're right about Yoast. It's a fantastic plugin that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for technical and blog SEO. But in my case, I went custom on the front end. I have to handle the technical SEO myself.
I have a headless theme running on WP rest api.
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Hi Felipe,
WordPress for the win!
Medium is nice because it has domain authority and a audience. But one reason I don't post as much to there is because I don't want to give them the precious domain authority. That sweet SEO points will be towards Mediums domain and not your own.
Any thoughts on self-hosted vs blogging platform such as medium or even Indie Hackers?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago