Are you interested in starting a blog and sharing your thoughts with the world? We’ve compiled a list of ten excellent sites where you can create a blog at no cost.Whether you’re looking to share personal updates with your loved ones or aiming to reach a wider audience with your blog, these platforms can cater to your needs.
1. Wix (www.wix.com)
Wix is a free tool for building websites and blogs, which you can manage entirely from the front-end. It offers a 100% free plan that allows you to start a blog under Wix’s subdomain, and it provides user-friendly drag-and-drop tools for blog creation.
Every Wix plan includes website hosting, so you don’t need to look elsewhere for this service. You can focus on organizing your layouts, choosing a template, and writing content. Wix offers a variety of free and premium themes and templates for different purposes, including blogging.
The platform’s design is intuitive and modern, making it suitable for both beginners and advanced users.To start a blog on Wix, sign up and choose between two options: let Wix ADI create a site for you based on a questionnaire, or build your blog yourself. If you choose the latter, you’ll select a template and arrange the layouts using the Wix editor.
You can then find a template you like and start customizing everything on the front-end in a live preview mode.You can add various elements to your pages, such as multimedia widgets, backgrounds, menus, typography, forms, video boxes, and more. Once you’re satisfied with your site, click ‘Publish’ to start sharing your stories. You can return at any time to edit the content blocks after publishing.
2. Wordpress (www.wordpress.org)
WordPress is a great option for those who want to start a blog for free. It’s an open-source platform that provides a vast array of customizable features. With thousands of free themes and plugins to choose from, you can easily create a unique and professional-looking blog without needing any coding skills. Plus, there’s an active community ready to provide help and advice.While WordPress itself doesn’t cost anything, you’ll need to sign up for a web hosting account to make your site available on the internet.
These accounts are typically not free. This service stores your site’s files and makes them accessible to online visitors. It’s an essential step in the process of creating your site on WordPress and sharing it with the world.
Here are some additional reasons why WordPress stands out among the best free blogging platforms available:
- It’s open-source, which means a global community contributes to its continuous development and security.
- WordPress provides ultimate customization, enabling you to tailor your site to meet your specific needs.
- With a total of 11,700 free and premium themes, you can create a professional-looking site, regardless of your design skills.
- The official repository contains 59,500 plugins, allowing you to add almost any functionality to your site.
- WordPress is SEO-friendly, which can help your site achieve higher rankings in search results.
- It’s suitable for all kinds of sites, from blogs and ecommerce stores to portfolios and business sites.
3. LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)
LinkedIn might not be the first platform that comes to mind when you think of free blogging sites, but it’s worth considering!
There are two main reasons for this: its user-friendly tools and its existing audience.LinkedIn’s user base consists of highly focused users, professionals, and business owners. It’s reported that over 60 million businesses are active on LinkedIn. Moreover, data shows that 40% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as one of their primary sources for leads.
In essence, LinkedIn serves as a platform where you can gain exposure, making it one of the best free blogging sites on the web.From a technical standpoint, publishing on LinkedIn is straightforward. Simply go to your LinkedIn feed and use the “Start a post” widget at the top of the page. To turn your status into a full post, click on “Write an article on LinkedIn” to open the full-screen editing window.
Here, you’ll find all the familiar editing tools for text formatting, adding images, and more.
4. Weebly (www.weebly.com)
Weebly is a website builder that you can use not only for blogging but also for selling products or showcasing your portfolio. It’s similar to Wix in that it offers a WYSIWYG editor with drag-and-drop elements. This means you can easily add and customize elements like buttons, photo galleries, slideshows, and other multimedia elements.
Weebly offers features like sidebars, media boxes, forms, ad spaces, social media icons, and newsletter subscriptions. It also includes built-in analytics and allows you to use your own custom domain (which comes at a cost).With the free plan, you get five custom pages, a Weebly subdomain, 500MB of storage, and ad spaces.
5. Medium (www.medium.com)
Medium is a versatile platform that covers a wide range of topics and allows anyone with an account to write. Unlike many other free blogging sites, a significant advantage of Medium is that your articles can reach a broad audience, as the platform attracts around 150 million readers per month, a number that continues to grow each year.It’s incredibly easy to use – you essentially just sign up and start writing. However, a drawback is that all your content resides on Medium. In other words, you’re not creating your own distinct “space” as you would with WordPress.
6. Ghost (www.ghost.org)
Ghost is another blogging platform similar to WordPress. While you can download the Ghost software for free, you’ll need a paid hosting service. DigitalOcean is a cost-effective service that supports Ghost and offers a range of useful features to get you started.However, installing Ghost isn’t as straightforward as WordPress, and you may need to do some server work depending on the host you choose for your blog.
Once your website is set up, creating a post in Ghost is easy. The editor is simple and minimalist, offering a live preview of your text on the right side of the screen. The front-end has a Medium-like feel, which is appealing. There’s also a sidebar near the editor screen where you can adjust your settings according to your preferences.
7. (Blogger (www.blogger.com)
Blogger is one of the longest-running free blog sites, although its popularity has declined in recent years.It’s a good option for personal blogs, but it may not be the best choice for professional use. It operates like other hosted platforms: you need to create an account to use it. Once you’ve created an account (which is a simple process), you can select one of the default themes and start writing. The platform’s interface resembles a Google+ profile, and the editor is similar to a Word document.
Blogger offers a variety of themes, each with different skins, advanced color filtering, and minimalist gadgets (also known as widgets). However, it doesn’t offer any advanced design customization. In general, Blogger prioritizes simplicity in appearance, allowing you to focus more on your writing than on intricate design. A notable feature of this site is that it includes ad spaces that you can incorporate into your content.
8. Tumblr (www.tumblr.com)
Tumblr is one of the original free blogging platforms on the web. It’s a bit more ‘gentle’ compared to others on the list. Unlike most platforms that are designed for publishing, Tumblr is more geared towards multimedia or social media-like content. Its interface is playful and easy to use. You can simply sign up and start posting.Like any standard blogging platform, it offers multiple post formats for various types of content. However, Tumblr is primarily for personal use and may not be the best solution for business-oriented plans. It’s simple, provides basic customization options, and has more of a social media feel.
Even though it’s not designed for business use, Tumblr allows you to display ads on your page, use affiliate links, and integrate your blog with Google Analytics.
9. Joomla (www.joomla.org)
Joomla is a blogging platform that’s similar to WordPress.org, but it might not be the first one you think of when looking at free blog sites. Like WordPress, Joomla is free software, but it requires hosting and a domain. We recommend Bluehost for this, as it’s both affordable and reliable, and it includes a free domain.
Joomla has a flexible interface that can be used not just for blogs, but also for more complex websites. You can choose from a variety of templates and extensions to add custom functionality to your site.In terms of ease of use, Joomla offers an old-school editor that resembles Microsoft Word. It lets you choose the font, color, size, emoticons, tables, or background. The tools in the menu give you the feeling of working in a Word document.
The Joomla editor uses tabs. The first tab is the classic text window. You then switch tabs to select the post categories, tags, date, meta description, keywords, and so on.
10. Jimdo (www.jimdo.com)
As you would expect, Jimdo is a tool you can use to build a blog for free. The way you make your site is by giving Jimdo some quick pointers about what you’d like to build and what the blog should look like. With these answers, Jimdo will create your blog automatically based on them.On the free plan, Jimdo lets you publish your blog under its own subdomain (.jimdosite.com). If you’d like a custom web address, you’ll need to upgrade.What’s unique about Jimdo is that it gives you more of a “page builder” feel. The main difference is that you create your blog posts directly within your website’s main customization page, and not in a separate editor like you might with other blogging platforms. To edit content, you click on a given content box on the live site and then edit whatever you think needs work. You can do all this without having to go to a different page. You can even edit your site’s footer and logo in this way.
You’ll find even more options to tweak your blog post on the left side of the Jimdo interface. There, you can add things like the post’s date, title, category, whether it’s published or just a draft, a summary, and a preview image. Basically, your article is built from many individual pieces that you can edit one by one. These include things like text, pictures, and buttons, and you can decide what order they go in.
