Best blogging sites for beginners
I will cut the chase and give TLDR first
Now carry on if you need more details.
Most beginners get an advice to start with either Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.
Both were amazing choices 10 years ago. In todays internet they are not so great anymore.
Let me explain. Every blogger site looks dated. Utterly unprofessional, uncool, and mostly ugly.
Wordpress can be made to look beautiful but it is not for beginners. It's complex, bloated and very complex to get most basic stuff done. It is good for technical people who need a lot of customization.
If you are a beginner and just getting started and came here by searching best blog site for beginners, trust me you don't need that kind of complexity.
Which is why you you start a blog on Lykhari. On Lykhari, you can have your blog up and running in one minute. No kidding. How cool is that!
If you need more details you may continue reading.
Wordpress is popular choice but bloated and managing it on a custom domain can get expensive. If you are not super technical and need a custom website name, do not choose Wordpress. If you are alright having a blog name like xyz.wordpress.com then it is a decent choice.
Ghost is great but expensive. It costs $11/month to get started. As a beginner you probably don't know if you are going to continue blogging or not. If you decide not to continue or pause blogging, you will still have to bear $11/month to keep the blog up. If you stop paying all your data is gone.
Lykhari is great for beginners and super cheap. It is free to get started and $5/month if you want advanced features. You can host a website, write posts, build an email list and connect custom domain name. The only downside is it doesn't have customization, theming options as other platforms do. It is good for writers and people more interested in blogging than theming, colors, and styling of the blog. In a way it is good for beginners to start a lykhari blog because it keeps you from wasting time on customization. At the end of the day, what matters is text. That is what readers are intersted in and that is what search engines crawl for.
Bear Blog is also another great option which is not expensive. However it looks dorky because a blog made in Bear Blog looks like a website from 90s. It does have all the important feature you need for blogging. It is also free to get started.
Beginners might feel overwhelmed by the idea of starting a blog. Mostly because there are many options out there. Also because most of them choose Wordpress which overwhelms the heck out of beginners. It only gets complicated overtime.
Instead of being writers, a blogger, an author, an essayist, you end up fidgeting around with Wordpress trying to make it work. Recently, I wrote about what you don't need to start a blog and what is that you do need.
You might wonder why I didn't mention Substack and Medium while every other website on internet mentions that. Many beginners go to one of following options. A decade ago it was Wordpress or Blogger. About 5 years ago it was Wordpress or Medium. These days it is Wordpress or Substack.
Do you see that Wordpress is a constant while everything else is replaced. The reason for that is all other platforms are closed platforms. They are built by companies that are built for pleasing the investors instead of the customers. Which is why they disappear. Most recent hype is Substack but here I wrote about why you should not start a Substack blog.
Similarly, Medium and Blogger are also a no go. I have been blogging for more than a decade and have been in tech for more that that. I can easily spot a pattern on what has a chance of working out and what doesn't. When choosing a platform choose an open platform.
I am maker of lykhari.com If you are interested do try. If you have questions hit me up at kashif@lykhari.com