When blogs first started around 1994, people used to start a blog especially to share their personal views, including their experiences and interests. Even with the popularity of YouTube and social media now, blogging is still alive and working well today. More than 410 million users like to read personal and informative information & seeking help from blogs daily. And more number of publishers are starting blogging as profession. So among the free and premium, most of the users choose free to start. And that is why, today, I am going to discuss the pros, and cons of these free blogging platforms, so it will help professional publishers like you choose the best.
Free blogging platforms —
Blogging is getting quite popular with every passing day. Many of you want to start a working life with blogging.
READ ALSO
Some of the users prefer starting with free blogging platforms like Google BlogSpot whereas some people like to start with a professional self-hosted WordPress blog.
It is said that choosing a good blogging platform is the most important step for starting a blogging career and reaching the targetted audience. This is the reason I thought of posting this page to help you all for selecting the best blogging platform.
{tocify} $title={Table of Contents}
Is it good to use free blogging platforms?
The first question that comes to anyone’s mind is if you can start a blog from scratch for free then why pay for it? Well, the answer is simple. Most of the free blogging sites have drawbacks in terms of bandwidth and limitations with lack of customization options; that make them unsuitable for professional blogging.
Most of the time it is recommended to avoid free blogging platforms if you are seriously looking to be a professional blogger. Self-Hosted WordPress is the best option for professional bloggers since nowadays you will get the best affordable web hosting services and discounts.
Free blogging platforms don’t have the pro features like their premium version. But still, if you wanted to start a blog just to share your knowledge, expertise, skills, reviews, and showcase your writing then it is advisable to go for the free blogging platform.
Don’t worry, you can still make money with free blogging platforms, and it might work and fulfill your purpose smartly.
Free blogging platforms are the most suitable sites for beginners who are not sure about being successful professional bloggers and just like to try blogging. But before checking the advantages and disadvantages of free blogging sites, check out the limits of free blogging platforms.
The limitations of free blogging platforms
- Having less number of unique (custom) domain names
- No control panel
- Less storage space allowed
- Blog import limit
- Limited bandwidth
- Limited widgets/plugins
- Insufficient eCommerce features
- Can use limited labels
- Limited marketing options
- No support for PHP/MySQL
- Can not remove advertisements
- Limitations on using media (audio/video)
- Limited number of authors allowed.
- No custom permalink structure
- Lack of security features
- You can not configure the server side
You may also like to know; Blogger vs. WordPress | Full Comparison
Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Blogging Platforms
Below are the advantages and disadvantages of free blogging platforms in general.
Pros of free blogging platforms:
- The biggest advantage of a free blog is that you don’t need to worry about investing money in your blog. Start a blog with zero investment. You also need not worry about variable and recurring costs and fees like premium users always tend to pay per month.
- If you are a free user; you’re only required to pay the cost of a commercial domain. Else the hosting is free (like BlogSpot).
- The total blog revenue per month will be yours and goes to your bank account. Total profit goes to your pocket only.
- Popular blogging platforms like BlogSpot don’t put any restrictions on using the bandwidth and other resources required to run your blog.
- You are free to use bandwidth as you required for your blog, so you do not have to bother with driving more traffic which eventually slows down the loading of your blog.
- You will get some options to manage your web security for your blog.
- The blogging platform has their own website-building frameworks, you don’t have to have web development skills and knowledge for building your blog or website.
- With the use of free blog templates, you can apply your own design.
- Blogging platforms like BlogSpot, enable you to make an attractive & unique website. It provides access to the HTML of the site, so you can customize your blog template as you want.
- Some of the blogging platforms have their own community that will help you gain more referral traffic.
- Some of the advanced users from free blogging communities provide SEO-friendly blogging themes that will help to improve your search rankings.
Disadvantages of Free Blogging Platforms
Cons of free blogging platforms:
- The biggest disadvantage for most of the free blogging platform is, you are not allowed to use Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, or their ad network for monetization unless you want to upgrade to their premium plan. (Except BlogSpot)
- With limited customization options, you can’t do more advanced tweaking with design, JavaScript, ad codes, themes, and more.
- With less design options, your blog design simply looks poor. If you want your blog to be taken seriously by your readers, you require to have a professional domain name with a premium design that shows your ideas and must relate to the niche of your blog.
- When you host your blog on free blogging platforms, you don’t actually own it. You are not the owner of your own blog who has full control to manage all your content. You are like the administrator or author of your blog. That means, in some situation if you unknowingly break the rules, or violates the terms and conditions, your page or blog will be deleted without warning.
- URL is most important for SEO, and with free blogging platforms, you don’t have control to edit your own unique URL as you want.
- Most free blogging platforms do not provide many essential plugins that can improve the functionality of your site. No customization, no custom URLs, less number of widgets, all drive limited capabilities.
- The free subdomain (i.e. yourname.blogspot.com) you got and its hosting is added to the server of their blogging platform.
- With free blogging platform, you need to invest too much of your time and work to make all things run smoothly.
- Because of no custom permalink structure (URL) & lack of SEO, most of the time the sites hosted on free blogging platforms usually do not rank high on search engine result pages.
- As it’s free, more number of spammers use it, so no more trust is bulit for these kinds of free sites, so it causes less readability.
- It has less capability to expand blog reputation greatly if you expected a larger, more comprehensive site performance.
- With less number of followers, if you are looking for growing your business image or building your own brand in public you will be disappointed.
- With all free blogging platforms, you can not build eCommerce website.
- Free blogging platforms are not a good option when you are choosing professional blogging, making a business blog, and looking for making money online to gain cash from your blog.