Blogging is exciting, creative, and holds endless potential both financially and professionally. But whether you’ll enjoy the process and can fulfill that potential depends heavily on the platform you choose to build your blog.
You’ll find lists online that dump dozens of platforms in front of you, leaving you more confused than ever. Instead of creating yet another one of those, we thought we’d show you what to look for in a blogging platform, and recommend you our tried and true favorite.
7 things to look for in a blogging platform
If you want blogging to be a smooth, fun experience, make sure that the platform you use to create your blog checks out all the boxes. Because no matter how many extra shiny features they have —if the foundation is complex and frustrating, you’ll have a much harder and less enjoyable time with blogging.
1. Layouts & customization
First, your blogging platform should have multiple templates and layout options to choose from, making the initial blog setup quick and easy. This goes out for the overall website or homepage layout, as well as the blog itself.
Setting up your starter website and blog to add your posts to shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes. So if you’ve been trying to figure out how to add pages, place your blog, and other elements for more than that… Maybe it’s not the right tool for you.
You should also be able to easily customize that basic site after the essentials are in place. That means setting fonts and colors to match your brand, sprucing up your images with cropping them to shapes or adding them to mockups, and more.
So look for a blogging platform with global design options. With that, you can change the look of your whole site with just a few clicks —you won’t have to go through each element if you changed your mind.
2. All the blogging essentials
Having published articles technically makes a website a blog but there are a few other essential things that make one a blog you love to both create and read.
On the creator side, things like being able to schedule or backdate your posts, will make your life much easier. That means you can batch create content if you need to, have it all ready to go, and you won’t have to worry about it.
On the reader side, blog posts being sorted into categories will help finding the content you’re looking for easier, while navigation options leading to next, previous, or related articles will make catching up on your favorite content that much more convenient.
3. Easy in-line editing
Have you ever tried a CMS (content management system, or basically a fancy name for a blogging platform) where you edited everything in the backend view and had to keep checking how it’ll actually look like on the front end?
WordPress is the most famous for causing people frustration with that but definitely not the only one.
By choosing a tool that has easy in-line editing, often also called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), you’ll save yourself loads of time and annoyance.
You’ll always know how long a paragraph will feel, where the text will break, and whether that photo you added will look good with the rest of the page or not.
4. Compatibility with your workflow
Having that in-line editing experience is essential, but your platform should also fit your blogging workflow. Whether you like to write right in the editor or paste it from somewhere else, it should never be a hassle.
Your tool should keep the formatting of the text you paste (think headings, italics, links, and more) and make it easy to add in all the extras (like images or video embeds) wherever you want after.
5. Responsivity aka looking good on every device
These days people browse and search on their phones just as much if not more than on their computers. With that, there’s good chance they’ll end up checking your blog from their phone too, so you need to be prepared.
You’ll need a blogging platform that makes your site automatically responsive. Sadly, that’s still not true for all platforms: you often still have to keep switching between desktop, tablet, and mobile views, adjusting sizes and paddings to make sure it doesn’t fall apart.
To save yourself time and guarantee a professional-looking result, make sure that the tool you choose does this for you automatically.
6. Being good for SEO
Speaking of people searching, making sure they find your site while they do that should be high on your priority list as a blogger.
You can do that through creating unique, high-quality content, and optimizing your site and blog posts for search engines —that’s what we call SEO.
The best blogging platforms should be suitable for that, meaning…
- They should allow you to customize your pages’ meta data (titles and descriptions)
- Text formatting options need to be available for better site structuring
- You need to be able to set alt texts for all media —both for SEO and accessibility
- Your posts and pages should load quickly, without additional, bulky code slowing it down
- The overall UX (user experience) of your site should be on point
- Your blog should be optimized for all devices and screen sizes
7. Little to no maintenance
Apart from having a terrible backend-frontend experience, WordPress is also famous for its need for constant maintenance. You need to always update your themes and plugins and be on the lookout for security breaches popping up all the time.
To save yourself the trouble, choose a blogging platform that requires little to no maintenance on your end, when it comes to the technicalities. You shouldn’t have to worry about your site breaking randomly or somebody attacking or hacking your account.
So while plugins and add-on widgets can add a variety of functionalities, try to choose a website builder that does the job without those too.
The best blogging platform: our recommendation
Not to overwhelm you with options, let us introduce only our tried and true recommendation for a blogging platform: Copyfolio. ✨
Copyfolio: it checks all the boxes
Copyfolio is the best blogging platform in our books, as it checks all the boxes:
✔️ Has multiple website templates and blog layouts you can choose from
✔️ Makes designing quick and easy with global palettes and presets
✔️ Has all the blogging features you need: scheduling, backdating, categories, blog post navigation, and more
✔️ Has a super intuitive, in-line editor that matches your blogging workflow flawlessly
✔️ Gives you a site that’s automatically responsible and looks good on every device
✔️ Optimizes all your media and has no unnecessary, bulky code, so your blog loads quickly
✔️ Gives you all the control you need to optimize for SEO
✔️ Needs no maintenance from you with the team taking care of all updates under the hood
And while it might not be the most feature-stuffed blogging tool...
Copyfolio is the best blogging platform for you if you’re looking for an easy and intuitive editor with a reliable foundation to create a gorgeous, mobile-friendly blog that complements your personal brand and boosts your online presence.
How to create a blog with Copyfolio
1. Setup your starter site
Creating a blog with Copyfolio starts with signing up. Once you entered your email and name, you’ll have to choose 3 things:
- Your profession, so we can give you personalized content ideas
- The goal of your site —make sure blogging is included, and
- A website template that determines the initial vibe and structure of your site
You can change all these later on, we just need this at the beginning to generate a starter site for you. It’ll have 3 pages filled with content to give you ideas on what to write and where.
If blogging was included in your site goals, you’ll already find a blog section somewhere, so go and locate that.
2. Explore the blog section and editor
Copyfolio doesn’t have a separate backend: everything happens in-line. All big things happen in the blog section. That’s where you add and manage categories and blog posts, and set the details and layout of how they appear.
You get to the blog post editor by clicking on a post’s thumbnail. Here you can build your post from blocks: you’ll find everything from simple text to image cards, galleries, social media icons, and more.
…you can easily copy and paste it —then add any visuals or extras after any paragraph. Want to reorder things? Drag and drop them into place easily.
3. Publish, schedule, or backdate finished posts
Every blog post you add is a draft at first. It means that only you can see it and you’ll have to publish it to make it visible to others. For that you have two options: you can publish it to go live immediately —or schedule it to go out later.
This latter is great if you want to batch-create content and post consistently. But if posts are already out and you want to reorganize their dates to make your posting look more on schedule, you can do that too.
Just click on the date of the blog post in the editor and choose the new date you want to set for the post.
Changed your mind about it being public at all? Click the “Published blog post” label, and you can set it back to draft if you want.
4. Optimize your blog posts and website for SEO
Blogs typically get most of their traffic from search engines, so it’s important to optimize yours for that.
While the first and most important step is creating unique and valuable content, there are a few technical details that also come into play.
Some, like fast-loading pages and looking good on all devices, Copyfolio takes care of. Others, like filling out alt texts, customizing meta data, or getting a custom domain, you can do yourself very easily. Here’s how.
Alt text: click on your image twice, and switch to the “Alt text” tab. Here you can write what’s needed: a line or two describing the images, including a keyword or two if it fits naturally.
Meta data: you’ll find the SEO settings either by opening the Settings panel from the top of the editor, or by clicking the cog icon that appears on each blog post. There you can customize the meta title, description, and URL slug for each page, and upload a custom preview image too if you’d like.
Custom domain: open the Settings panel, and click domains. There you can either connect a domain you already own by following the instructions or easily buy one with just a few clicks. It comes with an SSL certificate to ensure a secure connection and will automatically get connected to your site.
+1: Customize the rest of your site
While the actual blog is the star of the show, what surrounds it and how it looks also matters. So if you can, take some time to customize it to match your personal brand and the rest of your online presence.
Choose fonts and a color palette that suits your visual branding, make the top of your homepage compelling with a new tagline and photo, and fill your about page to sate your readers’ (and search engines’) curiosity.
If all this sounds right up your alley, then click here and take Copyfolio for a spin for free.
