Top Web Builders for Bloggers
Contents
Top Web Builders for Bloggers
If you have the gift of good blogging, you’ll need the right platform that complements your creativity and makes you look professional. Our detailed blog builder analysis will help you decide what you need most – whether that’s UX, the feature complexity or a more focused social media presence. After signing up for all these blogger sites, here are our main takeaways.
Blog Builder | Score | Top Features | Special Deals | Visit Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
WIX |
|
| Visit Site Wix.com/join | |
Weebly |
|
| Visit Site weebly.com/join | |
Web.com |
|
| Visit Site web.com/join | |
Site123 |
|
| Visit Site site123.com/join | |
| DudaMobile |
|
| Visit Site dudamobile.com/join |
Setting Up Your Blog
Setting up your blog should be an easy step by step process. Some blog builders will give you a tour of all their main features and some will just help you jump into an editor right like Wix
Choose a template that you feel not only looks the part but is also sufficiently clear and clean to get your point across. This of course depends on the main purpose of your blog-whether that’s entertaining, creating a knowledge base or monetizing.
Most builders will have their own templates to offer yet eHost for instance tends to use WordPress as their blog extension. With each step of the process, always have one thing in mind – your target audience.
Front or Back-End Editing
Choosing between drag and drop or back-end oriented coding entirely depends on your skill level and willingness to invest in your blog. You may want to consider spending more time on the content of your blog than adding more bells and whistles. However, if you are a proficient coder you can easily customize and provide depth to your blog.
All the web builders we analyzed have a fluid blog editor that allows for customization of the text, images and various formats. The Weebly blog editor incorporates all of these options.
You should also watch for options like post scheduling in advance, selecting a featured post and further side- bar customization. Wix tends to excel in this department:
SEO & Your Blog
Your blog is one of the pillars for on-site optimization and a huge traffic benefactor. The blog builders we examined had extensive SEO support and resources within their help centers.Read up on how you can leverage your blog towards attracting your targeted audience to your site.
The resources are abundant and it would only take a few hours to make minor yet crucial adjustments to your blog structure. These include doing a keyword research and adding your best ones to your posts, specifically in your h2 titles.
While web builders tend to spread rumors about one another on which is better or worse for SEO, they are all based on similar HTML code that can be fully crawled and indexed by Google.
Hosting + Expansion
If you already have a domain, you can easily connect it to each platform. Most support major domain hosts like GoDaddy or 1&1 and have different interfaces to manage their records. Web.com sets this up for you right from the start, while Weebly and others don’t require it immediately. They have more a freemium approach where they want you to start editing as quickly as possible before you are asked to purchase a plan.
That’s right, if you want to add your domain, chances are you’ll have to pay for the connection service. Note the difference between transferring and connecting your domain. Transferring implies that you give ownership of your domain to the web builder. Connecting means you can keep your original host and simply change a few settings to set it up with your builder.
Features We Like
Let’s highlight a few interesting features for each web and blog builder. Wix has a very efficient and feature-packed blog editor. They also have a neat Gif library to choose from. Schedule posts in advance and also customize the side-bar with lots of different ticker types. We also liked how much you customize each and every detail.
Weebly is similar in the sense that it has similar features of text and image customization yet not as intricate as Wix. However Weebly does offer great community building extensions to manage and moderate all posts. It’s also a lot less buggy.
Web.com supports WordPress blogs and they also guide you through how to set one up which can be a daunting task. They also have in-house analytics tools to measure the kind of traffic you get to your blog which is a huge advantage. With analytics you can evaluate which posts are doing better.
Site 123 is a hybrid between the fully customized drag & drop editor and a back-end editor. You can customize most elements of your site yet the structure of all the fundamental text and images remains rigid.
Duda places an emphasis on mobile sites- given that most traffic is now mobile, this is an added bonus for you blog. Perhaps the most appealing feature is their blog stats. Built specifically for your blog, these stats convey more than simple in-page analytics.
