Using a free blogging platform makes having your own corner of the world wide web easier than you might think. Sure there's the extended character count on Twitter to share your opinion, but these days people have a lot more to say, which is where which is where free blogging platforms come in very handy.
Having your own space online, that's potentially free from the distractions of a billion adverts and countless competing status updates, is an attractive prospect. Blogging is also still a great, organic method of self-promo online, and the best thing is, there are a load of free blogging platforms out there to get you started.
Jul 16, 2019 Wix is a free website builder that can be totally managed from the front-end. The main characteristic of this platform is that it comes with drag-and-drop options, so you don’t have to handle anything in the back-end. The design is very intuitive and modern, which can. Today, there are a number of tools to help people transmit ideas online, and many of them are free. Let’s take a look at the top blog hosting sites you can leverage at no charge. If you’re looking to build a professional-looking, beautifully crafted website on which to launch your blog at no cost, Wix tops our list.
If you want to get started with your free blog, Wix is well worth a look. This drag-and-drop website builder offers over 500 designer-made templates as well as plenty of additional features and apps, along with top-grade hosting so you can rest assured your site will be there when you need it. The WordPress.com free domain is also the only one to not include the name of the builder – for the site below, our domain name was www.lucyskitchennightmares.food.blog (the food.blog is automatically assigned based on the ‘purpose’ you set for your site).
Here you'll find the best the web has to offer, including details to help you decide which free blogging site is right for you. Once you've chosen, head to our how to start a blog post, which will get you up and running in no time. Need to do some basic image editing? Our guide to the best free graphic design software will help you there.
What is a blogging platform?
A blogging platform is a service or application that facilitates the creation of web pages for publishing your content. These content management systems come in the form of website builders like Wix, blogging applications like Wordpress, or simplified blogging software like Tumblr.
In this round-up, we explore the best free blogging platforms for newcomers who want to get a blog up and running.
01. Wix
If you want to get started with your free blog, Wix is well worth a look. This drag-and-drop website builder offers over 500 designer-made templates as well as plenty of additional features and apps, along with top-grade hosting so you can rest assured your site will be there when you need it.
You get 500MB storage and 1GB bandwidth with a free Wix account. If you need more – plus other features like your own domain, and online store and Google Analytics – then take a look at its premium plans.
02. Joomla
Open source software content management system Joomla is a popular choice among the blogging community. Powerful and flexible, Joomla can be used to build any kind of website or blog, with design features including the ability to create your own template and render HTML for objects/arrays of data. It also uses Bootstrap for perfect responsive designs.
Similar to WordPress.org, Joomla is a self-hosted solution, which means you will need a domain name and web hosting to use it (although there is an option to create a site on launch.joomla.org). The Joomla community is much smaller than WordPress community, so there are fewer themes and add-ons than for WordPress. But there are still hundreds of templates to choose from, and extensions to add more features, to fully customise your free blog's design.
03. Yola
Yola limits you a bit if you have grand plans for your blog – you can only have two sites and three web pages with its free plan – but the upside is a healthy 1GB of storage and bandwidth, and your site won't be littered with unsightly third-party ads.
Getting started is easy, with dozens of customisable templates to choose from, a straightforward site builder for putting everything together, flexible layouts and drag-and-drop widgets. And if you have the skills, then you can edit your CSS in order to fine-tune your site's look.
04. Hubpages
Hubpages is a network of sites that enable bloggers (or Hubbers) to share their story with a vast open community. It has an Arts and Design section, which will be a happy home for creative bloggers, and Hubpages majors on its ability to connect its users with a wide audience and earn revenue from ads and affiliates.
05. Contentful
Nobody knows how they're going to want to display their articles a few years down the line, so Contentful provides a way to separate your content from your design. It calls this an 'API-first' approach, so your content is stored on its servers and you can call it into any design or platform as you like. So if you want to build a completely different site in a few years time, it's easy to bring everything in as it's set up to be portable from the start.
06. Jekyll
Jekyll takes your raw text files, which may be written in markdown, if you like, and turns them into a robust static site to host wherever you want. It's the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can host your blog on there for free.
Making your blog with Jekyll avoids the need to work with technicalities such as databases, upgrades and so on, so there are fewer things to go wrong, and you can build something completely from scratch.
07. WordPress
If the folks over at WordPress are to be believed (and they seem suitably trustworthy sorts), the platform now 'powers' almost a third of the internet. It's easy to see why: on WordPress.com, you can rapidly create an entirely free blog, with a reasonable amount of customisation. Alternatively, most web hosts provide WordPress as a free single-click install, and more information on what's possible there can be found at WordPress.org.
Newcomers might find WordPress a touch bewildering initially, but it's the best free option for anyone wanting a great mix of power, customisation and usability. To help you out, we've rounded up the best WordPress tutorials and the best free WordPress themes to get you started.
08. Tumblr
To some extent, Tumblr feels a bit like a halfway house between WordPress and Twitter. It offers more scope than the latter, but tends to favour rather more succinct output than the former. Decent mobile apps make it easy to submit content to a Tumblr blog from anywhere, though, and it's reasonably easy to customise your theme to make it your own.
Tumblr also has a strong social undercurrent, via a following model combined with notes and favourites. Tumblr has also recently announced a controversial ban on adult content, which means that the porn bots that used to be lumbering around on the site should no longer be a problem.
09. Blogger
You'd hope with a name like 'Blogger' that Blogger would be a decent free blogging service. Fortunately, it is. Sign in with your Google ID, and you can have a blog up and running in seconds, which can then be customised with new themes. It is, however, a Google service, so be a touch wary, given how abruptly that company sometimes shuts things down that millions of people were happily using.
10. Medium
Medium is the brainchild of Twitter's founders, and appears to be their attempt to do for 'longreads' what they once did for microblogging. The result is a socially-oriented place that emphasises writing, although within an extremely locked-down set-up. It's a place to blog if you want your words to be taken seriously, and if you favour a polished, streamlined experience. But if you're big on customisation and control, look elsewhere.
11. Svbtle
Describing itself as a 'blogging platform designed to help you think', Svbtle is fairly similar to Medium in approach. Like Medium, it strips everything right back, resulting in a bold, stylish experience that pushes words to the fore. It could easily become your favourite free blogging platform for the act of writing, but it again relies on you also wanting something extremely simple and not caring a jot about customisation.
12. Subrion
Subrion open source CMS is a stand-alone PHP/MySQL-based content management system and framework. Very user-friendly, it comes with a ton of great features including full source editing, per-page permissions, user activity monitoring, to name a few. And its capabilities extend to the needs of bloggers right through to corporate mega portal.
The programme is not encrypted in any way, making it fully customisable, which is handy considering various plugins and templates are available directly from the admin dashboard with a one-click installation process.
13. Weebly
Weebly bills itself more as a website-creation system than something for solely creating a blog. It's based around drag-and-drop components, which enable you to quickly create new pages. However, blogging is also part of the system, and you get access to customisable layouts, a bunch of free themes, and the usual sharing features you'd expect, to spread your words far and wide.
14. Postach.io
This free blogging site claims it's the 'easiest way to blog'. It's from the people behind Evernote, and, naturally, is deeply integrated into their system. Essentially, you just connect a notebook to Postach.io and then tag notes as 'published' to make them public. However, you get some customisation, too, including a bunch of themes, the means to embed content from other sites, Disqus commenting, and the option to instead use Dropbox for storing content.
15. Pen.io
Pen.io's approach is also rather different from its contemporaries. Unusually, it doesn't require a login – instead, you define a URL for a post and set a password. Images can be dragged into place, and you can create multi-page posts using a tag. And that's about it. Really, it's a stretch to call Pen.io a blog in the traditional sense, but it's a decent option for banging out the odd sporadic post, especially if you don't want any personal info stored.
16. SilverStripe
Free Blog Site Builder Software
A small CMS with lots of potential, SmallStripe is a free blogging platform you might not have heard of. But it may well be worth looking into. This open source content management system and flexible framework is, as you would expect, used for creating and maintaining websites and web applications. So why choose this one? Depending on how you like to work, key features include an out of the box web-based administration panel that enables users to make modifications to parts of the website, which includes a WYSIWYG website editor, rich-text editing, quick embedding of videos and a drag-and-drop tree-based navigation structure.
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“This guide is for anyone who wants to create a free website but doesn’t know which website builder to pick.”
They may all be free, but sometimes this comes at a price – join us as we sort the good from the bad.
You might be thinking that a free website builder sounds too good to be true. We thought so too, once upon a time – but there’s actually some real quality out there. The trick is knowing where to find it.
That’s where we come in. We’re here to make your life as easy as possible by giving you the lowdown on the best free website builders – yep, they really are free! – as determined by our own independent research.
We also get people like you to test each website builder and give us their feedback, which we use to rate each builder on factors like ease of use and template design.
Plus, we’re always sure to look at the ‘price’ you pay for your free site in the form of a tradeoff. Whether it’s garish advertising, a dodgy-looking domain name, or restricted storage, we’ll cover each free plan’s ‘cons’ in plenty of detail so you can make an informed decision.
10 Best Free Website Builders
Based on our research, the top free website builders are:
- Wix – Best All-Around Website Builder (read review)
- SITE123 – Great Design Assistance (read review)
- Weebly – Ideal for Small Businesses (read review)
- Strikingly – Made for Simple Websites (read review)
- Jimdo – Small Online Store Builder (read review)
- WordPress.com – Perfect for Blogging (read review)
- IM Creator – Great for White Label Businesses (read review)
- Webnode – Quick and Easy Setup (read review)
- Mozello – Create Simple Multilingual Sites (read review)
- SimpleSite – Great Mobile Editor (read review)
Wix has a very generous free plan, which is super easy to use – it combines creative freedom with tons of features. SITE123 is very beginner-friendly, with a focus on helping you get online. Weebly’s simple, stylish designs and handy tools make it ideal for small businesses.
By the end of this guide, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what makes a good free website builder, which are the best platforms to use and how to choose the right one for you.
We conduct our own research to decide which website builder is best for different purposes. Take our quiz to get a recommendation that’s personalized to your needs.
Further Information
- How do these builders match up side by side? Find out in our Website Builder Comparison Chart.
- Take a look at the Cheapest Website Builders if you want a low-cost builder.
- Do you just want the best for your site? Our review of the 10 Best Website Builders of 2019 gives you the definitive list.
Best All-Around Website Builder
“Wix is by far the best all-round free website builder on the market today.”
| What we like | |
|---|---|
| #1 | Easy to use drag-and-drop functionality |
| #2 | Wide range of templates |
| #3 | Majority of features available on free plan |
| #4 | Ultimate customization |
| What needs improving | |
|---|---|
| #1 | Free plan domain names look like this: https://yourname.wixsite.com/yoursite – they’re not the catchiest! |
| #2 | The free plan sticky ads are very noticeable |
| #3 | Can’t change your theme once your site goes live |
With Wix, you can create and publish your site without spending a cent. You don’t have to upgrade after a certain time – if you’d prefer, you can keep your site free forever. This is what makes Wix’s free plan unusually generous for a website builder, and is the reason why it tops our list!
Wix came out top in our user testing for ease of use. With its selection of more than 500 templates – most of which are free – and a huge choice of tools and elements, like galleries, buttons, and social media icons, Wix makes creating a website easier than ever.
You will find limitations to Wix’s free plan, though. For starters, there’s a banner ad for Wix which stays in place as you scroll down the site. It’s fairly subtle, but a bit intrusive.
You also can’t use a personal domain (aka your personal website address) – your domain will follow the format www.yourname.wixsite.com/yoursite. So instead of www.lucycarneyphotography.com, you’ll be stuck with www.lucycarney5.wixsite.com/lcarneyphotography (you’re restricted to 20 characters for the ‘yoursite’ part of your address).
With the free plan, storage and bandwidth are both capped at just 500MB. This will prevent you from using too many images or videos on your site, as well as potentially limiting how many visitors you can get. You also can’t sell any products through Wix on its free plan.
Premium plans start at $13/month. Based on our research, Wix is the best value for money website builder, so if you do ever decide to upgrade you’re in good hands!
Free Blog Website Builder
For more information on Wix, read the following:
- Wix Review – If you’re looking for more information on Wix then this is a great place to start.
- Wix Pricing Guide – We take a closer look at the costs of each Wix premium plan and what you get for your money.