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Top 10 Blog Sites to Start a Blog Now! (Free & Paid Options)

Not so long ago, people used to share their thoughts in journals, diaries, and notebooks tucked away in drawers. Maybe you had one too. It was personal, private, and meant just for you.

Fast forward to today, and that habit has taken a digital turn. Instead of pages, we now have screens. Instead of locked diaries, we have blogs. And today, starting a blog isn’t just a trend; it’s one of the easiest ways to share ideas, build a brand, or turn your passion into something bigger.

If you’re here, chances are you’re thinking about starting a blog of your own. Maybe to grow a business, maybe to write about food, travel, or life, or maybe just to finally put your thoughts out there.

But the only problem is that there are too many blog sites to choose from. Free platforms, paid platforms, beginner-friendly ones, and professional tools, it can get confusing fast.

That’s exactly why this guide exists.

Here, we will give you a list of some amazing blog sites that you can use to embark on your blogging adventure. Before that, let’s try to understand what exactly a blog site is!

What is a Blog Site?

A blog site is an online platform where you can share your thoughts, ideas, or knowledge on topics you care about. It can be run by one person or a team, and it lets you publish written content for others to read, just like posting stories, but on your own website. Basically, it’s a web page or website that allows you to publish your own written content.

What makes blogs special is the way they’re written. Blogs are known for their informal or conversational style of writing in conveying information. Kind of like this blog you are reading right now! The topics written can vary from person to person and business to business. It can even include pictures, videos, gifs, and other forms of media.

Now you must be wondering: how is a blog different from a regular website?

A regular website is mostly static. It includes static content such as an “About Us” page, services, contact details, or product descriptions. Once the pages are set up, they don’t change very often.

Well, a blog site, on the other hand, is regularly updated, which could be on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. You’ve to keep putting up new content or a collection of new posts for the visitors to read.

Another key difference is interaction. Blogs invite conversation. Readers can leave comments, ask questions, and share their thoughts directly on your posts. That two-way connection is what turns a simple website into an active, growing blog community.

Now that you have a clearer idea of what blog sites are, we’ve prepared a list of blog sites that you can use to kick-start your blogging journey! So what are you waiting for? Dive right in!

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Read More: 10 Best Free Webpage Builders for Beginners & Small Businesses

Top 10 Blog Sites to Start a Blog Today

1. Wix

Let’s start our list with Wix, an amazing blogging website for small businesses. It has a simple, intuitive design that makes it easy for you to create a new blog within a few minutes! In fact, it even walks you through the entire process step-by-step if you need it. Also, its drag-and-drop editor and Wix integrations with third-party apps help you easily customize your blog.

With Wix, you can add multiple elements to your pages, from multimedia widgets to backgrounds, menus, typography, forms, video boxes, etc. It offers hundreds of templates from which you can choose your favorite one. Wix has an automatic email subscription feature that helps you collect leads right on your website! What’s more? It also has built-in SEO!

Key features

  • Offers an automatic email subscription feature
  • Has an in-built SEO for ranking
  • Supports third-party integrations

Pricing:

  • Free plan available
  • Paid plans start at $17/month

2. WordPress

Next on the list is WordPress, one of the most popular free blogging sites that you can find. It’s so popular that it has a large community of experts who provide tutorials for new bloggers. It’s super simple to use and enables you to start the blog in just a matter of a few minutes!

It comes with pre-designed free themes, templates and powerful wordpress widgets that allow you to choose your preferred look and feel of your blog site. It has a powerful dashboard for maintenance, publishing, and getting an overview of what’s happening to your blog. It supports over 55,000 plugins to enhance your blogging experience, along with providing SEO tools to help you rank in search engines.

You can later host your WordPress with payment so that you can get additional features such as 50GB disk space, better bandwidth, 100MB worth of email storage, and free SSL as well.

Key features

  • Highly reliable and secure blogging site
  • Comes with multiple free pre-designed themes and templates
  • Supports SEO tools and over 55,000 plugins

Plans and pricing

  • WordPress.org is a free tool.
  • WordPress.com has free plans and paid plans that start at $4/month, billed yearly

Also Check: 100+ Blog Post Ideas You Can Start Writing Right Now

3. Squarespace

If you run an e-commerce site and are looking to make money through blogging, then Squarespace is an amazing option for you. It is an all-in-one site builder that helps set up web stores and blogs at the same time, allowing your visitors to buy your products without ever leaving your blog post!

With Squarespace’s drag-and-drop tools, you can easily create stunning sites. You can also use their professionally designed templates, which include grid layouts and 3D scrolling to give your blog a unique look and feel.

It supports Twitter stream, an amazing Squarespace RSS feed, a search bar, and more. What’s more? Squarespace also offers powerful SEO tools to help your content get a higher ranking on search engines.

Key Features

  • Allows blogging with an extension to e-commerce sites
  • Supports live-updating and RSS feed
  • Offers SEO tools

Pricing:

  • Personal website plan starts at $16/month
  • Core plan starts at $23/month

create stunning content with elink.io

4. Medium

Looking for a free and easy-to-use blog to establish your passion for writing? Then, we think Medium is the perfect blog site for you. You don’t have to worry about coding, design, domain, or any other issues while starting out with Medium, because you can pretty much just sign up and start writing!

The great advantage of using Medium is that your articles will be exposed to a wide audience, as it is a platform with over 100 million readers! And since it comes with a set of social networking functions, it allows your readers to comment and like your blog content so that you can see their feedback and suggestions.

You can monetize your blogs with the Medium Partner Program, which lets you earn money when someone reads your content. Medium is also accessible across all devices.

Key features

  • Supports social media integrations
  • Medium Partner Program allows monetization
  • Provides exposure to a vast audience

Pricing:

  • Medium is free to use.

Check This: Best Tools For Blogging to Use Now!

5. Ghost

Ghost- best blogging site

If what you need is a very simple and minimalistic blogging platform, then we recommend you check out Ghost. It is a pretty straightforward blog site with a clean, intuitive user interface that contains zero limits on customizations and social media restrictions. It’s 100% about blogging, and because it is self-hosted, it gives you more control over your site than many other blogging platforms.

With Ghost’s premium plans, you can target readers through newsletters and also monetize your written content. The user-administration features of Ghost are great for teams as they help assign roles and permissions. Its automatic content backup system prevents loss of data.

It has built-in advanced SEO options and a sleek web app dashboard that is powered by JavaScript. Moreover, Ghost provides integrated AMP support, which can help your blog load faster on mobile devices and rank higher in search results.

Key Features

  • Supports a minimalistic user interface
  • Prevents data loss through automatic backups
  • Has built-in advanced SEO tools and integrations

Pricing:

  • Custom domain starts around $15/year

6. Weebly

Weebly- website builder

Here is Weebly, another website builder that comes with an e-commerce integration, which allows you to set up a blog as well as sell your products. It has an easy-to-use drag and drop editor, which you can use to build your webpage and customize it by adding photo galleries, slideshows, and other multimedia elements.

Weebly has limited third-party integrations, which add functionality to your blog and include a social media sharing feature that supports RSS integration to share your content on social networks. Its SEO tools help rank your website on the search engine, while its built-in hosting provider ensures a fast loading time for your website.

What’s more? All Weebly plans come with a free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate!

Key Features:

  • Supports e-commerce integration
  • Allows social media sharing 
  • Provides SEO tools for ranking

Pricing:

  • A limited free plan is available.
  • A custom domain will cost you $10/month

Elink Banner- Template

7. Blogger

Blogger- website builder

Blogger is a blogging service offered by Google, and it is one of the oldest free blog sites you can find! All you need to set up a blog site is to log in using your Google account and follow a few simple guidelines. It requires no technical knowledge, as it has a super-simple user interface that is similar to a Google+ profile and an editor that looks similar to a Word page.

Blogger offers multiple themes, advanced color filtering, and various minimalist widgets, and it is highly reliable and secure. It comes with ad spaces that you can place within your content and monetize by integrating it with Google AdSense. Its analytics feature helps assess your blog’s traffic and see which content is getting the most visits.

Key Features:

  • Integrates with Google AdSense for monetization
  • Offers secure storage with Google
  • Provides analytics to assess blog traffic

Pricing:

  • Blogger is free with a Blogspot subdomain.

Quick Add-on: How To Add A Newsfeed On Blogger Site With Elink?

8. Tumblr

tumblr- website builder

What if you could combine social media and visual content with a blogging platform? Then here we have Tumblr, a free micro-blogging platform with a playful interface that makes it easy to sign up and start blogging.

Just like a regular blog site, Tumblr provides multiple post formats, themes, and design options, but what makes it great is that it allows you to integrate your post with photos, videos, audio files, GIFs, stickers, and many other media files.

Despite not being popular for business purposes, Tumblr lets you display ads, use affiliate links, and integrate your blog with Google Analytics. Because it has a huge community and social network features, it helps your content have a wider reach.

Key features

  • Integrates with social networks
  • Allows re-blogging and sharing
  • Provides password protection

Pricing:

  • Tumblr is free of cost

9. Joomla

Joomla- website builder

Joomla is a powerful content management system that can be used to build any kind of website or blog. It has a flexible interface that is super easy to set up and use. It provides hundreds of templates and multiple extensions to help you add more features to the blog, and also lets you fully customize it.

Joomla provides an old-school editor that looks like Microsoft Word and allows you to pick your favorite font, color, size, emoticons, tables, or background. It is a multilingual website, which means that you can make and publish your blog in various languages.

Key Features

  • Easy to set up a blog and website
  • Offer multiple templates and extensions
  • Supports various languages

Pricing

  • Joomla is free to download

Must Know: The Most Common Mistakes to Avoid When You Start Blogging

10. Substack

Substack- blogging website

Substack is a popular blogging and newsletter platform that was essentially created for writers who want to build a loyal audience without technical hassle. Instead of publishing posts inside a social network, Substack lets you create your own space where readers can subscribe directly to your content via email.

Writing on Substack feels simple and distraction-free. It comes with an easy editor where you can write posts, publish newsletters, and send them straight to your subscribers’ inboxes. This makes Substack a great choice for bloggers, creators, and business owners who want to grow a personal brand or thought-leadership audience.

Substack also helps you understand your readers. You can see how many people open your emails, read your posts, and subscribe over time. Each time you publish, your subscribers are automatically notified via email, so your content doesn’t rely on social media algorithms to get seen.

Key Features

  • Built-in email newsletter publishing
  • Direct reader subscriptions and audience ownership
  • Simple analytics to track opens, reads, and subscribers

Pricing

  • Substack is free to use.
  • You only pay a small fee if you choose to offer paid subscriptions and monetize your content.

Before You Go, Check Out Elink.io: A Webpage Creator for All Types of Websites

When you want to start your own blog or grow your business online, you need a website that is visually appealing and functions great.

But are we all tech-savvy enough to build a web page with just a few clicks? With elink.io, you are! It is the fastest & easiest way to create beautiful content for your website.

Elink.io is the smartest content curation tool that helps you turn links, articles, blogs, videos, and other content into beautiful web pages, without any coding or design skills. It’s built for bloggers, marketers, teams, and creators who want to publish content fast and make it look great.

All you need to do is pick a template, add the links or content you want to share, and elink.io does the rest for you in minutes.

Key Features of elink.io (and Why They Matter)

🔸 Ready-to-use templates (70+ options): elink.io offers over 70 professionally designed templates. This means you never have to worry about layout or design, just choose a template and focus on your content.

🔸 Turn links into stunning web pages: Simply add links to blogs, articles, products, or videos, and elink automatically converts them into clean, well-formatted content blocks on your webpage.

🔸 Easy customization without coding: Elink allows you to customize the look and feel of the web page you are creating by changing fonts, background colors, text colors, and more with minimal effort!

🔸 Built-in SEO settings: elink lets you edit page titles, descriptions, and keywords, helping your content become more search engine-friendly and easier to discover online.

🔸 Content automation tools: elink.io also offers automation features that let you choose content sources and automatically create web pages or updates. This saves time and keeps your site fresh without manual work.

In a nutshell, elink.io is the perfect tool for creating a curated webpage. So, what are you waiting for? Get elink and get your website going!

Final Thoughts

… and that’s a wrap to this blog!

We have given you a list that ranges from basic blogging sites to blogs jam-packed with all kinds of features, suitable for both personal and professional blogging.

Before you go, there’s one more tool worth checking out: elink.io. It’s the smartest content curation tool that helps you turn links, articles, blogs, and content into clean, professional-looking web pages and newsletters in minutes. It’s especially useful if you want to showcase your blog posts, curate content, or create shareable pages without dealing with design or coding.

Now all that’s left is to get started.

Don’t wait for the “perfect” moment; start writing, start sharing, and let your blog grow with you. The blogging world is wide open, and your voice deserves a space in it.

🚀 Build your first blog page in minutes—no coding, no design stress. Try elink.io today.

FAQ’s

Q1. What are the best blog sites for beginners?

For beginners, Wix, WordPress.com, and Medium are great places to start. They offer easy-to-use interfaces, helpful guides, and free plans so you can get blogging without any technical headaches.

Q2. What is the difference between a blog site and a website?

A blog site is regularly updated with posts, usually written in a conversational style, and encourages reader engagement through comments. A website is typically more static, focusing on information about a business or service without frequent updates or interaction.

Q3. Which blog platform is best for writers?

Medium and Ghost are top choices for writers who want a clean, distraction-free space to share content. Both provide great tools for growing an audience and even offer monetization options.

Q4. Which blog sites support custom domains?

Platforms like WordPress.org, Squarespace, Wix, and Ghost allow you to use custom domains, so you can have a professional, branded web address for your blog.

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