Why Blogger is the best blogging platforms for a startup

As a startup one of the many important things to do is to create a blog so that we can share our journey with the world. To do that, we needed a blogging platform.

Having worked on many projects involving Wordpress and tracking its progress from a blogging platform to a Swiss knife of Web development(CMS). We weren't excited to host a full-fledged site on Wordpress just to have a blog.

There are many positive but many more negative points in having a blog based on a complete CMS like Wordpress in 2020. Some of them are:

• The interface is quite cluttered
• Does many things out of the box. So the software is bloated.
• Maintaining a CMS is quite painful especially when your resources are limited.
• You have one more thing to take care of.

To get rid of those pain points and save ourselves time and money, we wanted something very lean and mean. So the search began. We were looking for a platform which has:

• Clean User Interface
• Fast and easy to maintain.
• Specially designed for blogging
• Doesn't have any bloatware
• Have great SEO
• Preferably free and Open source

Some of the platforms we came across were:

• Flat file CMSes, e.g. HTMLy, Pico, Grav, etc. They had everything to offer from a clean interface to a very small footprint. They do not use any database(one less thing to take care of). Though we liked them quite a lot initially, all our excitement subsided when we came to know that Google App Engine doesn't allow write permissions to the file system.

•  Headless CMSes, Strapi, contentful, etc. Headless CMSes only offer APIs which serve data and we will have to take care of designing the front end. They came close to what we were looking for, but less than an ideal proposition for us.

• Hosted Blogging platforms like Wordpress.com, Blogger, or Medium. They offered most of the features but doesn't sound very professional ( at least that's what we thought of initially)

So I again started looking at Hosted platforms and started going through Blogger settings and customization options. To our luck, we found all the required features in the right proportion in Blogger. To summarize, it has the following features:

• Very good SEO as it is owned by Google itself so something written on Blogger will be picked up very quickly by Google search engine.
• You can use your custom sub-domain like blog.example.com and do a redirect so users can see it on your own domain. (That's professional)
• Already integrated Analytics which helps in tracking your audience.
• Comments, permalinks, good content editor.
• Lots of customization, you can use custom CSS as well
• Free of cost.

I am not saying that all these things can't be achieved with other hosted platforms. It, certainly, can be done, but it does take some of your time and effort to make them work.

So, I would say any startup should look at the hosted platforms as a potential candidate. As they provide you with most of the features with nothing you don't want and that too without the hassles of maintaining a CMS.

If you have any questions in mind about blogging platforms in general, feel free to ask in the comment section below.