Blogging with Medium or WordPress – How to make a choice?
It started when one of my friends (co-founder of QuodeIt), insisted on trying Medium for blogging due to its readability, beautiful UI, better community interaction, great SEO and built-in analytics. And to my surprise it took not more than 30 minutes to shift the entire WordPressblog to Medium. You can really feel the ease of use as you start using Medium. But the real question arises here, should a publisher continue using Medium or stick to WordPress? Lets take a look:
The main aim of publishing content is to reach to the huge number of audience and increase the visitors traffic. Medium fulfills this requirement efficiently. It provides you The Medium Audience which is missing in self hosted blog. But now, lot of people have started using Medium, so it might be harder to get your contents read, recommended or shared.
Again, readability is one of the strongest points of Medium. It has a clean white UI throughout all of its pages with exquisite fonts which can get users more interested in the content on your blog. It has also redefined the traditional way of commenting, liking the story which can surely maintain visitors’ interest in your blog and make them stay for longer on your blog!
Now you can get your own custom domain for medium blog, that too for free! Means you can have that Medium blog on your own domain similar to self hosted WordPress blog. But all of the content on your blog belongs to stored at Medium. Still no need to worry about it, as one click export of all articles will come to your rescue.
On other hand, self hosted WordPress is capable doing almost everything a Medium blog can do and even lot more, if you possess the proper set of themes and plugins. WordPress gives more room for flexibility since there are simply more options to choose from. Meaning more control over the blog and its content. In this regard WordPress is superior product because it’s meant to be a framework, not just a writing platform. But with great flexibility comes the complexity. It will be quite complicated & time consuming to set up WordPress first and then using it compared to Medium.
So, the choice depends on how you want use it.
If you are an author, and the sole motive is reach out to the majority of audience with ease by focusing on content writing rather than focusing on blog utilities. Clearly Medium is the best option!
If you have your own site or product and need a blog for content marketing, you are going to need more customization, more flexibility and more control over the blog and its content, than an author. Then WordPress is the only better option. But no one has stopped you from republishing your posts on Medium and reach out to more number of audience! As content marketing is the main aim, than increasing the traffic at your blog!
Ultimately the choice depends upon the purpose of use!!! But Medium will always be there either as a primary or a secondary way for publishing!!