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Medium and WordPress are two well-known platforms for blogging. For a newbie, it can be hard to choose between these two platforms as they are both popular and easy ways to get your blogs online.
But, these are two fundamentally different platforms. When Medium only requires you to have an account with it for publishing your content, you have to set up a whole website for posting blogs using WordPress.
This article will endeavor to explain to you how Medium and WordPress works, who should go for these platforms, what are its advantages and disadvantages, etc.
So, let’s get on with it.
The below article is a comparison between WordPres.org (self-hosted WordPress) and Medium.
Set Up and Ease of Use
If you are a beginner to blogging, you are probably interested in knowing about the setup and ease of use more than anything else. Let’s see how Medium and WordPress differ when it comes to its set up and use.
Medium
Medium is the easiest platform you could ever find to start blogging. All you need is a working email address to start using it. With your email address, you can sign up for an account and start posting blogs on it. It’s as simple as that.
Medium comes with a minimalistic editor that you can use to reorder your blog content the way you like.
Medium post editorWordPress
Setting up a WordPress blog includes buying a domain name, hosting, customizing themes, installing plugins and much more. Plus people might find the WordPress post editor cluttered and hard to use. Thus WordPress might seem a bit of a difficult option for beginners at first. But once you are past that stage and have gone through the learning curve, you will find it easy to create blogs with WordPress.
WordPress post editorVerdict
For beginners and those who prefer the ease of use, Medium would be the right choice.
Ownership and Control
This would be of concern for those who consider blogging seriously and have future plans for their blog. Both medium and WordPress handle it in a very different way. Here is how.
Medium
Medium is owned by a private company called Medium Corporation. Hence it doesn’t allow you full ownership and control of your blog. You are always bound by their rules and regulations to post content on their platform. You can’t even tell how long Medium is going to be there. It’s all up to the company that owns Medium.
Medium also owns the right to choose whether or not your content is a good fit for their platform. If they find that your content violates their terms and conditions, they can remove them from their platform.
WordPress
WordPress is an open-source platform that offers you full control over your blog. You can publish anything you want and have it stored somewhere else or delete, modify it anytime you want.
Verdict
For utmost ownership and control, WordPress is indeed the right choice.
Features and Flexibility
Even if writing is the primary thing involved in blogging, there are other features that make your blog great to read. Adding illustrations, images, etc., make your blog all the more engaging for your viewers to read. This will only be possible if your chosen platform supports all such things. Let’s see how flexible Medium and WordPress are.
Medium
Medium gives you a straight forward blogging experience. With its minimalistic UI, you can add title, feature image, SEO title and description for your article, but nothing fancy.
WordPress
With a wide pool of plugins and themes, there is no limit to the features and flexibility provided by WordPress. You can either go for their free or paid versions of the plugins and make your blog as unique as possible.
Verdict
WordPress is clearly the most flexible and feature-rich platform for blogging.
Cost
If you are concerned about the cost or are planning to keep it short, you really should take a look at how much these platforms are going to cost you.
Medium
With Medium, you do not have to spend a penny on your blog. It doesn’t require you to pay money for anything. You can simply open an account with Medium and start writing your blog. Medium gives you great power to focus only on your writing.
WordPress
With WordPress, things aren’t exactly the same. You have to spend money to get your blog online. But there isn’t a fixed price, you can fix the money you are going to spend on your blog by being selective about the features and functionalities you want for your blog.
Verdict
If you are looking for a cost-free blogging experience, Medium is what you should go for.
Search Engine Optimization
Writing great articles alone won’t make much difference to your blog. You need to have a great number of audiences to your blog that converts to your blog’s traffic. How will you earn that for your blog? That’s what search engine optimization is for. Both Medium and WordPress allow search engine optimization in it and let’s see to what degree.
Medium
Medium allows you to do a small degree of SEO. You can add title, subtitle and SEO title. Then add an SEO description and tags that add great visibility to your blog. You can also give a beautiful featured image to grab the attention of your readers. But since Medium has a huge number of a built-in audience, minimal search engine optimization will do.
WordPress
For a WordPress blog, SEO is as important as writing itself. Your blog won’t get visitors unless you dedicated your time and effort to the search engine optimization of your blog. But fortunately, you don’t have to do it all yourself. There are many WordPress SEO plugins that can help you do this. Yoast, Rankmath, etc., are some of the popular options for you.
Verdict
WordPress beats Medium in the capability to do better search engine optimization and thus in achieving greater visibility on Google search results.
Monetization
For some blogging would be a hobby, but for some others, it would be a way to make money. It is commonly observed that people start blogging as a hobby and later turn it into their profession itself. So is it WordPress or Medium that provides better monetization options?
Medium
Medium has a partner program that enables you to earn money. But in most cases, it is less than $100 per month. To learn more about medium monetization, you can read the article “How Much Money Can You Make Writing for Medium?”
Besides the partner program, Medium allows you to do first-party promotion and affiliate links with disclosure. You can make use of that too.
WordPress
WordPress is capable of making you rich with the money earned through blogging. There is no limit to what you can earn with WordPress since you have absolute control over your blogging website. The more work you put the more money you get. It offers you different ways to make money through it. You can either sell ads and sponsored content, take part in affiliate marketing or do both.
Verdict
WordPress provides better monetization options.
Conclusion
As a blogging platform, WordPress and Medium have their pros and cons and a whole lot of differences. Thus instead of choosing one, why don’t you choose both?
It is absolutely possible to manage both these platforms together. You can post your WordPress articles on Medium and create a larger audience for your posts from these platforms. But, if you are planning on starting a blog with monetization in mind, it is best to go with WordPress.
