WordPress wins for 95% of blogs. Ghost wins for $9/month newsletter-style writers. We rarely pick anything else and explain why below.
"Best CMS for a blog" is the most over-answered question in agency content. Most ranking lists are affiliate roundups of 12 platforms with shallow pros and cons.
Our short answer: WordPress for 95% of blogs, including news sites, multi-author publications, niche editorial sites, B2B blogs that need to integrate with HubSpot or Marketo, and personal authority blogs that want to scale to a paid product.
We pick Ghost for a writer who wants a clean newsletter-and-blog setup with built-in subscriptions and no plugin fuss: under 100 posts, no need for custom post types, willing to host on Ghost Pro at $9-50/month. We do not ship Ghost projects ourselves but recommend it freely when it is the right fit.
We rarely use Drupal, Magento, or OpenCart for blog-only projects. Drupal is for sites where the blog is one section of a much larger content architecture. Magento and OpenCart blogs exist only as companions to the main shop.
The “too many plugins” framing is wrong. We audited 200 WordPress sites that came to us for performance work over the last two years, and the slowest sites in the dataset did not always have the most plugins. The fastest site we cleaned up had 38 active plugins. The slowest had 19. Plugin bloat is […]
Compare WordPress vs Wix on pricing, design flexibility, SEO, ecommerce, and ownership. Discover why WordPress beats Wix for serious websites — and how to migrate from Wix to WordPress without losing traffic.
The comparison every WP developer asks: Rank Math or Yoast? Real review from 50+ production sites, schema, sitemap submission, Pro vs Free.
A complete blog on WordPress, ready to launch. Theme, RankMath, caching, analytics, and email signup, all preconfigured.
WordPress runs 43% of the web. There is a reason for that, and it is not marketing. The platform got the editor right, kept the plugin ecosystem open, and stayed cheap to host. For most business websites, those three things settle the question of which CMS to use. Below is what actually matters when you […]
WordPress was built as a blogging platform and 22 years later still powers more blogs than any other CMS. The editor UX, the plugin ecosystem (RankMath for SEO, Newspack for paywalls, MailPoet for newsletters), the hosting story (Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable), and the developer talent pool combine into something nothing else matches for a serious blog.
The detailed take is in WordPress for blogs: pricing, themes we use, plugin shortlist, and the 7-day launch path.
If your blog is a single-author newsletter and you will never want to add a product, courses, podcast hosting, or membership tiers, Ghost or Substack is lighter. Ghost gives you a real CMS and a $9 starting plan. Substack gives you zero ownership of your URL but the easiest growth distribution. WordPress wins as soon as you have any plan to expand beyond just blog posts.
Self-hosted WordPress.org for anything you take seriously. WordPress.com's free and starter plans block plugins, custom themes, and your own analytics. The Business plan ($25/month) unlocks them but at that price you are better off on WP Engine ($30) or Kinsta ($35) with full ownership.
Not really. A managed WordPress install at $30/month with a free Astra or Kadence theme and three plugins (RankMath, Akismet, UpdraftPlus) launches in an afternoon. The only case where it is overkill is a writer who never wants to add anything beyond posts. Ghost or Substack are lighter for that.
Ghost wins for newsletter-first writers under 100 posts who want subscriptions built in. WordPress wins as soon as you need a product, course, podcast, custom post type, or three-author workflow. Ghost has 0.5% market share for a reason: the addressable use case is narrow.
Five we install on every blog: RankMath for SEO, Akismet for comment spam, UpdraftPlus for backups, Wordfence or Sucuri for security, and a caching plugin matched to the host (LiteSpeed, WP Rocket, or built-in for Kinsta and WP Engine). Anything beyond that is editorial-specific.
$1,500-4,000 for a custom-themed WordPress blog launched in 7 days, including SEO setup, three plugins configured, and a one-month support window. The headline cost is hosting at $30-50/month for a managed plan that lasts you to 100k visits/month.
Yes. Medium exports as a .zip with HTML files; Substack exports posts and subscriber emails as a .csv. We migrate posts, redirects, and email subscriber lists in 3-7 days depending on volume. Pricing starts at $1,500 for under 100 posts.
30 minutes with a senior engineer. No salespeople. We respond within one business day with a brief outline.
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