When launching a blog it’s important to choose the right blogging platform. In this post, I will try to convenience you that Medium is a far better blogging platform than Wordpress. Especially if you buy a custom domain like I have done for this blog.
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No worries about performance
First of all, it takes a lot of work to speed up a Wordpress website. You have to implement caching, enable gzip and make sure that you are using a good Wordpress host.
Apart from that with a Wordpress blog, you should optimize your images and even consider a CDN. When choosing Medium, you don’t have to worry about anything. Medium will take care of things like load balancing, image optimization, and page load speed. Also security and backups are handled by Medium. You can fully focus on writing.
Better discoverability
You could have written the best article in the history of web development. However, this means nothing if no one can find your content.
When writing a Medium article, you can add tags to your article. When people search for your tags on the main Medium.com website, your article will be included in the search results.
Also, a lot of people and bots watch Medium RSS feeds of certain tags. This can lead to automatic including of your articles on certain sites. For example, if you have written a Ruby on Rails tutorial and tag your article with “Ruby on Rails”, you have a chance that your article will be included in an automated Ruby on Rails mailing list or on a tutorial website.
Your article can also appear as a related article on another Medium publication or on the main website.
Twitter followers are Medium followers
Medium was created by Evan Williams, a co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter. So it comes as no surprise that Medium and Twitter are closely integrated. One of the most obvious benefits is that you can enable that everyone who follows you on Twitter, will automatically follow you on Medium! This means that while building up your Twitter following, you could get free Medium.com followers without extra effort.
Less SEO effort
When you publish a Medium article, Medium will take care of a lot of major SEO and social media issues.
For example automatic proper canonical tags. Also, Medium will fill in Open Graph data tags for social media. You can customize the url, title and meta description of your articles.
After publishing an article, you will get a free dofollow backlink from your medium.com author page to the article on your own domain!
Furthermore, Medium will generate sitemaps for your publication. Also, the performance benefits of Medium can have a significant influence on your Google rankings.
Better accessibility
Medium is all about beautiful design and the best user experience. This means that they will make sure that your content is legible on all types of screens. Or when people click a link to your article, they will be automatically redirected to the Medium app that provides the best experience on the user’s platform.
Medium also supports instant articles in apps like Facebook and Telegram. This means that your article will load instantly in the current app of the user, without having to first download all styles.
The easier it is for the user to acces your article, the higher the chance they will read it.
Downsides
Of course there a few major drawbacks when choosing Medium as a blogging platform. For advanced bloggers, I admit that Medium is not feasible. Medium is best if you want to publish posts where your only goal is for people to read them, like a personal or corporate blog. For example, if you want to build an affiliate website, don’t use Medium.
No customization
First of all, you have far fewer customization options. You can change the color scheme of your blog and add a branding logo. Apart from that, Medium will decide the look and feel of your blog. And you can’t add widgets to your pages. Medium is all about writing.
Tracking is horrible
You have the option to include a Google Analytics code on your Medium publication. However, this only records visits on desktop. Visits from the Medium platform-specific apps are only recorded internally and can’t be shared with Analytics.
Medium has a built-in analytics system, but this only shows basic things like visits, reads and referrer urls. And you can’t place tracking pixels from ad-networks.
No ads
You can’t place banner ads on your blog. If you want to monetize your Medium blog, you have a few other options. You could place affiliate links in your posts. And because Medium links are dofollow, you could sell backlinks or guest posts (not sure if TOS allows it). However, the best way is to use your blog as a lead generator for your main website or use it to showcase your credibilities.
Content is controlled by Medium
Your content is stored on the servers of Medium. This means that Medium could censor your posts. Also if Medium would go out of business, you risk that your content can disappear forever. However, both scenario’s are highly unlikely. If you post normal stuff that is legally and ethically correct, you have nothing to worry about.
Conclusion
To summarize the most important benefits of choosing Medium over Wordpress:
- You don’t have to worry about performance optimization and security of your blog.
- Medium gives you more exposure and discovery oputernaties.
- Medium makes SEO easier for your blog.
- Close integration with Twitter means that instantly gain followers on both networks.
- Medium will make sure that everyone can read your content properly on their device.
The most important drawbacks are that Medium decides on how your blog should look and feel and you can’t use advanced online marketing tools. However, I think that these issues are not a problem for the average blogger.
To profit the most from Medium, I recommend that you buy a custom domain Medium publication. I have done the same for blog.braham.biz. A custom domain medium publication is a one-time payment of 80 dollars, but it is well worth it in the long run.
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About the author
I’m a freelance web developer and online marketer from the Netherlands. I’m specialized in creating and optimizing websites where the focus is user experience. In may 2017, I was included in the list of the TOP 500 young innovators by the Next Web. If you want to reach out, please contact me on Twitter or check my website: