Why WordPress beats Medium for building a personal blog

[Warning: this is quite a technical post. If you don’t plan on running your own blog or have an interest in SEO, you’re probably better off skipping this one!]

Medium — the good

I love Medium. After using it to find and read great content, I started my own blog there just over two years ago. It’s a great place to find an audience for your content — several of my posts got thousands of reads, and I’m not sure I could’ve got anywhere near that if I’d gone with another platform.

In fact, I’m not sure I would’ve even got started on another platform. The simplicity of Medium’s writing experience — literally as simple as log in and start writing — was what I needed. Everything automatically looked great, and procrastinating by editing themes wasn’t even an option.

But Medium has its issues. I’m not going to do a full comparison of Medium against other platforms as there’s a lot of content that does that out there already, but I’m going to go through the issues I’ve had with the platform and why I’m considering moving my blog elsewhere. You might notice that this is the first post I’ve written on WordPress, and the content is being automatically copied across to my old Medium blog.

The issues I’ll go over apply if you’re trying to find your own space on the web for your writing and as a hub to other projects you’re involved in. They don’t apply if:

• You want to start a regular writing habit with no goal other than improving your writing (go with Medium)
• You’re a professional writer and you’re trying to get your content noticed by others with the goal of being featured in publications (go with Medium)
• Most of your content focuses on writing, and you value a community of other writers to get feedback from (go with Medium — The Writing Cooperative is great for this)

The bad

The issues came when I tried to use my Medium presence to promote other projects I was working on.

After two years of writing on Medium, I had a few successful posts which ranked fairly high in Google for their keywords (e.g. if you search for “workflowy gtd” you’ll find my post on using Workflowy to implement the Getting Things Done framework on the first page).

In other words, my blog was starting to get some credibility with search engines — a rare and valuable commodity on the Web.

What can you do with that commodity? In the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), there are two big benefits you can get from content like that:

• A boost for the rest of your content on the same domain — e.g. if that page was on harald.co/workflowy, then other pages on harald.co would get a small boost up in their Google rankings for those keywords
• A boost for content you link to from that page — for example, if I put a link to harald.co/projects on that page, then harald.co/projects would also get a small boost in its Google ranking.

Using these benefits to promote a website is referred to as content marketing. Content marketing is a key tool in SEO, which is all about improving search engine rankings. And these rankings are more important than ever, with the shift to mobile and search engines being the primary portal to the Web. (this study says 51% of traffic is driven by search results, far more than social media or other traffic)

The issue with Medium is that it’s difficult to get either of these benefits. The first one is possible, but it’ll cost you. On top of the price for the domain itself, Medium now charges a $75 fee for linking your posts to your own domain — and even then you don’t have much flexibility in how this is used. (a domain can only be linked to a specific publication, not to your own profile)

The second one isn’t possible at all. To understand why, a short tangent on how search engines work.

How search engines work

At a high level, using Google as an example, search engines use a three step process for analysing content and deciding its ranking:

1. Google keeps a list of pages it knows about on the Web, alongside associated links and keywords. (this list is called its index)
2. Google’s bots regularly visit all the pages in the index. They look for links from those pages, and follow the links to find new pages. (this is called crawling)
3. Google adds new pages it finds to its index, and updates keywords and links for pages it already knew about. (this is called indexing)
4. When someone performs a search for a specific keyword, Google consults its index to find the most relevant pages for that keyword.

I’ve obviously missed out a lot of detail here! If you’re interested in SEO, Moz has a good beginner’s guide.

Back to Medium: why should it be any different from other sites?

The issue is with how Medium tags links. In the second step, where Google’s bots look for links, there’s a way to tell them to ignore a certain link. You can do this by adding a small bit of code to the link saying “rel=nofollow” — often referred to simply as nofollow — which means that Google won’t follow that link and the page being linked to won’t get the SEO benefit of that link.

Medium tags all its outbound links as nofollow. Why? Probably to avoid people abusing it for their own SEO purposes and flooding it with low value content — useless pages full of links which exists only to boost the pages they link to.

The downside is that, from an SEO perspective, outbound links from Medium posts are basically useless!

Enter WordPress

I initially preferred Medium over WordPress because of the simplicity, and lack of setup required. At this point I think the costs outweigh the benefits, so I’ve set up a new blog on WordPress.com — a hosted version of WordPress, which means you don’t need to worry about writing code or installing anything. It takes a bit longer than setting up a Medium blog and costs £30 per year, but in a few hours you can have a blog set up using your own domain (mine is http://www.harald.co), and have full control over how all your links are tagged.

I still cross-post everything to Medium, with the required SEO modifications, so I can keep getting the benefits of the Medium readership I’d built up and I can always switch back if I want to. It’s worth pointing out — WordPress.com doesn’t support automatic exporting to Medium like self-hosted WordPress does, but I think that’s a small price to pay for the convenience.

One last note: WordPress isn’t the only platform that allows you to do this, but I think it’s the best choice right now. It’s definitely the most popular, by far, and it’s fairly priced. I looked into Ghost and Svbtle as two good alternatives, but settled on WordPress in the end because of its larger user base and better pricing.

Any thoughts/suggestions? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter!

Originally published at harald.co on April 4, 2017.