Bottom line: for anything you want Google to find and your business to own long term, self-hosted WordPress is still the right default, but Substack, Medium and LinkedIn articles all have real jobs to do alongside it, not instead of it. The mistake almost everyone makes is picking a platform based on which one is trendy this month rather than what they need it to do for their business in three years.
Next step on this topic: What Makes a Blog Post Different From Other Content (And Why That Diff.
The question people ask is the wrong question
“Where should I publish my blog” sounds like a one-answer question. It isn’t. It’s three separate questions hiding inside one sentence: where do you write it, where does the “real” version live, and where do you distribute it for reach. Most of the confusion I see from clients comes from treating those three as the same decision, when they’re not.
I’ve been blogging in some form since 2009, first on Blogger, then self-hosted WordPress since 2013, with detours through Medium, LinkedIn articles and now Substack for a newsletter arm. I’ve made every mistake on this list personally, so this isn’t theory.
Self-hosted WordPress: still the default for a reason
WordPress.org (not WordPress.com, that’s a different, more limited thing) powers roughly 43% of all websites, according to W3Techs data. That’s not a fad. It’s the closest thing the web has to a safe, boring, reliable choice, and boring is exactly what you want for something you’re building for the next decade.
Real costs for 2026: a domain runs about £10 to £15 a year. Hosting through something like SiteGround starts around £3.99 a month on an introductory deal, then renews closer to £12.99 a month, or you can go managed with WP Engine from roughly $25 a month if you want someone else handling backups and speed. A decent theme is £0 to £70 one-off. Yoast SEO or Rank Math, both free at the core, handle your on-page basics. All in, you’re looking at under £200 a year to own your content outright.
The reason this matters isn’t nostalgia, it’s control. Nobody can change the algorithm and tank your reach overnight. Nobody can shut your account and take five years of writing with it. Google indexes it, your email list can be built directly on it, and it’s the one place where a lead magnet converts a stranger into a subscriber without a platform taking a cut or a commission first.
The story I tell every client who wants to skip this step
In 2013 I moved my main blog off Blogger and onto self-hosted WordPress because I wanted proper control over SEO, design and email capture. I did the migration myself over a weekend, redirects and all, and I still got it wrong. Traffic dropped by about 40% within the first month because a chunk of my old URLs weren’t redirecting correctly to their new versions. It took roughly eight months of steady publishing and cleanup before organic traffic climbed back past where it had been before the move.
That’s the bit nobody tells you when they say “just move to your own site.” Migrations are painful, they cost you real traffic in the short term, and the pain is worth it, but only if you’re honest going in that it will hurt for a while first.
Medium: good for reach, bad for a home
Medium is fine as a satellite, terrible as a headquarters. The Medium Partner Program pays writers based on member reading time, and in practice most writers earn somewhere between a few cents and a few dollars per thousand words read once you’re outside their curated top stories. It can add up if you’re prolific, but it’s beer money for most people, not a business model.
The bigger issue is that Medium owns the relationship with your reader, not you. You can’t build an email list off a Medium post the way you can off your own site. And Medium has changed its distribution algorithm and paywall rules more than once in the past decade, each time reshuffling who gets seen. I’ve watched writers with tens of thousands of followers lose most of their reach overnight after one of these changes. Nothing you build there is guaranteed to still be visible next year.
Substack: brilliant for a newsletter, not a search engine
Substack has earned its popularity, particularly for people who want writing and email in one place with zero setup cost. It’s free to start, and Substack takes 10% of revenue if you switch on paid subscriptions, plus standard payment processing fees on top. For someone starting a niche newsletter with no existing list, that’s a very low barrier.
What it isn’t good at is search visibility. Substack posts can rank, but they’re competing against the platform’s own domain authority strategy rather than yours, and you don’t control the layout, the sidebar, or what happens if Substack changes its terms. Think of it as email-first publishing that happens to have a public archive, not a blog replacement. This connects to a bigger point worth understanding on its own, which is why blogging still matters at all when everyone’s attention is supposedly on social feeds and newsletters instead.
LinkedIn articles: distribution, not a destination
LinkedIn’s native long-form articles get pushed to your existing network and sometimes beyond it through the platform’s own algorithm, which makes them useful for reach among a professional audience you already have some relationship with. I’ve had LinkedIn articles outperform the exact same piece published on my own site, purely on initial visibility, because LinkedIn wants to keep people inside LinkedIn and rewards native content accordingly.
But there’s no SEO value worth mentioning, you can’t add your own opt-in forms, and the content sits inside someone else’s platform with someone else’s rules on what you can link to and how. If you’re weighing this specifically, I’ve gone deeper on where exactly to publish LinkedIn articles and how that compares to your own site for that particular channel.
Squarespace and Wix: fine to start, expensive to outgrow
If you cannot face WordPress and just need something live this week, Squarespace (from about £14 a month) or Wix (from about £13 a month) will get a decent-looking blog online fast, with hosting and design bundled in. The trade-off shows up later: their SEO tools are weaker than WordPress plus Yoast, migrating away later is a genuine headache because their export tools are limited, and you’ll hit a ceiling on customisation the moment your content strategy gets more ambitious. I’ve had clients spend more moving off Wix three years in than they’d have spent on WordPress hosting the whole time.
A simple decision framework
- If you want long-term SEO traffic and full ownership: self-hosted WordPress, no real substitute.
- If you want a newsletter-first audience with a public archive as a bonus: Substack.
- If you want extra reach on existing writing among a professional network: republish on LinkedIn articles a few days after your own site goes live, never before.
- If you want a quick, low-cost site with no technical setup and you accept the SEO trade-off: Squarespace or Wix.
- If you’re only testing whether you enjoy writing at all before committing money: Medium, for a maximum of three months, then decide.
Whatever you pick, the platform is only half the job. The other half is what you put on it, and that’s worth studying on its own, because what a good blog post looks like structurally matters more to your traffic than which platform hosts it.
The uncomfortable truth about ownership
Everyone in this industry, myself included most days, tells you to own your platform. It’s correct advice. But the part nobody says out loud is that a self-hosted WordPress blog with twelve visitors a month is worse for your business than a Substack with three thousand engaged subscribers, or a LinkedIn following that reads what you write. Ownership without an audience is just a very tidy filing cabinet nobody opens.
So the real order of operations is: build the audience wherever it’s currently willing to show up, and migrate to something you own once there’s something worth owning. Waiting for perfect infrastructure before you’ve proven anyone wants to read you is how good writers spend two years building a beautiful site nobody visits.
How this fits with everything else you’re publishing
None of this happens in isolation. Your blog feeds your email list, which is its own decision about frequency and effort, and it’s worth being realistic about how many newsletters you can sustain in 2026 before you commit to a publishing platform that assumes weekly output you don’t have time for. A blog you update once a quarter on beautiful infrastructure loses to a scrappy Substack you update every week, every single time.
If part of your plan is monetising your writing through recommending other people’s products, the platform choice changes slightly again, and it’s worth reading up on where to start with affiliate marketing as a beginner before you build a whole content calendar around a model your chosen platform doesn’t support well.
What I’d tell you if we were on a call
Buy the domain today, whichever platform you land on. It costs about a tenner and it stops the decision being permanent in your head. Then pick the one platform from the list above that matches what you have time to do consistently for the next six months, not the one that sounds most impressive at a networking event. Consistency on a modest platform beats perfection on an ambitious one you abandon in month four, and I’ve watched that play out with more clients than I can count.
Frequently asked questions
Should I use WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
Use WordPress.org, self-hosted, if you want full control, your own domain, plugins and monetisation freedom. WordPress.com is a hosted, more limited version aimed at hobby bloggers, and the free tier carries WordPress branding and restricts custom plugins, which most businesses outgrow within a year.
Is it worth publishing the same post on multiple platforms?
Yes, but in order. Publish first on your own site so Google credits you as the original source, wait a few days, then republish or link out from Medium, LinkedIn or Substack. Publishing everywhere at once risks duplicate content confusion and hands your best distribution channel the least incentive to send you traffic back.
How much does it really cost to run a self-hosted blog for a year?
Roughly £150 to £200 covers domain registration around £12, budget shared hosting around £8 to £13 a month, and free versions of essential plugins like Yoast SEO. Managed hosting or premium themes push that toward £400 to £600 a year, still far less than most businesses spend on a single month of paid ads.
What if I’m just starting out and don’t want to spend money yet?
Start on Substack or Medium to test whether you’ll write consistently, since both are free and require no setup. Give yourself a firm three-month deadline, and if you’re still publishing weekly by then, move the archive to a self-hosted WordPress site before you’ve built too much you’d regret rebuilding elsewhere.
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