Medium vs WordPress: Which Is Best for Your Business?

A detailed look at Medium vs WordPress. 

Content marketing is essential to having a strong online presence and growing your business. 

But choosing the right platform to start your blog can be overwhelming. It’s never clear where you should publish your content online. 

So, to help you make a well-informed decision, we’ve narrowed down your list to two alternatives:

• Medium
• WordPress

In the rest of this guide, you’ll learn what these options are and which one is best for your business.

Let’s get started: Medium vs WordPress

What is Medium?

Medium is a publishing platform that allows writers to share their thoughts online. It gives a chance to both beginners and professionals to tell their stories and spread their knowledge.

Publishing content on Medium is free and doesn’t require hosting or installing software. All you have to do is create an account on the platform and start writing.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to create a site or a blog for your business. It’s an open-source software that any webmaster can use without writing a single line of code.

WordPress is the most popular CMS, with over 75 million websites, which accounts for 30% of online sites today.

The company offers two types of services to its’ users:

• WordPress.org provides you with the software, themes, and plugins you can install on your host to launch your self-hosted website.

• WordPress.com is a hosting service that allows bloggers and hobbyists to easily launch sites without having to do any configuration or maintenance.

We’re interested in WordPress.org (self-hosted blog) in this Medium vs WordPress comparison.

Advantages of Medium

Medium is the fastest growing third-party publishing platform today. It attracted millions of writers and readers and managed to keep them loyal to its’ brand.

Which makes you wonder:

What makes Medium such a popular platform? And what benefits will I get by launching my blog on it?

Here are three reasons why Medium might be a good option for hosting your blog:

1- Easy Setup and Maintenance

Although WordPress is easy to use as well, Medium is a lot simpler to start and maintain.

Anyone can create a Medium account within a few minutes and start sharing content. It doesn’t require any installation, configuration, or maintenance.

Beyond that:

The user interface is clean and pleasing to the eye, as it was designed to increase readability. 

Also:

The platform offers many great features such as “estimated reading time” and “favorite paragraphs highlighting,” which online readers seem to love.

2- More Exposure

Medium is one of the largest content publishing platforms today, with nearly 100M monthly visitors. That makes it the go-to place for businesses and webmasters looking to grow an online following quickly.

This platform has a large built-in audience interested in all sorts of topics — whether popular such as business and travel or super-niche like cycling and graphic design.

You can build a loyal tribe by publishing content on Medium consistently. Once the system identifies your target audience, it will bring you more followers interested in relevant topics.

3- Lower Costs

The cost for publishing content on Medium is literally nothing.

You don’t have to pay for hosting, themes, plugins, or maintenance to keep your blog up and running.

Creating an account is free, and so is writing content. There is no limit to how many articles you can publish or how many viewers you’ll get.

Better yet:

The ranking algorithms are created to reward you for your success with even more success. So, the more readers you gather, the higher your chances of getting more exposure.

Next in our Medium vs WordPress comparison is WordPress:

Advantages of WordPress

WordPress can be used for a lot more than blogging. 

Many businesses and webmasters prefer it because it cuts the high costs of starting a website. They also prefer it due to its’ big online community of developers working non-stop to make it better.

But…

In this post, we’re more interested in why WordPress is terrific for starting your business blog.

Let’s dive a little deeper into what this CMS has to offer:

1- Full Control Over Your Blog

Unlike Medium, WordPress.org grants you full control over your website. 

You can choose your own design and user-interface or make changes as you wish whenever you want. You’ll have the option to modify your site structure and organize your pages to keep your audience engaged.

Also:

WordPress directories have over 5000 themes and 55000 plugins offered all for free to their users. These huge libraries make creating and managing a blog easy and quick to all beginners.

2- Higher SEO Rankings

WordPress hosted content has a much bigger chance of ranking higher on Google with SEO. 

Medium has a high domain authority. But it also has thousands of pages discussing similar topics with the same keywords.

So:

Your chances of ranking high for those keywords are close to none.

Self-hosted sites, however, can easily rank for targeted search terms when done correctly. You can build backlinks to your web pages to rank them higher if they’re on your website. 

That also allows you to increase your domain authority and page rank simultaneously, which isn’t something you can do with your blog hosted on Medium.

3- Better Monetization Options

Self-hosted sites are the best option when it comes to monetization your content.

Why? 

Simply because you own everything — including the content.

Whether it’s through affiliate commissions, selling your own products, or display ads – WordPress allows it all. 

You don’t have to follow any regulations or set limits for yourself with a self-hosted site. As long as you’re following Google’s guidelines, you can monetize any way you want.

Now It’s up to You! Medium vs WordPress

When it comes to Medium vs WordPress, there are pros and cons on both ends, which might leave you a bit puzzled. But before you can pick an option, you must first be clear on what you want to achieve by starting a blog.

Medium is a good short term approach as it allows you to grow an audience quickly for free. WordPress is a better alternative if you’re looking to build a brand with a strong online presence.

Ready to find online success for your business with SEO? 

We’re at your service! Start by grabbing your free SEO report card to learn more about what your site needs to grow. 

For more information, don’t hesitate to give us a call at (949) 354-2574.