Have you ever wondered which type of blogging platform is better, self hosted or managed? In general, there are two broad types; those that are self hosted; installed, maintained, and managed by the person who owns and operates the website as well as proprietary platforms; those whose systems are built and controlled by outside companies. Both are incredibly wonderful – there’s no doubt about that. The primary preferences lie in the eye of the beholder. Some people like this and some like that. In today’s post, we’ll dive into a comparison between two of the biggest players out there: WordPress self hosted and Substack. Both offer awesome products.
Who Needs to Know Which Platform to Use?
My intended audiences for this post are two groups of people; those who are interested in blogging for the first time and who are seeking advice for which type of platform to use and those who have been blogging for years and who might be looking into alternatives. I’ve been blogging since 2005 and have taken advantage of multiple platforms. For the sake of simplicity, in this post, I’ll be focusing my efforts on discussing the WordPress.org self-hosted option as well as Substack, a platform that’s completely hosted and managed by an outside company.
About WordPress.org
Beginning all the way back in 2003, WordPress now powers over 43% of the web. Who uses WordPress? Big names, such as Sony Music, Meta Newsroom, PlayStation.Blog, TechCrunch, Time Magazine, CNN Press Room, and Disney Books, to name a few. WordPress began as an exclusively downloadable and hostable product, but now offers hosted and managed options as well. The software was initially created by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg and was quite slim in regards to its features and addons. Today, thousands of themes can help it look better and thousands of plugins can make it run better. Needless to say, the WordPress ecosystem is enormous and is extraordinarily popular.
About Substack
Substack is a managed platform that is much younger than WordPress. It was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie and has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity since its initial conception. As of 2023, it boasts over 20 million monthly active subscribers to writers in its network. As far as website traffic goes, those authors receive nearly 50 million aggregate yearly visitors to their newsletters. The top five newsletters currently on Substack include American Ambition at 2.3 million subscribers, Letters From an American at 1.5m, The Truth About Cancer at 1.4m, The US Stock Insider at 1.3m, and Quick Update at 1m.
My Opinion On Both Platforms
Like I mentioned above, I’ve used both platforms, so I thought I’d give a very simple and straightforward opinion of my experiences. I’ll share what I have to say below.
Pros & Cons of WordPress.org
I think it’s safe to say that much of the online word loves WordPress. It’s flexible, distributable, and downright versatile. I’ve been using WordPress.org since I launched my very first blog nearly two decades ago. It’s been wonderful. I’ve exclusively used the downloadable and self-hosted version and have loved it. Through the years, I’ve found that my WordPress websites have been extremely search engine friendly, easy to use for both my visitors and me, and have made me a lot of money. The software is fast and, while I’ve never had any issues with the original editor, Gutenberg is simply incredible and getting better everyday. If you search around online to learn about Gutenberg, you’ll likely find people screaming about problems they’ve experienced with it. Take these complaints with a grain of salt. It seems like these types enjoy complaining about everything.
One issue with the downloadable version of WordPress is that you have to know what you’re doing when it comes to hosting. Yes, you can find hosts that will manage everything nowadays, but really, you should know what you’re doing. If you’ve ever hosted other types of websites though, installing and setting up WordPress shouldn’t be too challenging.
Another downside is that the website hosting you’ll need will cost you money, something many newcomers are hesitant to spend. It won’t cost you a tremendous amount of money; just a few dollars a month, but it can still be a hurdle. So there’s that to think about.
One of my primary gripes with WordPress, and this really doesn’t have much to do with WordPress itself, is the list of optional mailing list solutions. There are quite a few options, but setting up these outside vendors can be cumbersome. The cost of using mailing list providers can also become prohibitively expensive as your email list grows. I’m not in love with the idea of spending all sorts of cash as I reach the point of having a long list of subscribers.
Overall though, WordPress is my top choice for content management systems. The sheer size of the template, plugin, and development ecosystem simply can’t be matched today.
Pros & Cons of Substack
When setting up and writing to a blog on Substack, the primary goal is to attract subscribers who will receive your posts via email. After I went through the initial setup and configuration of my fist blog with this alternative, I quickly fell in love with Substack’s editor. It’s clean, is extraordinarily easy to use, and it just works. It’s easy to include video and photos and there are plenty of bells and whistles to go around. I had, and continue to have, everything I need. The posts I’ve written look good and I’m proud to have others read them. The formatting is wonderful.
The weird thing about my posts on Substack is that they don’t seem to be very crawlable and indexable by the search engines. I’ve seen Substack posts from other blogs rank very well in Google, but for some strange reason, mine never have. And if one or two posts actually did make it into the search engines, it took a very long time for it to occur. With WordPress, my posts get indexed quickly. So it appears that what I write primarily stays inside the Substack ecosystem.
With Substack though, everything is free and I have the ability to generate an unlimited income through the very simple to operate subscription system. This is actually where Substack makes all their money, so they are sure to design the process as easy to maneuver as possible. Gathering subscribers isn’t challenging at all and, well, everything is easy to use with Substack. Other than the search engine visibility issue, I really don’t have many complaints.
There is one thing I do have an issue with though and this may just affect me because I write a lot. I’ve found that my longer posts, while they look fine in blog form, get truncated in email messages. I guess email providers such as Gmail don’t allow for very long messages. They’ll show my content up to a certain point and then instruct the recipient to click to view the entire message in a browser. It’s not the end of the world, but it is annoying. And really, it’s not Substack’s fault, it’s the email provider’s.
WordPress.org or Substack – Which Should You Use?
If you’re brand new and would like to get into blogging, I’d suggest you set up an account with Substack and start writing. The process will be so smooth and you’ll love it. It’ll also be free with the potential to make money. As you grow, you might want to set up another blog using WordPress. While WordPress will be more involved and will take extra effort to initially configure and maintain, I believe it’s got more growth potential for more serious bloggers and websites owners.
Personally, I’ve decided to use both options. I use WordPress for my primary blogs and use Substack for my newsletter mailing list. After I write a month’s worth of blog posts, I’ll write summaries inside of a Substack post. I’ll also guide people from my blogs to my Substack page to sign up for the newsletter. I’ll then send the Substack newsletter to the mailing list. With this configuration, I get the best of both worlds – lots of versatility as well as an unlimited subscriber base for my newsletter.
What Do Others Have to Say?
I read through a conversation on Reddit that I thought I’d share with you here. It’s my hope that I can save you some time by including as much information as I can on this one page.
Basically, a user asked for opinions on how others integrate Substack into their blogging endeavors. Do they use WordPress alone, Substack alone, or WordPress and Substack together in conjunction with one another.
One user replied that both Substack and Medium are similar in that they don’t allow for external plugins. This user compared this proprietary limitation to WordPress.com’s two lowest tiers. Because of these limitations, they didn’t like proprietary options. The user valued freedom over everything else.
Another user indicated that they write horror movie reviews on their primary WordPress.org (self hosted) blog. They write daily blog posts and then compile summaries into a weekend newsletter-type post on their Substack blog. This is sort of like what I was referring to above in the previous section. They also commented, as I did, that Google doesn’t necessarily crawl Substack blogs very well.
A final user mentioned how thrilled they are with Substack’s ease of use as well as it’s “sharability.” This user said that Substack’s editor is much easier to understand and work with than WordPress’, sharing is straightforward and effective, paid subscriptions are simple and waiting for configuration, subscriptions are much more forthcoming than they’ve ever been with his WordPress site, his readership is heavier than on this WordPress site, and interaction with other users via Notes has a high conversion rate.
This user’s overall opinion of Substack was very high, which I agree with. He said the entire system is seamless and the user base of those who have already subscribed to Substack as a whole is huge as well. But, like many others, he also blogs on his WordPress website. I’m not sure anyone is ready to give that up just yet.
What’s your opinion? Do you use either of these options? Both? If you do, which do you prefer? I’d love to read your thoughts on this. Please comment below. Thanks!
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