Which website building services meet these criteria?

Factual Questions
1

I want to make my personal website. The majority of the content would be blog-like posts. I have very little knowledge/exp in building one, so I’d prefer these features of a service by order of importance:

  • Must pose little risk of being shut down any time in far future. Ideally, the service has proved that with long history of operating already.

  • Need to be as user-friendly and easy to setup as possible. I guess that means having some templates to choose from, bundling hosting and domain and other stuff in 1 package, 1-click to add features like enabling comments or subscribing, etc. In other words, one can build a functioning page within, say, a day.

  • Has to be free. Or at least, free for some time (a few years?).

  • Should have more advanced and complex options in case someone grow up big or want to transfer to another service without losing database.

Could you point out 1-2 names (and links)? Any other advice regarding web building for novice?

2

Wix is great for that. They’ve been around a long time. It’s worth paying for but they do have a basic free plan.

I’m a web developer, but usually send my clients there for simpler sites. Sometimes I help them set it up. Usually they just maintain it on their own after that. No complaints so far.

Much simpler than WordPress and its infinite plug-ins and different page models.

3

I’ve used both Wix and WordPress. I find that WordPress is better for article-like pages. Wix has been stressing commercial enterprises for so long that I hate to set up anything requiring paragraphs. It also expects users to plug-in bands across the page, one for each purpose. You can fight it, but it’s a pain. I haven’t done a blog in either, so maybe that’s different.

Wix does have a huge number of templates for comments, subscribing, and all the merchant necessities. Any plan to accommodate payments or emails will cost money. It’s better for images as well.

If you want your own domain, neither is free. In fact, pretty much anything that would be helpful will cost money, although minimal plans are not expensive. Google Wix free plan for info. WordPress also requires payment for an online store.

4

If it absolutely has to be free, Blogger and Google Sites are still available too and subsidized by Google. Not as powerful or easy to use though.

There are also Wix alternatives like Weebly and Squarespace with various plans.

WordPress is kinda imploding right now since one of their leaders decided to go on a public rampage attacking one of their own partners, so it’s a risky platform to choose at the moment.

If you’re willing to learn some basic web coding, you can also host your own system for free on Vercel or very cheaply on nearlyfreespeech.net. That’s a lot more effort and maintenance than using someone else’s service, though.

A custom domain will cost you either way, but not much, about $10/year.

5

If you wish for an easy space where you can monetize your blog, substack.com is worth considering. I admit I don’t know too much about it. I have an account there for reading and supporting other blogs, but I only post comments and tweets there myself - no articles.

Also, their inbox feature broke for me and others, which doesn’t inspire faith in their longevity.

Years ago, some people on this website were active on Live Journal, but that site is now operated by a Russian company which is a deal breaker for me. I understand there are a number of sites like it: are any recommended? It would be nice to have an pseudo-anonymous blog for summarizing SDMB discussions, reviewing websites, and the like. Setting up your own website means dealing with spammers and hackers: it would be nice to outsource such hassles to a larger organization, preferably one less toxic than facebook or X.

Note to self: explore the fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ The sites may cease to exist, but platform decay should be less of an issue.

Wordpress.org takes some time to set up for newbies. I recommend the latest version of this book if you go that route. The author also has a website with links to free You-tube instruction vids.

6

Isn’t Wix a site builder that would make it really hard for the OP to take their content elsewhere if they grew bigger? Yes they can copy/paste their content but they wouldn’t get to keep any templating or structure.

Wordpress.org does have a way to move from the platform to a standalone.

7

WordPress.org acts as a resource center, offering the WordPress software for download. However, it requires users to independently seek a hosting service, install WordPress, and handle maintenance themselves. Beyond this, WordPress.org is a hub for the open-source WordPress community. Here, users can learn about WordPress, contribute to its development, and engage with other WordPress enthusiasts. It’s important to note, though, that WordPress.org itself does not offer website creation, and it is not a web host.

On the other hand, WordPress.com offers a managed WordPress hosting service, allowing users to build a website using the pre-installed WordPress software. This platform removes the burden of managing security or maintenance, providing a ready-to-use hosted WordPress environment, along with many enhancements.

@longtry, have you made a choice or started a site? Do you need any assistance or have questions?

8

Medium.com is another big one. Ghost.org is a newer service, comparable to Substack but with open-source internals in case you ever want to self-host or move away.

In this field, ease-of-use tends to depend on how much you’re willing to pay. $0 means you have to set everything up yourself and/or suffer ads and/or go with a really barebones system like Google Sites or Blogspot. $10/mo gets you pretty far, with easy to use editors and prettier website templates and such. $20/mo and above means you can whitelabel and customize everything, typically.

Yes, this is true. I think the ease of use tends to make it worth it, nonetheless, for many individuals and small businesses. In the future if they really need to grow beyond it, it can still be scraped and ported to some other system – with significant effort.

Sort of. Much of Wordpress is open-source, and its sheer popularity also means importers to other frameworks are common, but it’s not always easy. Wordpress isn’t just one thing; it’s a whole ecosystem of different plug-ins, page builder systems, template systems, etc., and the level of customization will drastically affect later portability.

If you only ever use the basic “posts” and “pages” function of Wordpress, it will be easy to move it elsewhere later. But you really fully buy into the Wordpress system and keep on growing it with custom add-ons, it can eventually become messy, unmaintainable, insecure, expensive, slow, and unportable. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s easy to keep digging yourself into a hole. The “website builder” services, on the other hand, provide better guardrails.

(That’s just the natural result of both its popularity and its low barrier to entry. There are a LOT of Wordpress users, developers, companies, salespeople, etc. out there. It’s how I started my career too. But fair warning that this same customizability can easily lead it to becoming super messy and bloated, like an old PC with too much software installed on it over the years.)

Separate from Wordpress’s technical merits, though, I really do want to provide a warning that the Wordpress ecosystem is currently going through a lot of drama, started by the CEO of Wordpress, who started an unexpected rampage against one of their own partners, suing them and taking over their software and causing a lot of fear and distrust in the Wordpress community (for more background, see 1, 2, 3, 4). This is resulting in open calls to spin off Wordpress into a new software or at least new governance model.

It’s very likely that even if such a thing were to happen, compatibility with current Wordpress sites would be maintained. So it’s not something you have to altogether rule out. Your site will almost certainly continue to work.

But it’s something you should be aware of. It’s a messy time to start using Wordpress. Unless you really prefer it over the alternatives, I’d steer clear until the fires die down a bit. It’s just too chaotic right now, and that’s not a word you typically want associated with your simple personal site.

9

Based on the early comments, I tried Wix and WP. Wix’s dashboard is surprisingly slow to load, even fails at times. WP puts a lot of prompts for upgrading into admin UI… None helped me set up in 1 day.

I 1st heard about Mastodon when reddit forced some API issue, didn’t pay attention then. Now it’s more tempting, but I don’t understand it much. Does the shared protocol get updated? i.e. will this version of fediverse get superseded by something else in, say, 2040?

Yeah, most of the posts will be word-based…I think? But I have some ideas about how the site should look - when it gets big, or preferably now. I’d like to have a (horizontal) carousel of posts for readers to choose from, a tag cloud, and posts being displayed in a port (popup, maybe) so that the main site rarely has to reload or switch pages.

10

Wordpress.org won’t be set up by a newbie in one day. Wordpress.com tends to funnel you into their $20/month plan, but that can look more attractive after several days of learning to be a webmaster.

11

The fediverse is not really a popularly known thing outside of geek and crypto circles, anyway. Unless that’s your target audience, I think the fediverse is going to make it too complicated for regular users to read your blog.

“Decentralized” software tends to mean “forks into multiple different things maintained by ideologically different parties” eventually, and intercompatibility is not always guaranteed.

Almost certainly by 2040 it’ll be something entirely different (but that’s the case no matter what platform you choose now… 2040 is an eternity in technology time.) I’d be surprised if anything popular today even makes it to 2030. Wordpress might (the recent drama puts it in doubt). Wix probably will, on sheer momentum. Various federated, decentralized services…? I wouldn’t count on it.

Sorry about the Wix dashboard performance. I guess if you’re on a slower connection or computer, that might happen. Are their published sites (like the ones in their template gallery) slow for you too?

Squarespace and Weebly are other similar page builder services. Google Sites is fast but looks fugly and doesn’t leave you any room to grow.

Wordpress.com is a commercial service that’s going to try to charge you at every opportunity. Wordpress.org is the free version that you set up yourself. wpengine.com is another paid host, but they are the ones under attack by Wordpress itself. There are other such hosts out there, like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Kinsta, Pantheon, etc. at various price points. Cloudways.com lets you deploy wordpress.org (the free version) to a cloud host of your choice, like Amazon or Vultr or DigitalOcean. This is usually cheaper than hosting directly on a Wordpress host. GridPane.com is a DIY clone of Cloudways that’s even cheaper. Generally, the less you pay, the harder it will be to set up and maintain, but those tools make it slightly less painful.

Wordpress can be extend to have page-builder functionality (including carousels, etc.) with paid add-ons like https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/, https://elementor.com/, or https://visualcomposer.com/. However, those aren’t really based on any web standards; they’re just their own thing that some small company invented specifically for Wordpress. They’ve been around for a while (especially elementor and visual composer) but there’s no guarantee they’ll survive into the future, especially if Wordpress gets forked.

This is one of those “easy, fast, cheap – pick 2 (or even just one)” situations. It’s an oversaturated space with a lot of mediocre options with various tradeoffs, but no one perfect, one-size-fits-all solution. It’s pretty much one of those things where you just have to try a bunch of different services until you find the one you hate the least.

You can also consider paying someone to build this site for you using actual web technologies (HTML, CSS, maybe a modern “framework” if needed). There are various adjacent systems that would allow you still easily edit such a site once it’s built (like Markdown or headless content management systems), but you won’t be able to easily add your own new features or upgrade the site to a new platform without further paid help. It does stand a better chance of being around for the long haul though, since it’s just normal web stuff and not a bespoke page builder system. It also makes hosting very cheap.

Might be the case where you can pay someone a couple hundred bucks, get a good enough site up (especially if you pick from an existing template) and then have free or cheap hosting that pays for itself over several years.

An example of such a system might be something like Astro (or see their free blog themes). An experienced developer could set that up for you in a few minutes, and you’d edit your posts in Markdown from then on. It’s easily hostable anywhere, including for free or very very cheap, and would be easily portable to other systems later. The downside is that it’s actual code that you have to hire someone to set up (or learn to do yourself), not just a service you can push a few buttons for and start typing.

If all of this is too much detail (sorry about that…), really, just try a few of the options and see which one you hate the least. They’re all good and bad in their own ways and only you know your specific preferences.

12

Techcrunch has been on top of this story: this explainer was last updated on 12 Jan 2025:

Given that 40% of websites are built on Wordpress, I doubt it will go away. That said, things get pretty weird around paragraph 12 of the above article.

13

It’s a good explainer. I’ll use that from now on. Thanks!

I’d also be a little suspicious of that 40% number… it’s one company’s limited crawl of a subset of websites, and only counting the ones that self-identify their content management systems (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress).

But that’s besides the point, I guess. Wordpress is undoubtedly popular, whether that exact number is 40% or slightly less. There are too many companies and individuals invested in it. It will certainly stick around in some form, but the ongoing legal saga makes it unclear exactly what form. There might end up being an officially trademarked Wordpress and then one or more unofficial OpenPress or LibrePress spinoffs, probably with less than 100% compatibility. Point is, if you start a new Wordpress site today, there’s no guarantee it will still be broadly compatible in a few years’ time (the way Wordpress currently is), because of this legal drama and all the community fear and fragmentation it’s caused.

If you go to the official wordpress.com and pay Matt directly, you’ll presumably be fine (unless the rest of the community abandons them, which it might…). If you self-host wordpress.org or pay another company to do so, your website could become collateral damage.

14

It’s probably my internet. The template site runs well.

If I want my early blog to have anti-spam and emailing new posts to subscribers (and at least those UI features I mentioned earlier), would it need any of these web techs? Someone told me it needs to be “responsive” or sth.

Don’t be! I actually learned quite some interesting stuff from this (the Markdown explanation link, for example). Even if it’s not me, then you, @Measure_for_Measure , and people’s informative posts here could help other newbies a lot.

15

As suggested, Wordpress is your friend.

It runs on a language called PHP, which all* software engineers hate, with a passion but I think we all can read/write it.

You don’t, as a beginner, even need to know that, with the very unlikely exception that you are hosting on Windows. Even then, the setup has been made so seamless you probably won’t even know.

* all: well, me. And this guy, who is right:

Ok. I needed a little rant. Thanks.

To answer your questions a little clearly…

All built in to Wordpress, or available due to free plugins.

Most “themes” (“the look, colours, layout etc”) are responsive these days. The meaning is, essentially, the website will work on a shitty cellphone as well as it does on an expensive giant monitor/screen.

If you are doing this, and you are technically not up to it, you could consult your local mid/high school. It is really trivial to do, and some kid in your area could do with some cash. Maybe US$20? I’m not sure what a burger costs. It is that easy.

16

As a C# developer I am not a fan of Wordpress whatsoever. My experiences with it have been frustrating as hell.

That being said, regardless of the drama (which seems to be just between Wordpress and a host that exclusively deals in Wordpress?), Wordpress has its purposes and for someone who wants an easy-to-set-up blog platform with the ability to expand and possibly self-host someday, I agree with @scudsucker that Wordpress is the best choice here.

The reason I suggested it in the first place is the point that the OP wants to have the possibility of taking their content - presumably in full - elsewhere for some customization. A site builder like Wix isn’t going to do that. Squarespace, Medium, etc, they are not going to do that. Those sites are all like fully-furnished apartments. You can’t wholly pick them up and move them elsewhere. You gotta leave not only the walls and the floors but also the furniture. If you start a managed site on wordpress.com it’s like having a mobile home - you can technically move the whole thing to another place, and then change your single-wide to a double-wide.

17

Ja, I am a C#/Java guy. I agree with pretty much everything you say.

18

For a newbie, it’s not trivial. I wouldn’t call it difficult. But it does consume time, because you have to learn and crank through a fair amount. I agree though that setting up a 2nd or 3rd Wordpress website would be quicker, so hiring a teen consultant might make sense. I am a hands-on expert at being a wordpress newbie and have extensive experience with website misjudgment and rabbit holes. I cross my fingers with regards to the latest drama.

Q: A wordpress.com website could be picked up and moved, right? I chose not to go that route, but paying an extra ~$120 per year indefinitely might be a good value proposition for those who are more pressed for time.

19

Sorry, that was in response to a different concern (long-term portability). Wordpress is the safest in that regard (easy to move anywhere else and keep it running). “Web techs” are a distant second. Wix, Squarespace, etc. are much harder to move (not impossible, just difficult).

Adding those features you want are very easy on Wordpress (thanks to paid plugins). There might be free options too, but they’re not great, especially on the email and anti-spam front (basically because any such free service easily gets overrun by bots and spammers). On other platforms, it just depends. Nothing that money can’t solve, but it may end up costing a little more or less than the equivalent services on Wordpress, and might require you to have separate accounts and providers (which becomes a pain to manage).

A website built from scratch is like a custom house you design and build. Very few people need that today.

A Wordpress site is more like a mass-produced budget RV that anyone can afford. You can pack it up in a few hours and take it to any other RV park and it’ll mostly be the same experience.

The drama in this case is that for some bizarre reason, out of the blue, the RV manufacturer decided to publicly attack one of the most popular RV parks , and that’s scaring all the other RV parks into wondering if they’re next in the crosshairs.

But there are millions of RVs (Wordpress sites) out there already, many of which are paying rent every month, and so the industry won’t just collapse overnight. They’ll figure it out, eventually, and this will be just another forgotten internet squabble. It’s just a little messy in the meantime, so it’s your choice if you want to jump in right now. Given that your needs are pretty straightforward and standard, you’ll probably be fine.

Can I maybe suggest that you just pick 1 or 2 of the services, build some example pages, and see how you like it?

There are infinite rabbit holes you can jump into, but you don’t need to. It’s just a personal website :slight_smile:

The thing doesn’t have to be perfect right off the bat. Make something simple, see if it’s even worth your time, and then gradually add features as you need to. Many people abandon their sites after a few weeks or months anyway. If yours turns out to be hugely successful, or you just fall in love with the process, then cool, you can deal with future problems as they arise… it’s just stuff you can throw a bit of time or money at to solve. Worst case, you hire a freelance web developer (or yes, teenager) for a few hours to help you solve whatever it is you need. Or just ask here.

20

Yeah, it’s still the same basic software underneath, and there are a gazillion Wordpress-to-whatever exporters. Or if you just want to move to another host, they will often just bring the whole thing over for you if you give them your login or install their plugin.