Blogging has been around for a few decades now, and it’s crazy to realize how much has changed since then. As a way of promoting content, blogging remains relevant. It has evolved from writing simple commentary and online diaries to a major marketing vehicle and way of connecting with new audiences and potential customers.
Today, while there are countless blogging platforms and business software platforms that support blogging, a couple stand out due to the functionalities they offer and their large volume of users.
So, today let’s compare three different platforms you can use for blogging: WordPress, Shopify, and DropInBlog.
Why Your Website Needs a Blog
By now, you must already know how much difference content marketing makes, but you may not be fully sold on the benefits of having a blog on your website. Sure, blogging has been around for quite a while, and newer marketing strategies have emerged in the meantime. However, there’s a reason people still blog and both big and small businesses still use it as a marketing tool.
Despite the rapidly changing climate, blogging has evolved with the times precisely because of its flexibility and scalability – you can make it into whatever you need. In fact, a 2022 HubSpot survey showed that 56% of marketers who use blogging found it an effective marketing tool, which only goes to show it’s still very much relevant.
Having said that, let’s briefly take a look at the reasons why your business needs a blog.
Builds Brand Awareness
Blogging is essential for creating brand awareness and making your brand identity known on the world wide web. By posting brand-relevant content, you not only create familiarity and positive association with your product but also get to express your business philosophy, which can set you apart from the competition. Needless to say, blogging gives your brand a voice and, in a way, humanizes it.
Drives Traffic to Your Website
One of the main benefits of blogging is driving more traffic to your site. When you add a blog, it means you have one more indexed page you can optimize, which also means one more opportunity to get discovered and show up on the search engine results page (SERP). In addition, blogging facilitates sharing content on social media, which exposes your business to new audiences and potential customers.
Increases Purchases
Another HubSpot survey has shown that blog posts lead to increased purchases. Why is that? Well, when you provide content of value to your readers that solves an issue, educates, or provides in-depth information about something, they’re more likely to trust your expertise and eventually get interested in your product.
Produces Long-Term Results
You might think it’s pointless to publish blog post after blog post because things move so fast anyways, and your content could lose relevance after a week or two. Not so fast. Well-written content on timeless topics can generate compounding traffic over weeks, months, and even years after a blog post has been published. Sure, this won’t apply to all posts, but you'll certainly have a few of those articles that become “a hit” and effortlessly bring in new visitors.
Enables You to Communicate
Here’s where blogging differs from other content marketing strategies – it allows you to communicate with your audience in a more personal and casual way. They say, “never underestimate the power of a well-written letter,” and this is so true for blogging, too. Simply put, it’s the best channel for communication with your customers, and it can help you build a lasting relationship with them.
The Features of a Blog – It’s More Than Just Looking Good
Blogs are designed to make visitors want to stay a little longer on your site, and to do that, they need to look good. But beyond that, there are some other features your blog needs to possess to be both easy for you to manage and easy for your visitors to navigate. A good blog:
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Is easy to set up and use right out of the box.
Above all else, your blog needs to be easy to set up. That is, you don’t have to tinker with any code or update a gazillion plugins for it to work. You just need a solution that’s ready right out of the box and makes blogging a breeze. -
Fits seamlessly into your website.
We mentioned that a blog needs to look good, but it also needs to look like it belongs to your site and not like the party guest who didn’t get the memo about the dress code. -
Has built-in SEO features.
Let’s be real here – there’s no real point in blogging if your posts aren’t optimized for Google. And to do that, it’s much simpler if the blogging solution you use has built-in SEO features to make the process simpler than having to do everything by yourself and waste time and resources. -
Is customizable.
The main advantage of blogging is that you can use it however you like and turn it into a medium of your own making. When a blog is customizable enough, the possibilities are endless. -
Offers support.
Once in a while, you might run into some issues or technical difficulties you’ll need help solving, so you’ll need guidance and support. That’s why it’s important to have access to help. If your chosen platform offers support, it’ll just make the whole process easier for you.
What Is the Best DropInBlog Alternative? A Comparison With WordPress and Shopify’s Blog
Having said that, let’s see the pros and cons of each platform and how they compare.
WordPress
WordPress is probably the best-known website building platform that has even become synonymous with blogging because it started as a blogging platform. However, many things have changed since then, and now, WordPress powers a large portion of all websites on the internet – that’s not a small thing.
Indeed, WordPress is a giant CMS that offers many possibilities, but like everything else in the world, it’s not perfect, and it’s definitely not for everyone.
The Pros
Starting with the pros, the one main advantage of WordPress is its huge customizability. For one, there are literally thousands of themes to choose from, so the chances of not finding something you like are pretty slim. And if you’re unhappy with how your blog looks, you can modify the CSS, as WordPress allows tinkering with the code.
Additionally, there are thousands of plugins for nearly every function you can imagine (even some really useless ones), so you can tailor your blog to your liking. If you need help with anything, there are endless resources of help on the web because WordPress already has such a large user base.
The Cons
Having said that, this freedom of controlling each aspect of your blog is also a double-edged sword. Why, you ask? Starting with the obvious – not everyone can code, and not everyone is willing to learn how to code in order to run a nice blog.
Plus, it may be difficult for your WordPress blog to blend in with the site. Unless you already use WordPress, it’s unlikely that your chosen theme will fit seamlessly into your site’s design unless you do some serious code modification (and even then, it may not look exactly the same).
Apart from that, the editor itself can be quite clunky and definitely has a learning curve, so it can easily discourage many due to it not being easy to use out of the box.
The Impracticality
Moreover, having to do everything yourself can be exhausting and not sustainable in the long run. Think about it – you have to personally search for and install all the plugins you need to have some basic blogging functionalities, like SEO features, proofreading, social media sharing, commenting, and more. Then you need to keep track and update each plugin manually because if one plugin misbehaves or becomes outdated, your blog will start misbehaving too, and it can be too much of a hassle. Not to mention that not all plugins are free.
Apart from that, unless you use WordPress to power your site, a WordPress blog will run on a separate domain instead of a subdomain. So, for example, instead of inheriting your site’s URL and running on a subdomain like mysite.com/blog, your blog’s URL will be blog.mysite.com. That’s definitely not ideal for SEO, and it’s more expensive because you have to pay for the hosting and domain yourself.
Shopify’s Blog
Shopify is another giant but in the e-commerce world. It’s a cloud-based platform that can make running an e-commerce business a breeze. In fact, it has made running an online business available to almost anyone in the world by offering good features for good prices.
However, Shopify is not a blogging platform, and it was never meant to be. The good thing about it is that it does have a blogging functionality that you can use right away, but it hardly compares with more serious blogging solutions as it just can’t offer you the needed features for running a solid blog. But let’s see more details.
The Pros
Apart from having a built-in blogging functionality, which is great to get you started, Shopify’s blog matches your site’s theme, so it won’t look unprofessional (i.e., like an intruder). Moreover, if you need to modify anything, Shopify allows you to edit the CSS of your chosen theme. The theme selection itself used to be very poor, and nearly all themes used to be paid, but now it offers a nice selection of free themes.
Additionally, the blog functionality is already built-in, so there are no additional costs to install it or use it. This also means that you also have access to dedicated customer support and help center should you ever need help with anything.
Due to its simplicity, the blog is very easy to use, so even if it’s your first time blogging, you shouldn’t have any problems figuring out how it works. It offers all the essential features you would need to blog so you can get started right away.
The Cons
The biggest problem with Shopify’s blog is that it’s just not enough for serious blogging. Sure, it’s great if you plan on blogging occasionally, like reaching out to share some news or updates about where your brand is going next, but that’s its limit. You can’t expect it to perform well for a more demanding blog nor to bring in traffic as much as other blogging solutions can. Shopify’s tool is just not sophisticated enough, and beyond the basics, there’s not much you can do.
For example, most professional blogging tools allow you to add both tags and categories on posts, while Shopify’s blog doesn’t let you add product categories but only tags. That makes searching and sorting more complicated, especially if you have a lot of content and different sections.
The Impracticality
For all the features that are lacking, you integrate Shopify with different apps. For example, Shopify’s blog doesn’t have a built-in SEO analyzer to help you optimize your content, so you’ll most definitely need to find an app for this function. Similarly, to enable commenting, you can integrate with Disqus.
Another notable issue with Shopify’s blog is the awkward URL structure. Basically, Shopify adds an extra /blogs to your blog’s URL because it was initially built to support several blogs, which are a lot like categories of one blog. It sounds weird because it is, so here’s an illustration:
You could have different “blogs,” like:
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mysite.com/blogs/news
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mysite.com/blogs/promotions
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mysite.com/blogs/guides
The confusion arises when you name your blog “Blog,” as many businesses do, which will translate in Shopify as mysite.com/blogs/blog, whereas your posts’ URL will be something like mysite.com/blogs/blog/my-first-post. See what I mean? It’s not the most horrible thing ever, but it’s kind of unnecessarily confusing.
Lastly, since Shopify is primarily an e-commerce platform, it goes without saying that it should have an easy way to inject products into your posts. But for some reason, Shopify doesn’t make this easy to do in the editor, so you have to find a workaround.
DropInBlog
DropInBlog is a flexible blogging tool whose sole purpose is to make blogging a breeze, and this is its defining characteristic and what sets it apart from others. It’s a great WordPress alternative because it’s much more modern in comparison, more secure, and definitely simpler with the absence of all the plugins, and it can also be a more advanced substitute for Shopify’s built-in blog.
The Pros
DropInBlog is easy to use right out of the box, and setting it up takes literally 3 minutes because it only includes pasting a couple of lines of code.
In addition, DropInBlog seamlessly adapts to the design of your site by inheriting your existing CSS, so you won’t need to change anything in the code. This means that your blog will look like a natural part of your site, and it will look clean and professional. Should you need to customize your blog, DropInBlog offers a great selection of customizable templates.
Apart from blending into your site perfectly design-wise, your blog’s URL will be on the same domain, and it won’t have a weird structure, only the classic and the most professional-looking address mysite.com/blog.
Another super important advantage of this blogging tool is that it has a built-in SEO analyzer that can help you generate SEO-friendly pages before publishing them. You can also add post categories, easily incorporate products into your blog posts from the editor, enable Disqus and Facebook comments, and embed YouTube and Vimeo videos. Moreover, you can add multiple authors and author bios, schedule posts, and many other advanced features you can check out here.
Last but definitely not least, DropInBlog has an excellent customer support center that includes comprehensible instructions and troubleshooting as well as a highly responsive team that you can reach through online chat or email for any questions you may have.
The Cons
It’s hard to find any real cons for DropInBlog when it comes to blogging, but if we’re being realistic, we can name a couple. Compared to WordPress, for example, its template and plugin library isn’t as extensive, but we can say this for most web-building/blogging/CMS platforms out there.
Depending on what you need, it’s arguable whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But I believe that for the majority, having access to a non-overwhelming selection of themes and plugins can be less taxing and more time- and energy-efficient.
Having said that, DropInBlog is a paid service, and there’s no free plan. However, you can try it out in all its glory with a 14-day free trial and see how you like it.
Our Verdict
There are many great blogging tools out there, but most of them weren’t designed exclusively for blogging, which is why many of them can’t cover your blogging needs. Not all of them are secure, easy to use, and easy to maintain. If running a blog is your main SEO strategy, DropInBlog checks all of these boxes and more. It’s ready for top performance right out of the box.
Unlike WordPress, which can be a huge hassle with never-ending theme and plugin updates, coding, and security issues, DropInBlog is fast and sleek and keeps up with the times. WordPress, despite its vast customizability, is not easy to use.
On the flip side, Shopify’s blog is really easy to use, but is lacking features-wise. It’s okay to get you into blogging, but if your business takes off and you need to establish better communication with your customers, Shopify’s blog just won’t do.
Therefore, you can see why DropInBlog is kind of irreplaceable. It’s highly adaptable and can meet all your blogging needs, so why not give it a shot and have your very own superior blog?