Choosing between a blogging platform and a personal site, and migration options

When speaking of content, it always comes down to making a choice between posting it on your own resource or using a third-party service. There are pros and cons for each option, so let’s talk about some of them (from a developer’s perspective in particular).

Blogging platform

Let’s first talk about a separate blogging platform (it can be anything available, not just Medium; for example, Hashnode, DEV Community, Substack, etc.).

The pros are rather obvious. You don’t need to do any preparation for the hosting of your content (meaning that you don’t need to create that source, be it your site, platform, app, etc.). And thus you can focus on the content itself. Plus, there are tools available that allow you to write and edit texts, upload files, etc. (so you don’t need to create the whole structure to manage everything). There is also a community already available, so you have higher chances of acquiring some audience / reads / interactions and getting your content shown to the world. With some chance, you may even get some SEO magic working in your favor: if you are consistent and have good content, your platform of choice may eventually start promoting or at least pushing your content a bit further up (whether it’s related to search results or simply adding your posts to various daily/weekly selections).

That last point may get less relevant with all the current AI development and people using fewer and fewer direct searches, but if you start thinking about all of the potential areas to cover, you may end up covering nothing at all, so let’s just assume that SEO and good content still have value and are worth taking care of (focusing on good content in particular).

Speaking about cons of blogging platforms, the main one is of course the lack of control. You have to adapt to their format (e.g., you may not like their text editor or the way the images are displayed in your posts). If you are someone who worries about the audience and views, then you’re also entering the area of figuring out how the algorithms work and how your content is being shown to others (e.g., one day you may get a sudden “promotion” and lots of views for a rather simple post, but then, after spending a lot of time and effort on another one, you realize that practically no one reads it). Finally, each platform has its own rules and policies to follow. And you don’t really question it if you decide to choose the platform and use it (you may disagree with these rules and policies, but at the end of the day, as it’s not your own source, you either accept it or use something else). So, overall, the situation is: you still own your content, but not the place where it’s stored.

And you should always keep that last point in mind. Also, ideally you should have backup options: for storing your content somewhere else (be it some cloud storage or your physical device) and for being able to migrate that content (in case something happens to the platform or your presence on it). The backup storage issue is rather easy to solve: you can simply save your posts (if we’re talking about a blogging platform) wherever you want them and have your backup, or you can periodically download your account information (with current data protection regulations, normally, most of the platforms have such functionality in the account settings, although you may need to do some exploration to find it sometimes).

The migration possibility, however, requires additional effort and planning, which brings us to the personal site option.

Personal site

Having your own place to store your content instantly removes pretty much all of the restrictions regarding platforms’ rules and policies (obviously, I’m not talking about extreme cases when your content goes above and beyond “all rules”, I’m talking about “normal” type of content).

You have your site and you can do whatever you want with it. You can promote your services the way you like, add links to other sources, write about any topic and so on. Of course, with that comes additional responsibility: you’re responsible for your content. In other words, if your site is made not just for you alone, you are now taking care of every aspect of it: making sure that the site is built following best practices and SEO techniques, that it’s accessible and looks decent enough, and (probably the main point) that it is worth visiting. You are practically on your own. Having a ready-to-use platform at least gives you some chances to occasionally get your content “pushed” to a wider audience. Having a personal site, these chances are fully up to you.

Maybe at this point it’s worth talking about AI again. The main reason is that, as mentioned before, fewer people now are actually using the source material. Most of the time now we simply ask [insert your AI of choice here] which then provides all the necessary data. If you are in luck and AI actually mentioned your site/blog (directly or among the sources), you need more luck so that people would actually click the link and check it. The reason I mention it is because it probably makes the advantage of the blogging platforms regarding promoting your content less appealing. Now AIs “scrape” the whole internet and wherever your content is, chances are they will use it in a similar way (I’m not an expert, obviously, but that is how it looks at this moment).

Speaking of other particularities of running your own site, we can mention the fact of actually making it and paying for it.

For making a site, you can either use a user-friendly solution (any site builder out there: WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) or build it yourself.

As for the payment option, yes, you can get a site for free (many site builders offer at least some options for doing it and, while making it yourself, you can also use free options), but you may want to have a personal domain name (and almost always that is going to be a paid option) and, if one day your site traffic goes up significantly, then you would need to pay for hosting (or rather for the paid version of the hosting when your free plan runs out).

These last pros and cons and paid versus free options made me do a bit of a research and calculations about a sort of a combined approach (nothing too special, but just as “food for thought” type of pondering). So, let’s talk about it as well.

Combined approach

By combined approach I mostly mean cross-posting on your own site and blogging platform. It will require more work, but then you will have your constant backup and don’t need to worry about sudden interruptions in the future (plus, in case you decide to make a switch to a single source at some point, you won’t need to do all the work at once, as you are already backed up).

Also, in that case you will most likely want to treat your own site as the main source, so you initially post there and then mirror it on the blogging platform. In case of Medium, there is an import tool where you can use canonical link (in stories settings), so it’s clear that the original source is a different site (other platforms might have a similar functionality, but if not, you can add a direct link to the original source and a brief description like “This post was originally posted on…”).

In theory, this may affect visibility and views (as the content is no longer original), but I’ve already mentioned it before. Besides, the goal is to make a personal site the primary source of content, so over time it should potentially start ranking higher in search results (if you care about them).

You may also explore the mailing list possibility and create a newsletter, so people can subscribe to it. That way, you will start building an audience base that you can manage all by yourself (which is particularly valuable for running a personal site, as it may have less options for engagement). However, it would require you to use other third-party services (and figure out if they have free tiers and whether they are enough or you want to pay for the advanced features), unless you want to build it by yourself (with obvious tradeoff of extra time and efforts that you need to put into it).

Also, if you are not doing all of the above right from the beginning, you might want to migrate your older content (so it’s mirrored on both of your sources). For that, although it might still be worth it, you don’t really need to be bothered by using the canonical links (usually that is worth doing for recent content, as chances are the older one is still quite deep in search results already), but it may take you some time to migrate everything. For a start, you can potentially begin with moving your most popular, useful, or recent posts first and decide what to do with the rest later.

One potential in-between variant to the above (to save some time and be less bothered by the duplicate content) is to shorten your content for one of the sources (for example, full version on your site, shorter version on the blogging platform). Personally, in that case I would prefer to make both of the versions complete: meaning that the shorter one shouldn’t be just an introduction to the full version (it should still be complete, but with less details and additional information). Otherwise it may look a bit like a click-bait (although, there may be exceptions to this).

Free and paid tier options

If you have your own site, you may want to figure out your options of paying for extra features in advance or using what’s available for free. This is always a tradeoff question. Some platforms still have quite generous free tiers, but their paid options might be rather expensive. In theory, one day you may reach free tier limits and then you basically have two solutions: use another (cheaper) platform and deal with another migration or pay a higher price for convenience (to stay on the same platform).

I also think that at this moment everyone should always keep in mind a simple fact that whatever you are using for free might one day become a paid-only thing or may limit the free tier version significantly. There are many platforms that did that in the past and with each new one this feels like an inevitability, regardless of how much they offer at the beginning. I’m mentioning this not to sound negative, it honestly feels like a natural progression for any platform. If it gets more popular, more people start using it, which creates additional financial impact on running the platform, hence they have to adapt (how to adapt and if there is a proper way of doing it is a topic for a whole new story).

It may be slightly less likely with already established platforms (like Vercel or Netlify, if we talk about hosting and deploying sites), but in the era of AIs that can create sites in minutes, even they may get overwhelmed by new users, so it’s hard to tell what would come next (for example, Netlify has already revised their pricing because of this factor).

So, overall, with any free option you should always be ready to either start paying for it, or to use reduced functionality (and be prepared that it may get more reduced), or to have a relatively easy way of switching to something else one day.

Closing thoughts

To make a brief conclusion, figuring out what would be the best option for you in terms of content is always a question of finding some compromise and tailor it to your own needs. Sometimes you may want to use what’s already there and adapt, sometimes you prefer to spend time to create your own solution from scratch and be in full control of it. Most of the time, it becomes a mix of everything and you have to balance your choices.

Thank you for reading.

Originally written here on my Medium blog.