Features of an Ideal Blogging Platform
A friend asked me, what are the necessary features that the platform must have?
My blogging knowledge doesn’t extend beyond WordPress and Medium, I haven’t used any other platforms, ever. But then I thought about it, what features I won’t continue without.
Here’s what I think:
- The platform should have the ability to add custom meta titles and description, so that you can have a better optimized title and description for the SERP and social media.
- There should be analytics, pre-added or a way to add Google Analytics, to track the progress.
- You should be able to add your blog to the Google Search Console (and to Bing Webmasters as well) to speed up and better the indexing process and track for any indexing errors.
- Sitemaps help search engines discover the newly posted content quickly and help them decide the indexing priority as well, so there should be a sitemap.
- The blog should load fast, you should pay special attention to if the loading speed is good enough. Who knows if loading speed becomes a ranking factor in the coming years?
- There should be a good way to navigate the website.
- It shouldn’t be too difficult to add internal links. I mean, if you have to open a new tab every time you have to add an internal link and manually find the articles that can be linked, it’s not efficient and takes a lot of time. I really prefer WordPress in this context, just select the text, start typing a few characters and the related articles will appear.
- There should also be a setup for you to be able to collect leads, or a way for your visitors to be able to subscribe to your newsletters. However, you can always provide an external link for people to subscribe but having an inbuilt system is an added bonus.
- It should let you add images in the blog posts easily. It shouldn’t be like you have to host images shomewhere else and then link them to the blog post. There should also be a feature to add Alt Text in images.
- Open Graph images are not a big deal, but if added, the shared links look good on the social media and on other platforms where link previews are shown (see the below screenshot).
Here’s how it looks when I share links on Twitter
And not to mention, the platform should offer a clean writing and editing experience. The editor should be distraction-free.
That’s it.
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