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<\/a><\/p>\nWordPress vs. Medium<\/h2>\nPurpose<\/h3>\n
WordPress was originally envisioned<\/a> by Matt Mullenweg in 2003 as a blogging platform and that\u2019s what it became in its initial years of life. However, today the CMS is capable of much more than that.<\/p>\n A total quarter of the internet is powered by WordPress, totaling\u00a0more than 74 million websites. In addition,\u00a0more than half<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0the entire CMS market share on\u00a0the entire internet uses WordPress.<\/p>\n Source:\u00a0trends.builtwith.com\/cms<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n In terms of blogs on the web, WordPress powers a whopping 95 percent of them. These aren\u2019t all hobbyist blogs either. The evolved WordPress is used by many\u00a0notable brands<\/a>\u00a0as a versatile web solution for building an audience.<\/p>\n On the contrary, Medium is what founder and former CEO of Twitter Ev Williams described as, \u201ca new place on the internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.\u201d<\/p>\n Medium is a place intended to allow people to share their written thoughts and ideas. The environment of the social media platform is controlled\u2014meaning it cannot\u00a0be altered in any way.\u00a0The only thing you control is what you write.<\/p>\n Medium’s market share is relatively small, with less than one percent of blogs used on the site. However, many choose to use the social platform\u00a0because it allows them to focus on writing without having to worry about other aspects, like site design and customization.<\/p>\n As a writer, Medium offers the benefit of\u00a0discoverability over anything else. Writers discover other writers, which is determined by categories including:\u00a0Editor’s Picks, Reading Roulette, Top Stories, and other customized subjects.<\/p>\n Verdict:\u00a0<\/strong>WordPress is made to build complex sites and beautiful blogs. Medium is simply a way to share your writing with others, as well as read about interesting subject matter.<\/p>\n While WordPress is open source and completely customizable, Medium has a locked design that cannot be altered. Site customization is important if you\u2019re looking to build\u00a0brand identity. But from a writer’s perspective, the technical aspects of modifying a site can be distracting and costly. This is one area where WordPress and Medium vastly differ.<\/p>\n Medium makes it easy to focus on writing with its minimal, sleek design, but it cannot be customized. WordPress too provides a beautiful, easy to use interface to work with, and you can take it further than given (the true beauty of WordPress).<\/p>\n In WordPress, customization requires a learning curve and there are many hidden features<\/a> that take time to discover.<\/p>\n With Medium, setup of your profile takes mere minutes. Setup with WordPress only takes minutes as well. Yet it will require time\u00a0to modify the look of your site or blog (which can actually be quite fun). WordPress comes with thousands of themes and plugins, helping you extend the\u00a0functionality of your site galaxies beyond\u00a0what you can do with Medium.<\/p>\n Verdict:\u00a0<\/strong>WordPress is the clear winner for customization, while Medium takes the lead for setup speed. It takes less time to setup Medium because there’s no customization involved.\u00a0WordPress is relatively quick to setup, but if you want to customize the design of your site, that’ll take extra time.<\/p>\n The better platform for getting your content discovered by search engines is without a doubt WordPress.\u00a0You can easily manage basic SEO using an\u00a0SEO plugin<\/a>, like Yoast.<\/p>\n Posting content to Medium is quite different in terms of SEO. The options for boosting\u00a0SEO on WordPress are nonexistent with Medium. For instance, you can’t<\/em> alter the meta-description of an article, nor can you add alt attributes to your images to make them rank higher. Want to customize how your content is shared on\u00a0Twitter?\u00a0Not possible. But with WordPress you can pretty much accomplish any desired SEO boosting action.<\/p>\n Another downside to SEO with Medium…if\u00a0duplicating content, for example\u00a0posting an article\u00a0on Medium that you’ve already published\u00a0somewhere else, it’s very likely\u00a0the\u00a0original content will outperform the Medium content<\/a> on search engines.<\/p>\n Verdict:\u00a0<\/strong>If you want your article to rank, don’t rely on\u00a0Medium as its main home.\u00a0WordPress is the clear winner here, with its out-of-the-box SEO functionality and SEO plugins that help\u00a0drive traffic to your site.<\/p>\n You can use a variety of analytics plugins<\/a>\u00a0on WordPress to measure the success of your content.<\/p>\n Medium\u00a0has a\u00a0built-in stats feature<\/a>\u00a0which measures metrics like views and reads. However, Medium doesn’t allow the usage of external analytics. So you won’t be able to use Google Analytics or other stats tools outside the platform.<\/p>\n Verdict:<\/strong>\u00a0WordPress can be integrated with many analytics tools, while Medium is extremely limited in measuring traffic, views, and other content performance metrics.<\/p>\n There are not many published\u00a0statistics about the usage of Medium, other than it gets around 30 million visitors per month<\/a>.\u00a0Many famous brands and writers utilize Medium to share their stories and thoughts, including REI, Starbucks, Intel, Michelle Obama, and even WordPress founder himself, Matt Mullenweg.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nCustomization and Setup<\/h3>\n
Customization<\/h4>\n
Setup<\/h4>\n
SEO<\/h3>\n
Analytics<\/h3>\n
Popularity and Usage<\/h3>\n