Is WordPress hosting the best option for my travel blog?

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Starting a travel blog comes with many considerations. The very first consideration you will have to make is exactly what kind of blogging format you should use. There are many options out there, both free and paid. The one suggestion you will likely hear the most is WordPress. But is WordPress hosting the best option for your travel blog?

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What Do You Want Your Travel Blog to Do?

Before you start with a blogging platform of any type, you have to have an idea of what you want. Mostly, people who publish travel blogs want their adventures front and center.

You probably want large images, and text that draws the eye into wanting to read more. They want easy connectivity to social media, and they want a platform that allows others to express opinions and render feedback.

Many platforms can allow all of those things to one extent or another. However, WordPress is probably the easiest and most user-friendly blogging platform available for those that don’t want to struggle with complicated setups.

How Much Control Do You Want?

The odds are that you want full control of your blog, its contents, and its design. If you choose a free blogging service, you give up control.

WordPress also offers a free option in the form of WordPress.com, but if you want full control, you’ll need a self-hosted blog. That will give you the flexibility to do what you want and post how you like. In that way, WordPress hosting really is the best option for a travel blog.

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How Easy Do You Want It To Be?

The truth is that WordPress comes with a learning curve. Then again, every hosted blogging tool comes with a learning curve. In all fairness, WordPress is a lot easier to set up and start using than most.

In fact, many webhosts come with one-click installations of WordPress. So all you would have to do is install it with a click and start blogging. For many, hosting for WordPress is actually a selling point.

The real nature of the learning curve comes with attempting to make use of the WordPress themes, plugins, and modification ecosystem. This isn’t something you should worry too much about though.

  • The WordPress community is large
  • Support is around every corner
  • Heavy documentation about every feature is out there
  • Most things are “plug-and-play”

In fact, WordPress has a tremendous amount of add-ons called “plugins” that you can use to make blogging your adventures that much easier. It’s not a stretch to say that almost anything you can think of regarding your blog has a plugin or two that can make it happen, and often free of charge.

If you search, there are even plugins specifically designed to help travel blogs. For instance, you can find one that will automatically update a map with the places you’ve been as you blog about them.

Or, you may want a plugin that automatically formats your photos to look good on your blog as you post them, or a plugin that creates an accessible and eye-pleasing portfolio of your travels. These things are all possible with WordPress plugins.

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How Unique Do You Want Your Travel Blog to Be?

The truth is that anybody can start up a travel blog. It doesn’t take much. But if you want yours to stand out in a crowd you will need finer control over the look and feel. Many blogging platforms look like many other ones.

If you want yours to stand out, then WordPress hosting is probably the best way to go. WordPress allows you to adopt themes, even themes tailor made for travel blogging. It also allows you to customize those themes in a multitude of ways.

With that ability, you can create, or hire someone to create, a travel blog that looks and behaves like nothing else on the Internet.

Keeping Everybody Updated and Informed

WordPress and its plugins also make it easy for you to gather subscribers, push out newsletters, and otherwise inform people of your activities. It boasts a high level of connectivity to anything you want your blog connected to.

This also goes a long way towards promoting your travel blog. Imagine alerting all of your social networks when you post something new. Imagine a search engine friendly blog that search engines can easily find and index. WordPress makes these things possible.

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Advertising that You Choose

One of the best features of your self-hosted WordPress blog is that there are no automatic advertisements. It’s your blog, your domain, your stuff.

You don’t have to display third party ads or post third party content. Of course, if you want to, you can certainly monetize your blog any way you want. It’s your choice to do it or not.

There Are Things You Need to Know

While a lot of this may sound like cheerleading for a hosted WordPress solution, it’s important to understand that a WordPress blog isn’t always fun and games. As previously mentioned, there is a learning curve.

In addition, the more you want to do with your blog, the more you will need to know about the inner workings of your WordPress installation. Beyond that, it’s important to remember that the platform and the plugins are independent of each other.

That means an update to one can cause a problem to the other. If you know nothing of your WordPress installation and how it works, it can become quite the headache when a problem occurs.

Of course, with all that said, remember these are the types of issues that can come with any blogging platform. The good news is that WordPress isn’t hard to navigate, and since it’s the number one blogging platform online, there’s always help available.

So to answer the original question: Is WordPress hosting the best option for your travel blog? The answer is yes. Find hosting for WordPress and you’re already halfway there.