The Best Blogging Platform for SEO in 2026
What my own Search Console numbers say.
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
The textbook answer is WordPress. Self-hosted, plugins, full control over every tag. I ran one from 2007 on, so I know the answer well.
It's not what my numbers say today.
I have Google Search Console connected to every site I write on. Medium with a custom domain, Substack with a custom domain, and two self-hosted blogs. Same writer, roughly the same kind of writing, four platforms. So instead of comparing feature lists, let's compare search traffic.
The numbers
The last 90 days, straight from Search Console:
Medium (stories.byburk.net): about 1.3 million impressions, around 12,000 clicks.
Substack (letters.byburk.net): about half a million impressions, around 2,000 clicks.
Self-hosted blog #1 (German, plain PHP, a few months old): under 700 impressions, 18 clicks.
Self-hosted blog #2 (English, also plain PHP, also young): about 2,400 impressions, 29 clicks. Most of them on the homepage.
Some of that gap is age. The Medium account goes back to 2021, the two blogs are from this year. But not all of it. My Substack has been on a custom domain for a while now and still gets a sixth of the Medium clicks.
One Medium article alone, about terminal tools on the Mac, brought about 2,200 clicks from Google in those 90 days. That's more than both blogs together will see this year. Probably.
Medium
Medium's domain authority is in the high nineties. Anything published there gets crawled fast and taken seriously by Google, whether you did anything for it or not. Put your own domain on it, and the search traffic starts to show up in your own Search Console. That one setting turned SEO into my biggest traffic source on Medium. Not the algorithm, not shares. Search.
What you don't get: control. No schema, no redirects, hardly any say over how the page is built, and the paywall sits in front of everything. Medium can change the rules, and it does. Every year, kind of.
Still. By clicks, nothing I run comes close.
Substack
Substack has an SEO title and description field, a sitemap, clean pages, and a custom domain for $50, once. Substack posts can rank within days, I've seen that a lot.
The editor is basic, though. Getting better slowly. Still no table of contents, no schema markup, and you can't set a canonical URL, which is annoying if you publish the same piece somewhere else too. And the URLs all live under /p/, which makes moving away later a bit of a redirect session.
Half a million impressions in three months is a lot of page-one appearances. Two thousand clicks is not a lot of clicks. Ranking is one thing, the click is another. Some of that is on my titles. I don't like to write SEO titles.
Some of it, I suspect, is Google answering the question itself before anyone gets to my link. AI overviews and such.
WordPress
On paper, WordPress is great. Plugins for everything, schema, redirects, canonicals, speed if you care to tune it. Every SEO checklist ever written assumes you're on it. My first blog was a German WordPress blog about tech in 2007. Never got anywhere serious, but I stuck with WordPress for a long time. Then I moved all of it to Substack for a while. Just to pick up WordPress again later.
The thing the checklists skip over sometimes: your domain starts at zero. Nobody knows it, Google included. My two new blogs have all the technical stuff done right, and they get 18 and 29 clicks a quarter. Meanwhile a Medium story with no SEO work at all gets a couple thousand.
That's not WordPress' fault, that is Medium's internal discovery and distribution at work.
It compounds, I've said that before and I still think so. Search traffic on your own domain is the one that lasts. But it's slow. Really slow. You need patience, and probably a second place to publish while you wait.
Ghost, Beehiiv and the rest
Ghost has the SEO basics built in, meta descriptions, clean URLs, sitemaps, no plugins needed. It's a good WordPress alternative. Hosted plans start at $18 a month right now. I've read a lot about it. Never run one myself. It suffers from the same issues as WordPress in terms of SEO. You start at zero and going big is slow...
Beehiiv is a newsletter tool first, a blog second. Flat fee, no cut of your revenue, blog pages included. Notion sites let you put a domain on a page now, with SEO basics, but nobody will find it unless you send them.
All of these share the WordPress problem. New domain, zero authority, slow start. The platform gives you the tools, not the authority.
Downsides
The catch with the platform route: the authority is "rented". Medium and Substack lend you theirs, and they can take it back. A rule change, a paywall change, a ban, and the traffic is gone with it. That's why I put a custom domain on everything I can. It can even make the numbers worse at first. But the addresses move with me if I ever have to leave.
The catch with the own-blog route: time. Months, more likely years, before Google trusts you.
And a catch for all of them: search itself is changing. A million impressions and twelve thousand clicks means most people saw my headline and didn't come. AI Overviews and AI tools take traffic. No platform fixes that completely.
The Bottom Line
So, the best blogging platform for SEO? By my numbers, Medium with a custom domain. By a mile. Substack second. My own blogs either vanilla PHP or WordPress last... for now.
This is what I expected a couple of years ago. The checklists say the "real" blog should win. But the real blog nowadays is Medium or Substack with a custom domain, in my eyes.
What I'd do, and what I do: publish on Medium and Substack, both on my own domain, and keep a blog on the side for the long game. Then stop worrying about the platform and worry about the topic. Write the thing people type into Google. That part matters more than where it lives, I think.
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