When To Use Medium Instead Of WordPress For Your Blog—Perspectives

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Hey! I really Loved what WordPress has done so far over the years! I’m still using WordPress for other specific work purposes, and totally only trust WordPress for it as it gave me the right concoction for the task I have at hand.

So… Why Am I Writing This Article then?

Read This Article ONLY IF, you had experienced the following, like me:

1. You constantly think about how ‘Perfect’ you want your blog to be— It must have ‘Perfect’ content, ‘Perfect’ English, ‘Perfect’ layouts, etc.
2. You constantly brood over what you have potentially written as a draft— The draft never left your notebook and never-ever-placed-in-your-blog, as you haven’t settled on how ‘Perfect’ your blog must look and how well-structured it must be yet.
3. You constantly stress about how much control you wanted— Being perfect is one thing, but having the need for full control in the layout design of your WordPress blog, every single tiny detail of everything in your site, which just totally immerses you in more brainpower constantly thinking about perfection.
4. You constantly worry about what future potential you might lose out on— WordPress is one of the Best Platforms that is Free, and anyone can do whatever they want with what they build on WordPress. However, this ‘freedom’ can sometimes make you lose control if not kept in check, like constantly wanting new plugins/functionalities to significantly improve your website, to make it a cut above the rest.
5. You constantly think that everyone will ‘buy’ into what you write — Immediately off the press, you think the article you just wrote will be gold. It will confirm garner new waves of traffic like all the famous bloggers around. The thought of potentially just “earning money” from it, actually makes you lose track of even writing the articles you actually wanted in the first place, which is solely just for your personal blog!

Most importantly, all these worries… Do Not Actually Contribute To The Content You Were Supposed To Write On Your Blog! Completely Nadah~!

Moral Of This Situation

If you don’t improve on what you write, whatever you write is practically not interesting. If what you write is not interesting, then why would people bother to even read your blog in the first place?

So all your worries, and potential problems, actually Can’t Even Exist, because your ‘supposed blog’ isn’t even validated by the general public!

Why Bother?… Consider all the load of worries you have been putting on yourself.

Then… I Woke Up

I realized at this point that I had wanted to write stuff and share my experiences in hopes that it can benefit others through the ordeals I’ve suffered. My first thought of this was roughly 6 years ago.

6 years on. Nothing has yet happened.

So just a few days ago, I made a decision to just port out the supposed website from one of my WordPress web-hosted servers, sign up for my Medium account, started the procedure to do some domain-name customization, and then I just started writing!

All these were done within One-Day… Except for the domain-name customization which took quite a little while.

So Now… Why Medium Over WordPress?

Medium has been doing a kickass job since its inception into the market a few years ago. The main draw is their simplicity in design and their ease of use for writing.

So here is a few good reasons for my decision to turn to Medium, and have since totally enjoyed the new workflow and experience as I’m really just focusing on penning down what I had always wanted!

1. Simplicity in The Space You Can Write On. — There’s just so much clean, white space. No clutter on the sides of the page. It is such a comfortable experience to just keep on writing. You’ll realize that you can just fully focus on what you are writing. WordPress just kinda has too many controls cluttering up all the space around the writing area all the time.
2. Good UI That Adds Basic Functions When Needed. — There are only basically a few text formatting functions you will ever, frequently use. No doubt, I have to admit Medium did make it a bit too limiting, but I still survived on what I had. Most importantly, these controls only appear as and when I needed them. Else, it’s just pure, good white space! WordPress just didn’t really focus on their UI/UX part of the job, I mean I don’t blame them! It’s just not their job! Their focus is giving us full control over everything else! And they really good at it!
3. Media Content Inserts Are Such A Breeze. — I love having images/media to add life to my writing. And it was truly an enjoyable and easy experience to insert any popular content into my Medium post. Loved the way how easy it is to add captions and credits. Drag and drops are a breeze as well, and I totally loved the ease of changing how the image will be displayed. WordPress on the other hand, though super robust, the workflow of getting an image in, requires at least 4–5 steps for one image and practically a few more extras for a small series of images. It’s just not really ‘user-friendly’ when you just really want to focus on writing a piece of work when your thoughts just flow.
4. Auto-Saving Function Is A Plus. — Sometimes, when you write, you just write, and write, and write. Then you’ll just forget that you need to save your work! Medium just automates it! WordPress may have an auto-save-to-browser function, but it doesn’t 100% work all the time, and will probably screw up if your browser crashes or your web-host end went offline.
5. Publishing Is Just A Few Clicks Away. — Their limiting 5-tags, will hopefully have more leeway in the future. But, it does help get the job done. Took me probably a few clicks in about 3 minutes, and the article is pushed out! WordPress may need me to relocate the different modular boxes to fill up the potentially long list of tags before I can eventually push out my post, which took me a little more than 5 minutes.
6. New Posts Are Just Easy. — Just 2-Clicks with Medium. My new thoughts can just continue to flow like water into the new dedicated white space. I can just freely let my thoughts and ideas pop freely. When using WordPress, ‘standardized processes’ have to be thought out first, which kind of drains the creativity behind the writing. When the post is finally created, I might have already totally lost interest in the first sentence I wrote.
7. Publication Setup Took Like 10-Mins. — A publication’s official setup will usually take up more than a day, notably if you want to have a more “modern look” to your blog. After roughly gauging what each control meant on the publication setup page, adding the necessary segments was just easier on Medium. Given the extensive control you will have in WordPress, dabbling it to be ‘perfect’, will probably take you at least a day. While there is the default look by their standardized yearly themes, the default layouts are just usually kinda ugly.
8. Direct Notifications & Useful Stats. — Though Medium can significantly improve in this segment, I totally like their direct notifications on articles’ statuses and overlay statistics that just give me an overall short brief of what’s happening on my blog. Just direct and straightforward! WordPress gave me many great, in-depth options! But, took me a super long while just to set it up, and get to finding out who actually really read want, I really needed to be a tech-junkie to know where to find what is happening on WordPress, as well as needing to run between Google Analytics, just to find out more. Just too much work, when my blog actually a no-body.

Now the decision is in your ballpark!

Hope this will help you choose wisely!

This article first appeared in ANDWHATITHINK.COM, named "WHY You Should Just Use Medium For Your Blog Instead Of A Customise WordPress Platform" published on 5 Jan 2017, written by Robert Chai. It was reproduced with permission by Robert Chai to extend the article's helpful reach for people to compare between Medium and WordPress. The article is refreshed with updated links and typo mistakes.