Free blogging tools for beginners
When you're starting a blog, you don't know how many hats you'll need to wear in your blogging career. And you don't know how many different software tools you will need to learn and use on a daily basis.
You will need many A blog hosting, a website building platform, a blog theme, an email service provider, an image editing software, a social media management tool, a search engine optimization tool, and that's just to name a few.
But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part is when you discover that for each category of tools, there are dozens and sometimes even hundreds of options to choose from.
You're gonna get like, just look at this catalog of WordPress themes. Keep looking, because you will have to choose just one of these.
Now, do you still want to be a blogger? If the answer is yes, that's good. Because this article will save you hours upon hours of research. It will also save you from doing a couple of refund requests. Because I will only give you the best options that I personally tried and tested.
You know, I've been blogging for over four years now and I cannot say that I tried it all. But I have enough experience to share with you my top list of blogging tools in this article.
Hi, I'm Ahmed of ozearn.com and on this blog I share my online business tips. My goal is to reach over a million people with this blog and to help you all transition to online income streams.
Now I will talk about lots of tools in this article and I will give you links in the below. But I guess your blog blogging journey will be a long one and you won't need all these tools right now.
So if you want to get back to this list of tools in a nicely organized PDF format, I will give you a link up here, so that you can save it on your computer for later.
The Best Blogging Tools for Beginners 2025
Now, blogging involves several steps. You will start with choosing your blogging niche, then organizing data related to your blog topics or your blog posts, writing SEO friendly articles, designing some appealing graphics, building a community and promoting everything.
But it doesn't mean that you'll have to hire someone to start and manage your blog. You can totally do it yourself using the best blogging tools that will help you from step one.
Creating Your Blog
And the first step would be well Actually creating your blog. Here, you will need to first understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
WordPress is the number one most used platform when it comes to making blogs or websites. Sure you can start with their free blog hosting platform that's called WordPress.com.
But the downside to this is that you will have very little control over your blog. Meaning you can only place your site under a subdomain, something like your site name.WordPress.com you will have limited disk space and you won't be able to place your own ads on the blog.
And if you just go to WordPress.org and download WordPress Website Builder, which is totally free by the way, then you will build a self hosted blog. You will have full control over everything on your blog.
You can install the necessary tools, you can have your own domain, something like yourURL.com and you can also use ads.
WordPress.org has to be set up with your hosting provider, so let's talk about that. Hosting providers if you're not building a self hosted site, you will not be able to put ads on your site and essentially you cannot make money with your blog.
Your site may also become laggy or load really slow if you use a free hosting platform and you technically don't own the site, the platform owns it.
So let's agree that we need to pay for hosting, but can you start with a very affordable plan? Yes. I started my blog with Bluehost.
Bluehost is a leading hosting provider for beginner bloggers, especially if you plan to build your blog on WordPress, which you should by the way I already told you, don't use Squarespace or Wix.
I don't want to go into a lot of details on that here, but these platforms can look a bit easier for beginners, but they're very limited in the long run. Just forget about anything except WordPress if you're building a blog.
As for the hosting, Bluehost has the most affordable plans for beginner bloggers. You can host your WordPress blog with them at a price as low as $2.95 a month and you get a 24 hour customer support via chat.
Plus you can get a free domain name for the first year and a free SSL certificate. That's to have your blog on HTTPs secure address. And you can get a special discount through my link.
And bluehost is a great option for beginners, but when your blog starts getting a lot more traffic, then site speed becomes your priority. And if you start making some real money with your blog, you'd rather pay for a managed WordPress hosting.
And in the last year or so, I've been using for my blogs BigScoots. They provide unmatched support and I can sleep better at night knowing that my sites are in good hands.
WordPress Theme
Now that you have your domain, the next and probably the most important step is to choose a WordPress theme.
That doesn't only look nice, but also makes your site fast, because site speed is crucial for both your rankings in Google and for potential ad income.
Sure, you can get the default and free WordPress themes, but there are several setbacks to this. First, your site could look too similar to other sites that are using the same free theme. Next, you won't really have any customer support in case you need help. And lastly, customization options could be very limited.
Astra Theme
I'm using Astra theme on one of my blogs. It makes my blog fast and you can start with a free version. I am using the paid version of this theme and there is a certain level of support, but I would say there is definitely room for improvement in terms of support for Astra theme.
Divi Theme
And my next favorite premium theme is called Divi. It can make your site a bit slower than it would be with Astra, but it has a great community and customer support and the theme itself gives you very impressive tools for customization.
You don't have to hard code anything because they have this amazing Divi editor. It's perfect for a newbie blogger, seriously. And they have a 30 day money back guarantee by the way. So you can try the theme with no risk at all. But I'm sure you will fall in love with this theme.
Email Marketing Tools
Now let's talk about the email marketing tools that I can recommend. When starting a blog, most of the people kind of ignore email marketing, but it's a crucial part of building a long lasting connection with your audience.
Aside from writing compelling and conversational blog posts, you should also constantly reach out to them with emails that are relevant to your blog posts.
And you could email them short blog like posts, maybe product recommendations and a lot more. But through this your audience could actually reply to you and have a one on one conversation with you.
But to successfully do this you need a high quality email marketing tool so that your emails don't end up in the spam folders too often.
Mailchimp
Let me first tell you what I don't recommend here, it's Mailchimp. It's probably the one that you'll hear about a lot because it has a generous free plan.
But the downside is that your email open rates will be very low with this provider. Meaning that for a lot of your subscribers, your newsletter will go directly to the spam folder. And also mailchimp has a lot of user experience issues and I don't feel comfortable with their interface.
ConvertKit
So I personally use ConvertKit and it even has a free plan to try the software. I think it's the best email provider for bloggers. I love the feature which allows you to resend emails only to people who didn't open your latest newsletter.
And I also love in convertkit that when I added sequence it doesn't get paused and I don't have to republish it over and over again after making every little change.
It's such a lifesaver and ConvertKit somehow happens to have very smooth integrations with about anything in the world. Any software that I ever needed to use for my online business had ConvertKit on the list of integrations.
Deadline Funnel
Now I will also mention here Deadline Funnel in this section. Although it's not exactly an email provider, it's a software that you might need to use if you sell products and if create landing pages and evergreen funnels on your blog.
So it's a pretty advanced tool that you might need further down the line in your online business. It's the best tool for creating real urgency in an evergreen funnel with countdown timers that can be added and synced across multiple platforms including your website, landing pages, webinar pages, and your emails as well.
Image Optimization Tools
And once you've found some beautiful images for your website and your blog posts, there may be times when you need to edit them or make a collage out of them. So I use Canva for everything.
Canva is a free web based tool that allows you to easily create and design images for your posts for your product images, social media graphics, and so much more.
And what's good about this is that you can get tons of templates and graphics for free. I personally love canva, especially when I need to make pins for my blog posts.
Keyword Research Tools
Now let's talk about keyword research and SEO tools. It is not enough to just make great content. If you want your website or blog posts to rank up in Google search results, then you should also focus on website SEO.
This means that you will have to do keyword research basically every time that you make a new blog post or a page on your site.
In a nutshell Keyword research is especially important for SEO or Search Engine Optimization, which helps your content get found in search engines like Google or Pinterest or YouTube.
Sure, you can do keyword research by getting search suggestions on Google, but if you want to be really a pro at SEO, then here are some tools that I personally use:
Keywords Everywhere
First one is called Keywords Everywhere. This is a browser extension that will show you keyword volume and some additional keyword ideas right in the search results. It's very affordable on a monthly fee, so it's great even for beginners.
There are some pretty expensive SEO tools that will cost you over $100 a month, but I'm not going to recommend them to beginners because I know that you're on a tight budget.
Ubersuggest
The other tool I can also recommend is Ubersuggest. It's a free keyword research tool that specializes in generating new keyword ideas.
Aside from keyword ideas, you will be able to see the search volume, the competition, and even seasonal trends for each keyword.
This is perfect if you want to know more about your competitors and you want to be on track with whatever is trending on the Internet.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Now on your website you still need to have an SEO plugin. Most WordPress themes already have Yoast SEO installed by default, but if your site doesn't have it, then just go ahead and install the plugin.
Yoast SEO is your best friend when it comes to optimizing your content for keywords. The plugin offers a premium upgrade, but you can do so much in the free version like adding your meta descriptions, which is important for Google SEO.
Social Media Management Tools
Now that you have a well optimized website and a bunch of good posts on your site, you need to attract more visitors and social media is a great place to start.
Tailwind Scheduler
So for Pinterest you will need something that allows you to schedule pins up to 20 times a day. Tailwind is officially authorized Pinterest Scheduler.
Tailwind also gives optimized and recommended time slots for scheduling your pins when your audience is more active on Pinterest.
And aside from this, you can also use Tailwind to schedule posts on other social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook. And if you want to get a free one month trial, check out my link.
Grow Plugin by Mediavine
And what I use on my blogs for social media sharing buttons is called Grow Plugin by Mediavine. It's highly customizable and allows me to choose where exactly in the post I want to see the buttons above or below the content.
But I really recommend it because it's the best plugin to control your Pinterest, save buttons and images that you want to be pinned and also pin descriptions.
Other Free Blogging Tools
And I also want to mention a few other free blogging tools which were hard to categorize but they're very important.
So Pinterest is the main platform for bloggers and content creators when you want to gain readers and traffic to your website really fast.
And Pinterest is not just a social media platform, but it's also a search engine. And as long you post eye catching pins and use the strategies that I recommend through my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course, then you're good to go.
Antispam Bee Plugin
And the other thing that you will need to have on the blog is something to prevent spammy comments. Even if you are just a beginner with less than ten blog posts. You will still receive annoying spam comments, if your comments section is activated on WordPress.
The Antispam Bee Plugin is the easiest and a free spam blocker for WordPress. Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and track backs them effectively even without Captcha. And it's also compliant with European data privacy standards.
Grammarly
And once you have a website, you will essentially become a writer, right? And if you know that you can occasionally do typos or mistakes in writing, then you may need a tool to suggest some corrections. And this is where Grammarly will become your lifesaver.
This plugin can correct your grammatical errors and spelling, and it can even suggest better words and some phrases, and all for free.
Google Analytics
And finally, Google Analytics. This is a free tool that tracks how many people visit your site, but they give you so much more than that.
You will be able to track how much time your audience spends browsing on your blog and the demographics, for example countries they're from, their gender, etc. And this is a really must have tool to see if your website is doing well, again, it's free as well.
Conclusion:
I think I'm done with my list, but you don't have to necessarily install everything that I mentioned at once. Take it easy, one step at a time.
And if you have some questions, come back to this article and ask me in the comments section and I will answer to the best of my knowledge. With that said, I wish you all the good luck on your blogging journey.
