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I wanted to work on a newsletter but I realized I was building a cage around it

5 points yuwahhid | 1 comments | 17 Oct 25 11:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.227s | source

I'm about to launch a newsletter and I'm stuck picking the right platform.

On one hand, the simplicity of something like Substack is tempting. I just want to focus on writing.

But if I go that route, every post will be invisible to Google, trapped inside their ecosystem. I'll be renting my audience on someone else's land.

The alternative is a WordPress blog, but wrestling with plugins and updates on top of writing every week feels overwhelming.

For those of you who have been down this road:

1. If you were starting over today, what would you do? 2. Is the discoverability problem on closed platforms as bad as I'm imagining, or am I overthinking it?

1. understandwp ◴[17 Oct 25 12:10 UTC] No.45615816[source]▶
I cannot comment on the closed systems, as I have not used them, but I do think that WordPress is a viable option.

If you just want to write and for the writing to be seen by Google, then you really do not need more than a couple of plugins and you should have a working blog that you do not need to spend any time on maintaining.

I would go with GeneratePress - https://wordpress.org/themes/generatepress/ and its companion plugin GenerateBlocks - https://wordpress.org/plugins/generateblocks/ for some simple blocks to design the blog. Both of them are well-coded and fast/lightweight.

In addition to them I would use SEO Framework - https://wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/ as the SEO plugin and you are set. Just set everything to auto update and there should not really be any issues.

No affiliation to any of those plugins/themes, but have been using GeneratePress, GenerateBlocks and GeneratePress Premium for years and not one update has broken anything for me.