15 Significant Differences Between A Website And A Blog

Many online as well as offline businesses these days are preferring to make a blog instead of a website. What exactly distinguishes a blog from a website? And which one is more effective? Read on to find out 15 significant differences between a website and a web log (blog). 

A website and a blog can be distinguished from each other on the basis of the following. 

1. Frequency Of Updates.

A blog is updated and new posts are published regularly. Mostly bloggers aim to write on trending topics. The posts or articles on a blog are most of the times informative.

Whereas a website is rarely updated. And it may contain information about services or products. A website might have a static landing page.

2. Dynamic And Static Content.

Blogs have dynamic content. Posts are displayed on the home page in the reverse chronological order. Posts written on a blog may contain date and time stamps. Design and functionality updates are frequent to keep the blog new and fresh all the time.

Websites have static home pages which are hardly updated. Once the site is designed and developed, design and functionality updates are infrequent.

3. Search Engine Ranking.

Blogs appear higher on Google search engine results page (SERP) than websites. This is so because one of the most important ranking factors for Google is “Freshness of content“. The more frequently a web property is updated, the higher the chances of it appearing higher in the SERPs.

Although websites are rarely updated but they too have fair chances of appearing higher on Google if they contain relevant and best content.

4. Which Is More Conversational?

Of course Blogs are considered more informal and conversational. Blogs have posts which are written in a conversational tone. Also many blogs have commenting systems installed on them for the purpose of encouraging discussions and conversation.

Many business websites are adding blogs in order to avoid any kind of communication gap between the visitors and the business owners.

Some blogs as well as websites add forums to encourage reader’s/customer’s feedback, discussion, support or help, collaborative tasks, inquiry or complaints.

5. Communication Style.

As discussed under the above sub heading, blogs have conversational tone and they are meant for discussions. If blogs don’t contain any kind of interactions they are considered as ghost house.

The key to run a successful blog is to have quality discussions or create interactive content. Whereas a website might or might not give importance to engagement and discussions. But website owners must surely take customer satisfaction seriously.

6. Information.

Blogs contain extensive information about whichever niches they are concerned with. The information on the blogs are regularly updated or changed based on the recent happenings. Whereas websites may only contain information about a particular company, business, service or product.

7. Marketing.

Blogs can be marketed using inbound marketing as well as outbound marketing. Inbound marketing is nothing but permission-based marketing. It relies of getting customers attracted to the service. Marketers help, add value, educate or entertain audiences. As blogs are interactive in nature so they facilitate a two-way process. This is the reason why almost all the blogs ask their readers to subscribe in exchange of their content.

Whereas websites mainly adopt outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is forceful in nature. It is mainly done using paid advertisements, cold calls or e-mails which rarely add value. If site owners wish to make use of inbound marketing, they might consider adding blogs to their business sites.

8. Money spent on Marketing.

Blogs concentrate on providing value to the readers. Hence, blogs have tendency to attract massive visitors without any money spent on advertising. On the other hand, websites require adopting paid advertising to sell their services or products as they might have no value adding features.

9. Community.

A blog might have a bigger and better community than a website. As mentioned before, blog encourages interactions so blog readers might also prefer interacting among themselves than to the actual author.

In contrast to a blog, website visitors can only interact with the owners. To stimulate community feeling, websites might add forums or blogs.

10. Setup Cost.

Blogs can easily be created using free or charged services like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad, etc.

A website might require to be coded by a professional coder who can build it as per requirements. Blogs have a pre-structured layout and template. Major design chances may require installing new theme or tweaking all the codes.

11. Expertise.

You don’t need to be an expert to maintain and backup your blog; thanks to the content management systems.

On the other hand, websites might or might not be made using content management system. So the level of expertise required to maintain a website may differ based on the basic building blocks used to create the site.

12. Blogs are websites.

All the blogs are websites but all websites are not blogs. Websites can add blogs to get readers and credibility.

13. Relationship Building.

Since blogs are based on the concept of permission marketing and adding value, bloggers build great relationships with their readers.

Websites fail to establish quality and dedicated relationships most of the times because of the lack of commenting system and value adding capability (other than by selling services or products).

14. You can add Widgets to a Blog.

Plugins or widgets like Recent Posts, Popular posts, Recent comments, Top commentators, Engagement widgets can be added to a blog. Different plugins or Widgets facilitate different purposes.

For example: Recent Posts widget arranges the blog posts in a reverse chronological order (latest to oldest) on the sidebar or footer of the blog.

You cannot add such widgets to a website because there exists no posts.

15. Blogs have a RSS FEED.

Since blogs are updated regularly (maybe daily, weekly or monthly) they attract readers. Readers are asked to subscribe in order to receive latest blog updates through an emailing system which is technically known as RSS subscription. 

Over to you! 

I hope you can now easily differentiate between a website and a blog. If you have more differences or criterion on which websites and blogs can be distinguished, do let us know in the comments below. Or if you still have any questions regarding a blog or a website, feel free to ask your questions using the comments box below.