Setting up your blog

Setting up a blog is a short wizard. Open it from Host your blog with Rankbench on your dashboard, from Where it publishes in the content calendar, or from an article that has nowhere to go yet. (When the calendar has written articles waiting, its Publish on a free blog answers all four questions for you in one press: see publishing calendar articles to your blog.) It asks four things and saves each one before moving on, so a closed tab or a refresh halfway through picks up where you were. Nothing is published until the last step.

The blog is free, so there is no plan to choose first. Writing articles with AI is the part of Rankbench that needs Pro.

1. Name and address

The blog's name and an optional tagline. The name is what readers see in the header and what appears in the feed and in search results, so use the name of the publication rather than the name of the company, if those differ.

Two more fields sit here because they are awkward to change later.

Language sets the lang attribute on every page and the language on the feed. It affects how the writing is read by anything that cares about language, including screen readers.

Time zone is the one that catches people. Scheduled posts, dates on posts and the "published at" line all use it. Set it to the time zone you think in, not the one your server is in.

Address is your blog's Rankbench address, something.rankbench.site. It follows the name until you change it, it has to be free, and it works the moment you go live. Your own domain can wait: see the last step.

2. Look

A set of designs, each a complete design rather than a colour scheme. Each card is your own blog's name rendered in that design, so you choose by looking.

Editorial is a magazine feature: serif headlines, a wide measure, covers running to the edge.

Minimal is one column and nothing else. No cards, no shadows.

Magazine puts a grid of covers up front and lets categories do the sorting.

Studio is bold type and colour, for a practice that shows its work.

Journal reads like a newsletter in a browser, centred and personal.

Noir is dark first and high contrast.

Signal leads with a dark featured story, a scrolling topic bar and a compact three-column feed.

Orbit is bright, with a feature story, supporting reads and shelves by category.

Pick the closest one. Everything in it is editable afterwards in the design studio, down to individual colours, and switching preset later does not lose your posts.

3. Bring your posts

Three ways to start, and which appear depends on what you have.

Start from the content calendar shows up when the calendar has drafted articles waiting. They arrive in Posts as drafts, not as published posts, in the minute after your blog goes live, so you read them before anybody else does.

Import from another platform takes an export file from WordPress, Ghost, Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, Medium, Substack and others. Your addresses are kept, so nobody's links break. See bringing a blog across.

Start empty gives you a blank blog and a blank first post. You can import at any time later from the Import screen.

This step disappears on a resume if the blog already has posts in it. Offering the import again at that point is how somebody ends up with every post twice.

4. Go live

A summary of your answers and one button. Until you press it, the blog exists but answers nothing: no reader can reach it and no search engine can find it.

This step is also where your own domain comes up, because it can wait. Every blog works on its Rankbench address the moment it goes live; blog.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com/blog can be added whenever you like, and the posts move with you. See using your own domain.

Going live also connects the blog to your content calendar. If the calendar already publishes somewhere else, it keeps publishing there until you choose otherwise. See publishing calendar articles to your blog.

Afterwards

The wizard does not come back. What it set up lives in two places:

Settings holds the name, tagline, language, time zone, what the front page shows, the feed, robots and the code boxes. See adding your own code.

Design holds everything about the look.

If you need to undo the whole thing, Settings has a final tab for it. Deleting a blog takes its pages out of the internal link pool and out of any partnership that was using them, which is the part people forget.