What the hosted blog is

Most of Rankbench works on a site you already have somewhere else. This part is different: the blog is hosted here. You write a post, press Publish, and a reader opens it seconds later on your own address.

That matters for one practical reason. Everything else in the product knows about a page only after it has crawled it. A post on your hosted blog is known the moment it exists, so the audit, the internal link pool and the content calendar all work on it straight away.

What you get

Posts and pages, with drafts, a review status and scheduling.

A design studio with seven presets, every colour and both typefaces under your control, and a preview that redraws as you change things.

A media library that resizes and re-encodes what you upload, keeps the original, and tracks which pictures still have no description.

Your own address. A Rankbench one works immediately; your own domain takes two DNS records; and if your main site can carry it, the blog can live at yourdomain.com/blog instead of on a subdomain.

An importer that brings a blog across from somewhere else and keeps every address, so nothing anybody has linked to breaks.

Authors, categories and tags, a sitemap, an RSS and JSON feed, redirects, and a box for your own code in the page head.

What it costs

The blog is free. Setting it up, going live, writing and editing posts, the design studio, your own domain and importing need no plan, and there is no per-post charge and no traffic charge.

Writing articles with AI is part of Pro. On Pro, the content calendar writes articles on the days you schedule and can publish them to this blog; without it, you write posts yourself in the editor. One thing inside the blog is Pro as well: your own code on every page.

Pictures count against a storage allowance, which the library shows you as a bar once you are three quarters of the way through it.

Stopping Pro does nothing to the blog. It keeps serving, and you can keep writing in it.

What it does not try to be

It is a blog, not a website builder. There is no page canvas and no drag-and-drop layout. Pages are written the same way posts are, which is why the design studio has presets rather than an empty grid.

It does not touch your main site. A blog on blog.yourdomain.com is served by us; everything on yourdomain.com is still served by whoever serves it now. The one exception is path mode, and that is a rule you add to your own site rather than something we do to it.

It will not write posts for you here. The content calendar is what writes articles, and it can publish them to this blog. The editor is for people writing.

Where it is

CMS in the sidebar, once a website has a blog. Before that, the first visit lands on the setup wizard. Under it are Posts, Pages, Media, Design, Domain, Import and Settings.

What to read next

Setting up your blog is the five questions the wizard asks.

Writing a post is the editor and everything in its sidebar.

If you already have a blog somewhere else, start with bringing a blog across instead. Importing first and designing second saves you looking at an empty theme.