13 Advantages & disadvantages of Tumblr, [Tumblr review]

Hi there, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn 13 Advantages and disadvantages of Tumblr.

Every reason is backed with facts and links.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog.

What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is a free microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007.

At present, Tumblr is owned by Automattic owned by the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg.

Tumblr is a place where you can not only blog but follow other blogs, like and share other blogs just like Facebook and Instagram.

Let’s learn about Tumblr’s purpose, its advantages, and disadvantages in detail.

Advantages and disadvantages of Tumblr.

Here is a quick comparison table of the advantages and disadvantages of Tumblr.

S/no.	Advantages	Disadvantages
1	Free SSL.	You don’t own the blog.
2	Free web hosting	No plugins access.
3	Setup blog in minutes	Less customization of the blog.
4	User-Friendly Interface.	Safety, Security, and UX issues.
5	Unlimited storage	Social networks are not that good.
6	No ads displayed on the blog theme.	Not meant for long-form of content.
7	It is a social networking website.	–

Let’s learn about advantages in detail,

Advantages of Tumblr.

Here is a quick overview of the advantages of Tumblr.

1. Free SSL and free place no premium.
2. Free Webhosting.
3. Setup a blog within minutes.
4. User-friendly interface.
5. Unlimited storage.
6. No ads displayed on the blog theme.
7. It is a social networking website.

Let’s learn them in detail,

Free SSL certificate and free platform.

Secure Socket Layer[SSL] is a certificate that enables the important details of users such as,

• Credit card numbers.
• Bank account details like passwords.
• Personal email account passwords.

When a user types this data on your website, SSL will encrypt the data and hides the data into a secret code that is difficult or next to impossible to hack and decode.

These SSL certificates are a key part of the security of the website and these definitely cost money for websites.

But,

On Tumblr, you have SSL for free without investing a penny.

Another thing interesting about Tumblr is that,

You don’t have to upgrade to any level like a premium or a pro plan like Wix and Weebly to access other features of Tumblr,

The platform is free to use as a blogger.

There are no premium plans at all there.

Free Webhosting.

Obviously, it is a free blogging platform which means you are getting your blogs hosted on the servers of Tumblr.

When it comes to speed of the typical Tumblr blog, it is neither too good nor too bad I would say.

The blog will load fast usually within 4 seconds on mobile and 2 seconds on the desktop because the theme is very light and the code is good as well.

Well, you should not expect higher and quick speed and 24/7 uptime of your blog on Tumblr.

It is free and you should be satisfied with whatever you are getting.

If the servers of the Tumblr crash, your website will automatically get down and crash as well.

Here is a screenshot of my Tumblr blog on the Gtmetrix page speed score.

Set up a blog in a matter of minutes.

Basically what makes Tumblr blogs different and better than other free blogging platforms is the fact that you can set up the blog within a matter of minutes.

I have created my personal Tumblr blog within say 2 minutes.

It is that fast and easy to setup.

You don’t have to deal with any issues like,

• Unnecessary settings.
• Theme selection.
• Blogposts selection.

It just happens within a matter of minutes and you are good to go.

User-friendly interface.

You have Tumblr which is very extremely easy to use.

You have all things in place, you set up your blog on Tumblr in a matter of minutes and now you need to publish content on your blog.

You have all types of content which are to be published on Tumblr right on top.

• Post.
• Audio.
• Video.
• Image.
• Gif.
• Quote.
• Link.
• Chat.

Anything and everything you want to publish on your blog is very easy and can be happened in a matter of few clicks.

You don’t have to deal with anything like,

• Menus.
• Categories.
• Plugins.
• Themes.
• Settings.

You can start posting content in a matter of few clicks without getting many hurdles in designing your blog.

Unlimited storage.

This one is pretty nice I would say,

You have unlimited storage on the blog,

You can upload unlimited photos, posts, audio files, and videos, whatever you want without thinking about the storage of the blog.

Of course, you will have restrictions in terms of uploading content,

• You can post not more than 250 posts on Tumblr each day.
• Uploaded images are restricted to 75 per day.
• Files can’t be larger than 10 MB.
• Gif files should not be larger than 1 MB.

These daily limits change every day with respect to your standard time zones in your Tumblr settings.

No ads are displayed on the blog so far.

Previously Tumblr has tried placing ads and earning money on their user’s blogs but that did not seem to work for the Tumblr blogs as they are just a single page and not a website.

So, Tumblr removed their ads from the blogs because it was not satisfied for both users and advertisers.

Now Tumblr is not showing ads on its blogs of users which other free blogging platforms such as Wix and Weebly do.

They show ads on their user’s free blogs and earn money from that.

It is a social networking website.

This thing is pretty different from other blogging platforms.

Tumblr is a blog and a community itself.

Tumblr not only allows you to create free blogs for yourself it also gives you chance to meet, interact with other people on the platform.

As you finish the setup of the Tumblr account.

You will be asked to select a bunch of interests of topics and some relevant other niches which you have selected.

You can,

• Follow other blogs on the platform, like and share other blogs just like social media.
• You can reblog other blogs on the platform like saves in Pinterest and retweets on Twitter.
• When someone reblogs or saves your blog on their blog account, you will have a backlink to your Tumblr blog from other Tumblr blogs along with more traffic and more followers to your blog.
• You can get a chance to meet new people and grow traffic to your website or blog.
• You can find relevant niches to your blog through the help of tags on Tumblr.
• You have the option of making your Tumblr blog private and giving access to only a selected group of people like Instagram’s private account.
• You can keep numerous blogs like numerous social media accounts for different niches and purposes.

This system makes Tumblr a unique platform within itself.

• Most of the users on Tumblr are anonymous that increases advertisement of the brand faster, that is the reason big companies have been using Tumblr like IBM, Coca-Cola for more brand awareness.

You have already a social platform built-in that makes Tumblr totally different and unique from other blogging platforms.

Disadvantages of Tumblr.

Here is a quick overview of the disadvantages of Tumblr.

1. You don’t own the website.
2. No plugins.
3. Less customization of the website.
4. Safety, security, and user experience are bad.
5. Not a good social network website overall.
6. Not meant for long-form content.

Let’s learn them in detail.

You don’t own the blog.

This is the most important and hard to digest the fact that you don’t own the blog at all.

It is the Tumblr corporation that owns the blog, not you.

The same applies to many other free blogging platforms like,

• Blogger.
• Wix.
• Weebly.

You simply don’t own the blog.

When you think about it for a second.

If you move around here and there and mess up things against the T&C of Tumblr policies.

They can and will delete your Tumblr blog in a matter of few seconds without giving you a hint of,

• Notice.
• Update.
• Mail.

There have been cases in the past, especially a women user of Tumblr had more than 150000 followers and over 100000 posts on Tumblr account was deleted without letting the user of the blog being notified.

It’s a bit too extreme, the user says.

Learn more about the case, here.

The woman user of Tumblr did not violate any sort of terms and conditions and go against any policy violations of Tumblr but still her all the work and effort went vain which she maintained for years.

Recently Tumblr has changed its policies and made very strict rules on suspending accounts which talk about things related to,

• Pornography.
• Hate speeches like political agenda.
• Violet and bad behavior glamorizing.

Still, the platform is not the one you can control,

You are always at the mercy of Tumblr and the same goes with most other free blogging platforms.

You never know what might happen to your blog or website tomorrow.

No plugins access.

You don’t have access to any plugins and other stuff to make your Tumblr blog easy and attractive.

You need to manually do,

• Seo of your blogs like URLs and meta descriptions have to be done manually in HTML code.
• Images compression of your blog.
• Make it look user friendly without any help from external things.

This makes it difficult for Tumblr.

Less customization of the blog.

In terms of a blog, you just have a few themes that are very very basic, not that pretty looking and welcoming and just settings to change,

• Cover photo of the blog.
• Font of the blog.
• Logo of the blog.

That is it.

You can’t customize your blog any further but there are paid themes as well which are also pretty basic.

If you want to make changes in deep,

You either need to buy themes or make the editing of the theme in HTML which most people are not experienced in.

Themes you get for free on Tumblr are pretty basic and not that welcoming for users as well.

Safety, security, and user experience are bad on the blog.

There have been cases in the past where Tumblr blogs have been hacked.

Click here to learn them.

As per the news, Your personal information like your,

• Age,
• Location.
• Login IP addresses.
• Names of the blogs associate with email addresses.
• Interests of users.
• Passwords.
• Email addresses of the users.

And other information is not that safe as you expect it to be on Tumblr.

From other news, hackers have stolen 65 million passwords from Tumblr.

The case of safety and security issues is not just limited to Tumblr,

Even,

• Twitter.
• Facebook.
• Google+

Have faced these security issues of the user’s private information and in fact google+ was shutdown by google which was a famous social media network due to security issues.

It is just that Tumblr is no exception in terms of safety and security of personal information and privacy is concerned.

Another bad thing about Tumblr is that.

In terms of a blog,

You are handed over a single page only as a blog.

It creates a bad user experience.

• Users can’t navigate to other sections of the Tumblr blog.
• It’s difficult to find previous posts.
• It is not appealing for advertisers to bid for ads on the Tumblr blog due to the bad design and structure of the blog.
• There are no menus and categories in the header.
• Anyone and everyone can comment on the posts without a comment moderation.

The social network is not that good actually.

You know Tumblr is not a blogging platform itself, it is a social media network as well.

I have mentioned earlier the benefits of Tumblr as a social media network but,

For everything, there is positive and negative.

In Tumblr negative thing is that,

It is really bad as a social media network.

• There is a lot of hate speeches and arguments on politics from anonymous people whom you never know.
• There is a high chance of receiving threats from others who don’t accept your ideologies.
• There is a chance of getting your creativity being lost like reblogs or steal your work [credit is not given].
• There is a lot of pornographic links and images allowed to be published on Tumblr but not videos directly.
• There is a trend of glamorizing bad and unhealthy behavior as positive and good which eventually leads to mental health issues.

Tumblr has been fighting with this issue for a long time.

Tumblr was removed from the Apple AppStore due to showing adult content like pornographic content in 2018.

After that Tumblr made its policies even more strict and started suspending and deleting accounts that share pornographic content on the platform.

The decision was a kind of important one for Tumblr but that made the huge loss of traffic.

There was a dip of 30 percent of the traffic to Tumblr from 521 to 320 million people in a matter of a few months after the ban on adult content on the platform.

Even after the ban, still there are cases reported for child sex abuse, as it is not totally removed and there are links to these pornographic websites published freely without any restriction.

Tumblr has also been struggling to deal with the hate and political speeches and started suspended reblogs that associated with the content but still, the platform is like an open-source,

Anyone can come in and do anything, comment, and give threat comments to any blogger on Tumblr without any accountability.

It is not meant for that long form of content.

Tumblr was a very special place for anonymous people.

You mostly find only,

• Quick images.
• Quick memes.
• Gifs.
• Quotes.
• Audio.
• Little text posts.
• Infographics.

These are very popular on Tumblr, short bite-sized visual content.

If you are someone like me who likes to write long blocks of text and information.

You should not choose Tumblr because it is not the right platform to be in.

Tumblr is for the microblogging platform.

You know, those short posts and short quick content.

It is what Tumblr is for, not for those long forms of content writing and blogging, you would expect it to be.

Tumblr is more of a multimedia content platform which means there are more images and gifs kind of content being shared and published as compared to text.

Because, there are 450 million users on Tumblr, and the majority of them are the young audience aged 34 years on average.

Should you start a blog on Tumblr?

Whether you want to start a blog on Tumblr or not depends on your intentions.

You should start a blog on Tumblr if you,

• You just want to have a simple blog.
• You just want to publish short blogs.
• You want to get your existing blog more brand awareness and advertisement to your online brand.

You should not start a blog on Tumblr If you,

• You want to build an online brand.
• You want complete ownership of the blog.
• You want to publish long articles.
• You want to get more traffic from SEO.
• You want to monetize your blog and customize your blog professionally,

If not Tumblr, then what?

What are the alternatives to Tumblr?

You should mostly choose wordpress.org, it is a great content management system,

Over 34% of the entire websites on the internet are operated and managed on wordpress.org.

It is software and free but you need to pay for hosting and domain name.

• Read, my guide on web hosting.
• Read, my guide on the domain name.

If you don’t want to invest money, no problem.

You have many other free blogging platforms, such as,

1. Wix.
2. Weebly.
3. Blogger.
4. WordPress.com
5. Strikingly.

But you should start a blog on wordpress.org and believe me it is worth it.

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered all the advantages and disadvantages of Tumblr.

Do let me know whether you are going got to start a blog on Tumblr or not in the comments section below, I am happy to know.

Do consider sharing the blog with your family and friends, you know sharing is caring.

Read my other blogs,

• Read, advantages and disadvantages of blogger.
• Read, reasons to start a blog.
• Read, reasons to start a podcast.

I will catch you next time, till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.