Unless you absolutely cannot stand PHP I will always recommend Kirby. You get blogging out of the box, comments, search, tags, related posts, featured posts, me

Unless you absolutely cannot stand PHP I will always recommend Kirby. You get blogging out of the box, comments, search, tags, related posts, featured posts, metadata stuff like SEO/RSS/Sitemaps is easy, a decent amount of themes out there, easy to make your own, can be deployed on shared hosting like Siteground or a bespoke server like Digita Ocean and the CMS interface is a joy to use. Downsides: all the code is on github but it’s not technically open source. I forget what the license is but it’s not MIT or anything like that. It also technically costs money. The maintainers let you download a working basic site and never nag you about paying. It’s an honor system.