No, a plugin is not needed. I’ve built plenty of blogs that are integrated the same way as all of my other pages. That’s how I would do it, while implementing as many of these tips as you can:
Edit: The point about keeping it on your root domain is important. And what I ended up doing was setting up a new data type called “blog-post” with all of the content, and then set up a dynamic page with that type so that the url for my article is: www.domain.xyz/blog/article-slug.
