blogger review: 21 advantages & disadvantages of blogger

Hi, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn everything about the advantages & disadvantages of blogger.

Every reason is filled with facts so keep reading through.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30000, foot view of the blog.

What is a blogger?

Blogger is a free blogging platform acquired by Google in February 2003.

It is a similar platform to youtube and Gmail for bloggers and content creators online.

It is the oldest and one of the best blogging platforms for free.

Let’s learn the advantages and disadvantages of the blogger and should you choose a blogger in 2020 or not.

Let’s dive right in,

advantages and disadvantages of blogger.

Let’s divide the section Into 2 parts, first advantages of the blogger and then disadvantages of the blogger.

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

S/no.	Advantages.	Disadvantages.
1.	Free SSL for your website	You don’t own the blog.
2.	Free web hosting for your website.	Bad domain and URL structure.
3.	Good uptime of the website.	Domain redirection is not easy.
4.	User-Friendly interface.	Difficult to build backlinks and authority.
5.	Easy to integrate Google services.	Less customization of your theme.
6.	Free unlimited storage of websites.	Difficult in uploading other media files.
7.	Faster website indexing in google.	No plugins access at all.
8.	Easy to set up and get started.	Difficult to monetize your blog.
9.	No unnecessary ads display on the blog theme.	You can’t have 2 Adsense accounts
10.	–	Slow updates and bad support.
11.	–	No access to FTP.
12.	–	Future of blogspot.com, you never know.

Advantages of the blogger.

Here is a quick overview of the advantages of the blogger.

1. Free SSL certificate.
2. Free web hosting both fast and secure.
3. Good uptime of the website.
4. User-friendly interface.
5. Easy to integrate Google services.
6. Free storage of website.
7. Faster index of blog and website on google.
8. Easy to set up and get started.
9. No unnecessary ads display on your blog theme.

Let’s learn them in detail,

Free SSL certificate for your blog/website.

Look,

This one is a pretty important thing for any website or blog to have.

Secure Socket Layer[SSL] certificate helps people to enter their important details like

• Credit card details.
• Bank passwords.
• Email and other account passwords.

It happens as a process of encrypting the information in form of secret code that actually hides the real information.

The SSL certificate is offered for free by many hosting providers like Bluehost.

Interestingly, Blogger provides an SSL certificate for free.

If not you would have to spend at least 500 INR for an SSL certificate.

Look, this SSL certificate is a huge factor when it comes to the safety and security of people’s data on the website and if your website has some transactions happening, like purchasing an ebook or a course, having SSL is a must.

Here is a graphic image of the importance of an SSL certificate.

 

Free Webhosting both fast and secure.

Blogger is hosted on google cloud servers.

It means that you don’t need to worry about hosting like the speed and security of your website.

You have,

• The faster loading speed of your website.
• Better security and almost no hacking of your website.

Website loading speed is an officially declared ranking factor by google because no one wants to visit a website that loads slow.

There are going to be no issues with the loading speed and security of your blogger blog and website, it is going to be fine.

No issues with the uptime of the website.

You will face no issues with the uptime of the website.

Usually, the uptime of the website is totally dependent on the hosting provider of your website and here the blog/website is hosted on google’s servers.

You know it is pretty good.

You don’t have to worry about the uptime of the website and mostly blogger websites handle a good amount of traffic as well without crashing because of Google’s cloud servers.

If you are not aware of cloud servers, read my web hosting guide to learn everything about Webhosting in a single place.

User-friendly interface.

The interface of the blogger is easy to understand and user-friendly and a great one for beginners.

It is easy to use,

Things are well organized in one row,

Writing blog posts is all very easy,

You have all the options for writing blog posts in the header itself,

You can easily change between themes and add widgets without many hurdles.

Overall, the website interface is a lot of user-friendly and easy to understand.

Easy to integrate Google services.

Integration of google services like,

• Google analytics.
• Googel search console.
• Google AdSense.

It is much easy to add these google services and integrate them into your blogger blog.

It happens within a matter of minutes to integrate these services into your blog account.

Free unlimited storage for the website.

You have unlimited storage for your blog on blogger.

You can include unlimited photos and blog posts on your blog without thinking about the storage of the website.

On other free blogging platforms, they give you fixed and limited website storage for free blogs and ask you to upgrade to premium plans to continue which are expensive but it is not the case with blogger.

Faster website indexing in google.

Your website is hosted on Google servers itself and that means,

Your websites will get indexed by google’s crawlers faster than other websites.

Yeah, this helps in knowing google that your blog exists on google and that’s good.

Easy to set up and get started.

Practically speaking, it does not take more than an hour to start your blog and publish your first article on blogger.

You can start a blog and your first couple of articles insanely fast.

You don’t have to download any,

• Plugins.
• Buying Webhosting.
• Buying and checking domain name.
• Themes.
• Customization.

Almost all the themes in the blogger are good to go.

You can instantly take the whole blog as an online business within a few minutes.

Your blog’s theme does not have unnecessary ads.

You know what,

Many free blogging platforms like Wix & Weebly provide blogging for free so that these free blogging platforms can place ads on these free blogs and earn money.

But it is not the case at all with blogger.

Here are screenshots of Wix and Weebly pricing plans and their free plans.

You don’t have ads of google displaying on your website unnecessarily on your blog theme.

Disadvantages of the blogger.

Here is a quick overview of the disadvantages of the blogger.

1. You don’t own the website completely.
2. The bad domain name and URL structure.
3. Domain redirection is not easy.
4. Difficult to build backlinks and authority.
5. Less customization of your theme.
6. Difficult in uploading other media files.
7. No plugins access at all.
8. Difficult to monetize.
9. You can’t have 2 Adsense accounts.
10. Slow updates & bad support.
11. No access to FTP.
12. Future of blogspot.com, you never know.

Let’s learn them in detail step by step,

You don’t own the website completely.

This is a bad truth about owning a blog on blogger.

Technically you don’t own the blog or website on blogger.

You are using Google’s free blogging service which means Google owns your blog, not you.

This comes with it some important things to know,

If you don’t follow the content policies of blogger and google and create content that violates google’s policies, your blog will be deleted by Google without giving you notice.

There have been cases in the past where people’s blogger account has been suspended by google without an appropriate reason as well including being deleted by violating google’s policies.

Click here and here to see the real cases of people’s blogger blog accounts deleted by google without a reason.

To summarise, you don’t own the blog, Google owns it.

Google can delete or remove your blog whenever they want with or without a reason and you can do nothing about it.

That means you all the handwork is gone vain.

Bad domain and URL structure.

This one is a pretty obvious thing,

Having a blog on a free blogging platform means you can start a blog for absolutely free of cost.

The blogger is the same as that but you have a domain name attached with a subdomain Blogspot and extension with it.

This is how your blogger blog domain will look like,

Yourdomainname.blogspot.com.

That Blogspot at the end looks pretty bad and gives an instant bad impression to users when people visit your blog.

When you are publishing an article on blogger which you will usually do,

Your URL will look like this,

Yourdomainname.blogspot.com/year/month/yourblogtitle.html.

I have a Blogspot blog previously,

The URL typically looks something like this,

https://entrepreneurshipera.blogspot.com/2020/05/home-business-ideas.html

Yeah, I had the domain name as entrepreneurshipera only.

Now, you have this domain,

entrepreneurshipera.com/home-business-ideas.

If both of these blogs rank in google, which result would you prefer clicking through,

Obviously, the one which is short and sweet.

And, as per a study, short URLs tend to increase rankings in Google over long URLs.

Domain redirection is not easy.

If you are serious about blogging you at least need to invest money in buying a domain for your blog.

but,

if you are on blogger and created content on blogger, have a traffic a little bit and with a lot of effort to build backlinks here and there,

Now if you think of domain redirection to your custom domain shifting from Blogspot to your new domain, it is not going to be a piece of cake job,

Because most of the people don’t have much knowledge of HTML and javascript and much knowledge in SEO,

While redirecting your whole Blogspot domain to your new custom domain,

You might,

• Lose traffic.
• Lose authority.
• Your little rankings in Google will suffer.

It also involves a lot of technical works that most of the people are not good at like java and HTML works.

Difficult to build backlinks and authority in the niche.

This one is the most important thing, you need to understand if you are looking for starting a blog on blogger for free without investing a single penny on blogging.

Building backlinks to your Blogspot blog is next to impossible.

The reason being is,

• 75% of google’s Blogspot blogs are spam.

It is very simple math,

People don’t like linking to a Blogspot blog irrespective of how good the content be,

Because Blogspot blogs are considered majority as spam, and links from Blogspot blogs can get other blogs penalized by the penguin algorithm or decrease the reputation of the blog which linked to that Blogspot blog.

If you are not building links to your Blogspot blog, it is not possible to establish authority [EAT] in your niche and establish a brand in your niche.

This is the reason most Blogspot blogs don’t rank high on google because they won’t attract links at all.

Less customization there in your theme and website.

Having a blog on blogger means you can’t customize theme as you wish you want.

You can’t take advantage of elementor or any other page builder to design your home page and posts.

You simply can’t design the website to look professional, it looks not so professional in blogger.

You can’t use email subscribing options for your blogs in blogger like lead magnets.

You can’t use add other features that make your blog user friendly.

There are not many widget options as well in blogger which you can use on your blog.

Other free blogging platforms like,

• Wix.
• Weebly.
• Tumblr.

Offer better customization settings of the website and make it look professional than the blogger can do.

You can’t upload other media files easily.

If you want to upload other media files like

• A downloadable PDF.
• A gif file.
• An audio file.

It is going to be difficult for you to upload these media files in your blog posts in blogger.

You need to copy and paste code all the time in blogger account manually if you want to customize your blogger blog posts better,

No plugins at all.

Because of the absence of the feature of plugins in blogger,

You simply can’t add additional features to your blog that make it user friendly like,

• Easy table of contents.
• Social sharing buttons.
• Image optimizer and compressor.
• Seo plugins like rankmath.
• Automatic backups like updraft.

You need to do the SEO of your site manually only,

You have to compress all the images manually and take the backups manually of your blogger blog.

Difficult to monetize your blog.

If you are using blogger.com,

You can’t think of anything more than Google Adsense to monetize your blog.

That’s the only way you can monetize your blog and earn money.

And believe me, Adsense is the least thing you can do on your blog.

And the earnings are not that great as well,

Sadly, Google takes 32% of AdSense income of your website and you will have 68% of your AdSense income from your website.

While it is very difficult to get AdSense approval for your Blogspot domain irrespective of how good the content be, the chances of you being rejected for approval is high,

Even if you get approval, because of no plugins, you need to manually insert Adsense codes in your blog posts which is kind of tricky if you don’t know much about HTML and javascript.

You know, it is not a great option either.

There are many ways to monetize a blog like,

• Selling an ebook.
• Selling an online course.
• Selling your merchandise.
• Offering consultations.
• Affiliate marketing.

All these things are very hard or I should say, impossible to do on BLOGGER.

There is a chance of doing affiliate marketing on blogger but no other way of monetizing on blogger.

You can’t have 2 Adsense accounts.

This is also something you must keep in mind.

You are not allowed to have more than an account of adsense[google ad monetization network] with you.

Because you are using Gmail to login to your blogger account and the same Gmail in Adsense account,

Google can find it whether you are using 2 AdSense accounts or not if you are on blogger.

You can keep multiple websites in a single AdSense account after approval but it is that you cannot have 2 Adsense accounts.

Slow updates and bad support.

There is one recent update in google’s blogger platform in its interface in 2020, since February 2003 when google acquired blogger officially, it is one major update by google on blogger.

You know, other blogging platforms give frequent updates to improve,

• Speed.
• Performance.
• Security.

It is not the case with blogger,

Of course, there is no issue with the speed and security of blogger websites because they are hosted on google’s robust cloud servers.

But the problem is with performance,

And another thing about blogger which is quite bad is,

It has bad support,

If you have some issues with your blog, You can only visit a broad help forum installed in the blogger dashboard which is pretty basic and mostly does not help you with specific problems.

You can’t expect much from it as well.

You can search for that on google and youtube to find answers to your queries on settings in blogger.

Even google’s support on blogger forums is outdated and old which is not worth it to help you.

No access to FTP.

FTP-First Transfer Protocol is generally a way of transmitting information between your server and client which is your website.

Generally, your web host is the place where your website is stored.

It is the house of the website where all the necessary files and data are stored on the servers of the website.

FTP allows you to access & make changes to your website files which get saved directly on your server and website.

You need FTP access in order to,

• Make changes to your website like install a new theme.
• Upload some media files in bulk or remove images selectively.
• Fix some core errors of your website.

Sadly, on March 26, 2010, Google stopped giving access to FTP in blogger.

This means you don’t have the access to make changes to your blogger blog if something happens with your blogger blog like an error and you can’t access your blogger dashboard.

The change is still there and you cannot get access to your FTP on blogger blog yet.

Future of blogspot.com, you never know?

This one is pretty scary to know that recently google disowned the Blogspot.in subdomain.

That means you might lose all your work and you can’t access your blogspot.in domain.

The domain is now at a sale for 5999 USD at domainming.com.

The sad part of the whole thing is that Google did not either give notice or update or addressed the problem to its users.

That is why 4 million Indian blogger website users who used Blogspot.in the country-level domain for their blog have suffered.

They eventually turned their blogger domain into .com but it is pretty scary to know if google disowns even blogspot.com domain as well without giving notice or update for users to backup their content [ you know manual backup ].

Ultimately, Google is not showing any interest in disowning the blogspot.com domain now or in the future but it is always an uncertainty there.

Google can disown its blogspot.com domain without giving you a hint of,

• Update.
• Notice.
• Notification.

Which can give sleepless nights for millions of bloggers using the blogspot.com domain blogger blog worldwide.

Here the disadvantages of blogger are completed,

Let’s answer the main question.

Should you start a blog on blogger?

The answer depends.

If you are just starting out with your blog and not so serious about blogging or just want to test if blogging is right for you or want a simple blog like a hobby, you can blindly go for blogger.

If you have other goals like,

• Earning money from your blog.
• Building an online brand and authority of your blog.
• Attracting more clients for your business.

You should consider giving a shot with WordPress.org investing 100 USD in hosting and domain.

Why WordPress.org?

Well over 30% of all the websites on the internet including this one are managed by WordPress.org CMS.

Because

• It is SEO friendly.
• It offers many plugins for free making your SEO easier.
• It has many professional-looking themes for free.
• It has great customer support & help.
• You can monetize your blog however you want not just with ads.
• You can fully customize your website as your wish with plugins and themes.
• Ultimately, you own the blog/website not google.

WordPress.org is a CMS software that is free but you need to invest money in buying hosting and domain name.

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

Alternatives for Blogger.

There are many alternatives for a blogger free blogging platform.

Here is a list of 10 free blogging platforms and a good alternative for blogger.

1. Wix.
2. Weebly.
3. WordPress.com.
4. Joomla.
5. Strikingly.
6. Site123.
7. Hubpages.
8. Contentful.
9. Jekyll.
10. Tumblr.

Learn more about these free blogging platforms in detail here.

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered everything there is to know about the advantages & disadvantages of bloggers in this blog.

Do let me know whether you are going to start a blog on blogger or not in the comments section below, I want to know that.

Please do consider sharing the blog with your family and friends if you found the blog useful and interesting,

You know, sharing is caring.

Do consider reading my other blogs,

• Read, reasons to start a blog.
• Read, why blogs are important for SEO and business.
• Read, truths about starting a blog.

I will catch you next time, till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.