Blogger vs WordPress- Which one should you choose

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Hey, I am Praneeth.

Here in this blog, I will walk you through,

Everything you need to know about both the platforms Blogger vs WordPress so that you can have a clear idea and picture in mind on which platform you shall choose to start your first blog.

Since I have good experience in using both the platforms for blogging purposes, so I will include my opinion along the way,

So without further ado let’s get started.

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Definition and differences.

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Here you will learn and understand what is the definition and differences between the two platforms in detail.

What is WordPress?

Blog-Tool-Publishing-Platform-and-CMS-—-WordPress-org

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in a PHP programming language and released back in 2003.

So far, WordPress powers over 40% of all the websites on the internet.

Here is a quick difference between different WordPress services.

Difference between WordPress.com vs wordpress.org.

WordPress.org is an open-source CMS whereas wordpress.com is the same CMS but owned by the company which created official WordPress software AUTOMATTIC.

In short, wordpress.com is a like blogger a free platform, and a business model of the company that created the software.

The difference between the two is that,

  • In wordpress.org it is free CMS but you need to buy website hosting.
  • In wordpress.com it is also free and you can get started with using the platform just like a Blogger, you can upgrade to higher plans thereby accessing more features, and hosting is managed by the company.

Another key difference between both the platforms is that,

  • In wordpress.org you totally own the blog or website.
  • In wordpress.com, even if you invest money in higher plans, you don’t own your blog completely and you still have to follow the t & c of the company.

Click here for more differences between both the platforms in detail.

In this blog, we will only consider wordpress.org to compare it with Blogger.

What is a Blogger?

blogger vs wordpress

Blogger is a free blog publishing platform released back in 1999,

It was developed by Pyra labs,

Back in 2003, Google officially bought the platform and started hosting the platform on Google itself providing a free blogging platform for users ever since then.

Here is a quick difference between the 2 terms which lots of people misunderstand.

Difference between Blogger vs Blogspot.

I see more often than not, many people seem to have this confusion between Blogger and Blogspot,

The only difference between 2 terms is,

Blogger is a free blog publishing service and a product of Google, whereas Blogspot is a free domain name provider for blogs that are built on Blogger,

Usually, you build and manage a blog on Blogger under a subdomain of Blogspot.com by default.

Difference between the two platforms.

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The key difference between WordPress and Blogger is,

Blogger is a simple blog publishing platform with less power and features whereas WordPress is a full-featured software,

You can control all aspects of your website not just blogs but build a lot of things like a forum, online store, membership website, and many more apart from having a blog.

Another key difference is, Blogger is a product and service owned by Google whereas wordpress.org is not owned by any company or any individual.

With that being said,

Let’s have a look at the top features of both the platforms and look at their pricing as well.

Features and pricing of both.

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Here I will talk about the features and pricing of both platforms.

Let’s start with WordPress first.

WordPress features:

Here are the 5 top features of using WordPress.

  1. It is highly simple to use CMS.
  2. It is highly powerful and flexible software.
  3. It is also known for its safe user management feature.
  4. Easy to write, edit and publish or schedule blog posts.
  5. Easy to import content and data from other software to WordPress.

Let’s see the price of using WordPress.

Pricing:

As I mentioned earlier, WordPress is an open-source CMS that is free for people to use.

Anyone can download the software from the official website of the platform for free.

But in order to build a website on WordPress, you need website hosting and domain name,

For more information about how to start a blog on WordPress, click here.

Blogger features:

Here are the 5 top features of using Blogger.

  1. It is a free blog publishing platform of Google.
  2. It is optimized for SEO.
  3. User-friendly interface and platform overall.
  4. You got reliable hosting and uptime from Google cloud for your website for free.
  5. It is one of the most popular blog publishing platforms on the internet.

Let’s see the price of using Blogger

Pricing:

Although Blogger is not an open-source platform like WordPress, it is indeed a free blog publishing platform managed by Google.

There are no paid themes and plugins you have on Blogger, it is absolutely and completely free to use.

You can get started with just a Gmail account to sign-up and start using the service and run a blog in a matter of a few minutes.

Now that you know the features of both the platforms,

Let’s have a look at the benefits and drawbacks of using both platforms in detail.

Pros and cons of both.

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In this section, we will learn what are the pros and cons of using both the platforms.

Let’s first see the pros and cons of using WordPress.

Pros of using WordPress.

Here are the benefits of using WordPress as cms for your website

  1. You have total control over your website.

The beautiful thing about WordPress is that,

It allows you to control and make changes on each and every aspect of your website right there.

There are literally over more than 50000 plugins that are registered in the WordPress plugin directory.

At the same time, there are lots of literally thousands of free themes that you can install and use for your website.

With each plugin, you install and add new unique features onto your website like the way you have imagined it to look like without learning any coding knowledge or investment at all,

For Example,

  • You want to manage comments on your website.
  • You want a drag and drop page builder.
  • You want to speed up your website or manage your images.
  • You want to add Email subscription forms.
  • You want to add a forum or an eCommerce Store.

Just think about any feature or customization you would like to have on your website,

I am sure that there is a plugin to help you achieve that on WordPress.

  1. It is highly optimized for SEO.

Another good thing about WordPress is that it is optimized for SEO in terms like,

  • Among thousands of free themes, a lot of them are responsive and mobile-friendly.
  • You got lots of SEO plugins like rank math to make your website SEO easy for you to manage and take care of.
  • You can customize the permalinks the way you like.
  • With features like categories and tags, you can make your content easy to access for users on your website navigation improving the UX.
  • There are lots of plugins to take care of your website speed and add features like table of contents, etc to make your website SEO friendly.

Overall WordPress is a highly optimized content management system for SEO, the benefit is that on-page and technical aspects of SEO become so much easy for you with WordPress.

  1. You own the blog.

Comparing with Blogger,

WordPress is an open-source content management system like there is no company owning the software, the software is owned by the public,

For you to build a website on WordPress you just need web hosting and domain and you have total control over your website whatsoever.

With having complete control over your website, here are a few things which you can enjoy of

  • You have complete control over the monetization of your website.
  • You don’t have to follow or obey any company’s terms and conditions.
  • You are a free bird with WordPress like it is so flexible that you can easily integrate it with external software and tools and customize your website.

Overall you just own the blog and website which is not the case if you start on Blogger.

  1. It is the largest CMS.

With such amazing features that WordPress offers,

It is no brainer when you know that over 40% of the websites on the internet are powered and managed by WordPress CMS.

Because it is the largest content management system in the world,

The factor of support is also in favor of WordPress when we compare it with Blogger.

In WordPress, you got support like,

  • A massive community and online forum.
  • Detailed documentation of WordPress.
  • Lots of highly authoritative websites, third-party sources of information about WordPress helping people from basic to advance like this one.

Besides that, you can get customer support from your web hosting service and if you buy any theme or plugin for your WordPress website you can get exclusive customer support added to it, 

Apart from that, There are thousands of freelancers offering WordPress-related services which you can leverage as well.

You also get regular security updates for WordPress to make your blog fight better against bugs and security risks.

Overall in terms of customer and user support, WordPress is on top of the table.

  1. It is a lot user-friendly.

WordPress is known for being a powerful CMS at the same time maintaining simplicity.

Simplicity and being user-friendly is some of the main reasons why WordPress is the best CMS.

To be extra specific, here are a few things you can do which are a lot user-friendly.

  • You can add multiple people to manage your website easily assigning different roles on the website.
  • There are lots of web hosting companies that offer single-click WordPress installation and easy setup.
  • It is easy to migrate from one web hosting to another.
  • You can easily edit, post, write and schedule your posts.
  • You can add lots of multimedia easily.

Although for a beginner to the CMS it takes time to figure out things on WordPress,

After some time it gets easy to get along with WordPress and start using the features present in WordPress on the website.

Here are a couple of cons regarding using WordPress.

Cons of using WordPress.

Here are the disadvantages of using WordPress for your website

  1. Security can be an issue to deal with.

Because WordPress is an open-source CMS, not a closed source one,

It is prone to a lot of security-related issues.

If you start your website on WordPress you need to be aware of the security of your website.

You have to manage a lot of things of your website security by yourself,

Some of the major security risks are related to plugins, themes, not following the latest practices of WordPress security, etc.

  1. Not a lot of things are free.

Although there are lots of things that you can get for free on WordPress like thousands of free plugins and themes to add new and unique features to your website,

The good and the bad thing about WordPress is the customization because you can accomplish a lot of things with WordPress,

But not all of those things are for free so you might end up investing more money in themes and plugins apart from investing in hosting and domain name for your website than what you planned.

Blogger.

blogger

Let’s first see some pros of using a Blogger.

Pros of using a Blogger.

Here are the advantages of using blogger for your website

  1. It is free.

Blogger is an absolutely and completely free platform.

There are no paid features, plugins, themes available for you to purchase in your Blogger account although there are several third-party themes and templates which you can buy to make your Blogger blog look more professional.

You just need a Gmail account to be able to sign-up, create an account, and get started using the service.

Your blog is hosted on the Google cloud platform so you don’t need to worry about, security, hosting, and uptime of your website. Google is going to take care of it, it is not your headache.

You will also get a free subdomain for your blog like this, yourdomainname.blogspot.com.

You can easily connect a custom domain name with your account if you purchase a domain later.

There are no restrictions on storage and bandwidth for your website.

You can publish an unlimited number of posts on your blog for free although there is a limit for page and multimedia size.

  1. It’s user-friendly.

When it comes to user-friendliness platform,

Bloggers hold a good top position on the table.

Blogger is a very simple and user-friendly platform although it is very limited in terms of customization it is easy to use and implement.

Some of the features in Blogger include,

  • Easily set up a blog in minutes.
  • Easy integration with AdSense.
  • Easy to add gadgets (plugins) in a few clicks.
  • Backup of the website in a single click.
  • Easy to write, edit and publish posts.
  • Easy to change or customize themes.
  • Check the stats of posts right in the dashboard.

Overall Blogger is a good platform when we are considering the user-friendliness just like other products and services of Google,

Blogger is also very easy to use platform, you neither need much support or any learning curve required to get started with it.

  1. It is optimized for SEO.

There are lots of SEO settings that you can configure to make your blog more optimized for search engines like,

  • You can easily integrate your blog with Google analytics and a search console.
  • You can easily enable SSL certificates on your blog.
  • You can create a custom URL structure.
  • You can have a comment section and sharing features open for people to engage on your blog.
  • There are lots of SEO settings that you can configure.

It is not that Blogger is not SEO friendly, it is also SEO friendly platform indeed and many blogs managed by Blogger also rank high on the search and drive tons of organic traffic to their websites,

It is just about the limitations in functionalities that Blogger has when we are considering WordPress on the other hand.

You need to do a lot more work on a Blogger blog to make it optimized for SEO compared to WordPress.

Let’s see the bad side of using a Blogger.

Cons of using a Blogger.

Here are a bunch of cons of using Blogger as a blogging software for your website.

  1. You don’t own the blog.

Although you can take the backup of your website and content and store it on your computer,

Technically you don’t own the blog, 

You are just building a blog and using Google products which is a free service.

Which means,

You need to follow all the rules and regulations or terms and conditions of Google for using Blogger.

If you don’t do so,

There are chances that your website can get deleted by Google.

This is not a probability, this has happened many times in the past for many people whose accounts of Blogger have been deleted by Google for such reasons.

This is one of the major issues you can find with free blogging platforms and services. It is not limited to Blogger, even free blogging on Wix, Tumblr, etc platforms you have this issue.

  1. It is not that powerful.

In terms of management,

Blogger is not that powerful and doesn’t help you much with regards to control over your website.

  1. Customization is limited.

Despite there being a couple of gadgets or plugins which you can add and integrate on your Blogger website or change the layout, themes, or appearance of your themes,

You cannot customize your website completely and exactly the way you want apart from gadgets that you get.

Like you are only confined to doing basic settings like making a few changes externally like changing colors, increasing sizes of icons, etc.

You cannot change or add elements or create a custom design or anything like that with a Blogger.

  1. Monetization is confined.

If you want to monetize your blog,

You cannot think of anything other than,

You can’t create an eCommerce store or create a membership website or a portfolio website.

It is just quite hard to monetize a blog on Blogger because there are not enough features to help you in the process.

So overall monetization on Blogger is quite difficult.

Blogger vs WordPress: The final verdict?

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WordPress is the best choice to consider for the following reasons,

  • You own and have total control over your website.
  • Future is a lot more secure in WordPress compared to Blogger as Google can shut down the Blogger platform anytime in near future.
  • You can automate the process or add lots of users to manage your website.
  • It makes your work a lot easy as it is a lot more powerful and flexible through plugins.
  • It has a great support system.
  • You can Monetize your blog whichever way you like.
  • It is a lot more user-friendly once you learn things and get through the learning curve.

WordPress is the option to choose if you are serious about Blogging and online marketing like you want to build a brand or make money.

I urge you to start a blog on WordPress,

Blogger is not a bad choice either,

It is a good option for those of you who are interested in following things like,

  • You are not so serious about Blogging.
  • You just want a basic blog setup.
  • You don’t worry about the control and customization of your blog.
  • You want a just personal blog.
  • You are fine with limited monetization ability.
  • You can’t invest money.
  • You are just experimenting with whether Blogging is the right option for you or not.

It is just that,

If you start your blogging journey on WordPress it makes things a lot easier and smoother in the long run.

Ending remarks.

Now that you have got an idea and a good understanding of both the platforms,

Consider sharing your thoughts in the comments section below regarding which platform you prefer starting your first blog on,

I am happy to hear from you.

Don’t forget to share the post with your co Bloggers and friends if you have found it helpful,

Sharing is caring.

Read my other blogs,

I will catch you next time,

Till then keep learning and keep growing.

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