Blogger VS WordPress

Blogs are setup everyday by individuals wanting to share their life with friends, family and people they meet online; by business owners wanting to promote their business website; by people wanting to make money online with a blog; or for a hundred and one other reasons.

Deciding that you want a blog can be the easy part. Figuring out how to set one up is another story. And then there is the decision of what blogging platform to use. There are many to choose from - Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, Typepad, and lots of others I probably don't even know about.

Some of my blogs are on the free Blogger blogging platform and others are on Word Press. I have put together an extensive list of Pros and Cons of both Blogger and WordPress, mainly because they are the most popular blogging platforms I see online, so you can decide for yourself.

You should never take my word for something or anyone elses unless they are giving you facts. I say always get a second opinion because often what you read is clouded with that person's experiences and prejudices for whatever topic they are talking about. I think you need to know what each blogging system has to offer so you can make your choice that way instead of every friend you know telling you that you HAVE to use Blogger or you HAVE to use WordPress. You decide what you want and need in a blogging platform by making an educated choice based on the facts.

I found that the a good way of deciding on something like this is to do a Pros and Cons list. I have experience with both platforms and this is what I came up with. I am sure there are more features I didn't cover so if you have suggestions or comments feel free to leave them below.

Business Blogging Update: You may have found this post because you are trying to figure out if you should use Blogger or WordPress for your business blog. If you are not an SEO specialist and do not have the time to tweak your blog to help you get traffic and build up your business brand then you might want to stick with WordPress. It has a lot of great, built-in SEO features that are great for business blogs.

Blogger Blogging Platform

Blogger Pros:

• Free hosting
  
• Drag and drop gadgets (widgets) are easy to move around
  
• Owned by Google
  
• Easy to setup in 5 minutes
  
• Easy for a "newbie" to understand how to use
  
• You can place ads on your blog to monetize it (make money)
  
• You can add a custom domain without paying for hosting
• Free access to edit the HTML and CSS if you want to
• Images are hosted for free with no limits (that I see)
  
• Let's you export your blog for backup on your computer (posts)
  
• Let's you backup your template
  
• Creates a free archive daily, weekly, or monthly
• Unlimited storage
• Can create a private blog
  

Blogger Cons:

• Limited gadgets (widgets)
• Post title URLs cannot be changed once they are made
• Post title URLs are limited to 35 characters
  
• Limited features (features like WordPress plug-ins)
  
• Requires knowledge of HTML to add certain features
• Cannot create true static pages
  
• No way to contact Google if your blog goes down
• You really do not own your content and Google can remove your blog at any time (see their policies)
  
• To see comments you need to subscribe to them by email. That means an individual email for each comment that is posted on the site
  
• There is a limit of 100 users for a private blog with no way to upgrade this total
  

Now that I gave you this list let me explain a bit more.

Pros:

Blogger is owned by Google so getting on the search engines seem to be easier. I had a couple of Blogger blogs appear on page 1 of the search engine results for my topic in 3 days using a free Blogger blog domain name (.blogspot.com).

Hosting is always free even if you own a custom domain.

Google allows you to monetize (make money) with your blog by adding Google Adsense ads and other ads.

It takes approximately 5 minutes to set up a Blogger blog using one of their standard templates and even a person who is new to blogging can understand how to create a post within a few minutes.

You can create gadgets (sometimes called widgets) easily and if you get "tired" of where they appear on the blog you just click and drag them to a new location.

You cannot create a static pages using Blogger. I have, however, found a work around that makes posts look static and have gadgets appear only on the homepage.

Cons:

The flip side is that because Google owns your blog they also own the content. They can pull your blog for any reason and they don't have to restore it. Read their policies.

There are limited gadgets (widgets) available unlike WordPress which let's you install plug-ins that give you more options. The limited features I am talking about would be the plug-ins that WordPress offers such as the All-in-One SEO package, printing a page option, threaded comments, and more. These things are possible with Blogger but you would need extensive HTML knowledge to create them or at least feel comfortable "tweaking" the HTML code.

You can only have a short post title if you want to make it SEO friendly because they cut off the permalink at 35 to 40 characters.

You will need knowledge of HTML and feel comfortable editing the template in HTML to get certain customized features to work.

If your blog goes down for some reason I have never found an easy way to contact Google and have them respond. Since hosting is free through Google you are at their mercy many times.

WordPress Blogging Platform

Word Press has two formats - the free wordpress.com blog and the self hosted wordpress.org version

WordPress.com Pros:

• Free hosting at wordpress.com
  
• Drag and drop widgets
  
• You can create static pages like a website
• Intuitive Dashboard and features
  
• Can create a private blog
• If you pay to add more private users you can pay for an upgrade

WordPress.com Cons:

• Cannot monetize your blog so you can't make money with it
• Cannot edit the HTML or CSS, however, you can pay for an upgrade if you want that function
  
• Limited to themes (templates) they have in their gallery
  
• You can only move the widgets up or down so you cannot easily move them anywhere you want on the blog
• You must pay extra if you want extra storage space above 3 GB
  
• Limited amount of templates available
• WordPress.com may put Adsense ads on your blog to help them pay for the service. You can turn this feature off if you pay
• Private users are limited to 35
• 
  
• The WordPress interface is slow to load, create posts, and even switch to various functions
  

WordPress.org Pros:

• Free WordPress platform software
• You can create static pages like a website
• Free Professional templates available all over the Internet to download and upload through your Dashboard
• Thousands of free plug-ins available
• You can tweak HTML and CSS
• Post URLS are easy to save using search engine optimization tricks and easy to change if need
• Very SEO friendly right out of the gate

WordPress.org Cons:

• You must pay for monthly or yearly hosting
• You must keep your own backup
  
• You must figure out how to install the software on your host
  
• You must manually download and install all upgrades yourself
• Sometimes you may need to know how to use FTP software to upload the template and plug-ins although many of these features are now available through the Dashboard
  
• The WordPress interface is slow to load and post to
  

Now that I gave you this list let me explain a bit more.

Pros:

WordPress.com gives you a free blog and a wordpress.com domain address and also hosts your blog for free.

WordPress.com does provide good quality templates and the ability to add widgets like link lists, HTML code, etc. There is a lot of help available on the WordPress website.

You get a certain amount of storage so you can upload pictures and videos for free until you reach that limit.

The WordPress dashboard is sleek and modern looking and fairly easy to understand.

Spam is easy to get rid of and you can view all of your comments from the Dashboard so you don't have to subscribe to them by email.

Cons:

With WordPress.com (free version) you are limited to the templates available in the gallery. Although there are many professional WordPress templates available on the web you cannot use them unless you use the WordPress.org site and download the software on your own hosting account (that you pay for) and install it.

Unless your host provides help this can be challenging and not suggested for a newbie blogger.

You also have to manually install all of the upgrades that WordPress comes out with. If you don't know what you are doing customized features you have added may be wiped out when you upgrade. If you don't use any customized features it should be fine.

You cannot use the free plug-ins on the free WordPress.com site and you cannot add JavaScript or monetize your free blog to make money. Because you cannot add JavaScript then some things like adding a Twitter widget or a photo gallery widget will also not work.

You cannot tweak the HTML code on the free site but you can if you pay for hosting and download the software.

What do I use?

For quite awhile I used Blogger. I like the ability to tweak the HTML when I want, be able to monetize new blogs right away, drag and drop widgets all over the place, and I like how fast the Blogger interface runs when I am working on one of my blogs.

When I started blogging I didn't have any money to invest in a domain name or hosting. As time went on, however, I was able to afford domain names and hosting and I also realized that WordPress was designed to be SEO friendly. That is a huge thing for me because there are limited things you can do with Blogger to optimize your site for search engines.

What I don't like about Blogger:

• No cool plug-ins like WordPress which make me have to add features manually into HTML
• No ability to change a post URL to make it more SEO friendly
• No way to contact Google when something goes wrong
• I don't know the content and Google can pull my site on a whim
  

You will have to find which blogger platform works for you - Blogger or WordPress. I cannot tell you one is better than another because each person has reason why they use something and what features are most important to them. There are many other features for both platforms I did not cover but this gives you a summary of the differences between Blogger and WordPress to get you started and help you make some decisions.

What do you think?

What do you hate about Blogger?

What do you like about Blogger?

What do you hate about Word Press?

What do you like about Word Press?

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