There are many blogging platforms available to choose for starting a blog like WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, movable type, TypePad, Joomla, Drupal, Open Diary, Live Journal, Xanga, Dead Journal, MySpace,etc. But among them only two of them have topped the leader board namely WordPress and Blogger. As a Newbie you might well have a doubt on which platform to choose or which platform would satisfy your needs. I am not going to stress on the cons but I would stress mainly on the Pros of both the platforms from my experience. So this is not a post on debate between WordPress vs Blogger but it is an informative article.
WordPress vs Blogger? Which one to choose?
A burning question indeed and it can also be asked indirectly as Paid vs Free which is preferable? This platform wars between WordPress vs Blogger has been surfaced from very long since WordPress has been introduced in 2003. I have started my blogging journey with blogger and I have been with it since 2008 which is almost five years. Many bloggers who now are called professional bloggers also have been using blogger in their initial stages.
| Name of the Blogger | Initial (Blogspot) | Present (WordPress) |
| Amit Agarwal | labnol.blogspot.com | Labnol.org |
| Harsh Agarwal | virgintech.blogspot.com | Shoutmeloud.com |
| P Chandra | pchere.blogspot.com | quickonlinetips.com |
| Rohit Langde | blogsolute.blogspot.com | Blogsolute.com |
Why I Choose Blogger and why you should?
Most of the people who have just entered into blogosphere start their blog with blogger as it doesn’t take any extra time or effort if you are already having a Gmail account.
- I choose blogger due to the fact that it is free and easy to use. Even now I feel easy to write a post in blogger rather than writing in WordPress.
- As a newbie I felt, it is not preferable for me to invest money on hosting as I don’t know the in and out of how people make money through their blog (initial days).
- Blogger also had variety of templates to choose from and I also had the option to install many custom templates from third-party sites.
- I never needed to pay a single penny for hosting and the only expenditure I had to invest was 10$ a year to renew my custom domain.
- Though there was a section in blogger about adsense I never got approved as in those days I don’t know its terms and conditions and Privacy Policy. But at last I got an approval from blogger blog itself.
My Experience with Blogger:
- I have 5+ years of experience with blogger.
- 90% of the income I generated till date (over 1000$) is from blogger platform.
- I also have designed few templates on my own for blogger.
Why you can choose Blogger?
- Free, I think most of the people love this word free, blogger is free to use.
- Inbuilt templates to choose, no need of installing frameworks and templates. Though you have the option to change your template that too very easily.
- Many languages to choose, you can write a blog in your own regional language.
- You can also get approval for an adsense account from a blogger blog provided you meet the requirements. ( I got adsense approved for a blogger blog)
- You can learn many new things without investing any money like SEO, template designing, writing a post in blogger is a good platform to experiment and if you fail you can immediately start a new blog.
- You don’t have the risk of getting your blog hacked.
- You don’t need to be afraid of any downtime as it is run by one of the most trusted company Google.
- Recently blogger has rolled out many SEO features to help blogspot users to rank well.
Why I started a blog in WordPress and why you must?
I never knew that WordPress existed when I was blogging in my starting days. But it did not take many days for me to know about it. I also suggested WordPress for a guy who asked me to teach about blogging and he turned up with whooping returns from his blog. He had his uncle in US who paid him for hosting and domain and only thing he had to do is write articles for his blog and he earned really good amount within a year. It did not surprise me as I already know that it works.
But I did not choose to start a WordPress blog seeing his success as I had no uncles in US to support and at the same time I was studying and I was blogging on a part-time basis now and then. If I had invested money on a blog, then I need to invest my time and energy to get back what I have invested. But now I just started this blog in WordPress and with very less effort I was able to bring traffic and a good Alexa rank.
Read: 3 Months of my Blogging Journey with Blog in Grace
Why you must choose WordPress?
- Using WordPress is like you are in an advanced stage of blogging (most people love WordPress blogs over blogspot blogs).
- You have an opportunity to control the design, template or framework and give your blog a professional look.
- Plugins though it is not mandatory but still you have variety of plugins to use and enhance your WordPress activities. You can get page stats, social networking buttons, SEO, etc all through plugins.
- SEO feature is rocking, you have plugins like Yoast and All in one SEO they really do a great deal in ranking your sites high in search engines.
- You have a real control over spam (should use plugin for this) and also user engagement will be more due to comments section (People won’t comment in blogger blogs as often as they comment in WordPress blogs) .
- It takes very less time to get indexed by search engines as it has some good ping services.
- If you are serious about making money or turning into a full-time blogger then WordPress is must.
Below is a video from Matt Cutts who is the head of Google’s Webspam team. Though he works for Google he runs his blog on WordPress but not Blogger so listen to him on what he says.
Before choosing a blogging platform:
Well I think you have understood why one should choose Blogger or WordPress. I am not a supporter for either of them as I like both platforms equally. If you are serious into blogging then I would suggest WordPress as a must go. If you are into experimenting and learning how to blog, then Blogger is good to start.
But remember a blogging platform should be easy to understand and user-friendly. We must be able to control the design and customizations of our blog as per our requirements without any restrictions. Blogger has many restrictions whereas WordPress gives you the freedom of choice. As a newbie a free blogging platform is always preferred. What ever platform you choose see that it must and should be indexed by search engine so that we can get traffic. Traffic is all what we want, if you know how to get it then you know how to make money. WordPress vs Blogger, it’s up to you on your choice…
What makes blogger superior over wordpress is of the fact that it can’t be hacked.
I started with blogger as well and I learnt a lot.
Hey Emmanuel,
I too learned a lot from blogger, and that experience is working well with WordPress.
Hi Vijesh,
I do have a Blogger but I have never used it. Since I was in Livejournal from 2000-2008…then switch my social media to Facebook, I was so sick of Livejournal that I dare start another blog. So I have but never used it. Then when I tried to read my profile on Blogger it redirects me to Google+. So I was pretty confused. I thought Blogger converted to Google+.
Anyway, it’s very interesting how Matt Cutts said that he used WordPress. I didn’t know anything about WordPress till I took the webinar from Paid Social Media Jobs. Men, PSMJ is so packed of information that even today I have not finish reading all they had to offer there. They have videos after videos, contracts example for graphic designers, ebooks, you name it.
I’m actually Information OVERLOAD…
Anyway, just dropping by and say a quick hello! A very good read.
Thanks,
Angela
P.S. I know you’re pretty new in WordPress but not quite new in blogging. You’re like me, I can relate with you more coz we almost have the SAME experience. I blogged for a long time before but never seek money from it till PSMJ introduced me to it. Guess, I was one confused blogger? Haha…anyway, I just want to tell you that I have a “special” folder just for you…where I keep all of your posts. I have no doubt one day…Vijesh you’ll be the NEXT biggest authority on the Internet. And I wanna be around so we can CELEBRATE someday. Champagne! Firecrackers! I look forward to it…
I totally agree with you @Angela McCall. Vijesh has a great potential one can easily see through his writings. I too wish to see him in top charts in the future.
Hi Angela,
You have been encouraging me from the very beginning of my blogging journey and I never knew you had a special folder for me, I feel it a honor I have no words but still thanks for supporting me and encouraging me from your words. I have been knowing about you more through your comments.
BTW in the celebrations I would see that you would have a special place as I think you are among those few who knew Blog in grace from the very first days of its beginning,
Thanks a lot for your encouraging comment
@ Karthik Thanks for your support buddy…
Hi Vijesh,
I think blogger is good for someone who is still new into blogging and don’t wanna invest money in hosting. I choose blogger over WordPress because I was still new and wanted to know whether I will be able to make any money off my blog. Now that I know I can, I am ready to move on to the next step – WordPress.
So yeah, for newbies out there who are still not sure unsure about there blogging future and don’t wanna invest too much money blogger is the only viable option out there.
You are so fast Rahul,
That’s a wise decision to go for WordPress though you are just 2 months old blogger you learned the basics too fast. You are almost done with some of the best SEO tips like building back links and how to make most of your posts.
All the best Rahul see you soon with WordPress.
Hey Vijesh,
You spoke for both the sides and you did really well. I used blogger once and yes, writing in blogger was much simpler than in wordpress. I’d say blogger is good enough for a start, but if you are really serious with your blog it is better to move into wordpress. BTW, I’m a newbie and knowing that you are a blogger since 2003, I really could learn a lot from you. Thanks for the good read and constant guidance!
Hi Karthik,
After a long gap, its true that blogger is so easy to use compared to WordPress but it is WordPress that shortens your success path. But only thing is we should be ready to invest what it takes to reach our goal, money wise and time wise. Thanks for your comment Karthik…
I like WordPress because I have total freedom to customize it. I can customize permalinks and everything. But problems using WordPress are, if we did some mistakes in coding our blog will go down and our blog can be easily hacked. But there is no security issues with Blogger.
Great post!
Hi Sriram,
Thanks for your opinion glad to hear that you love WordPress, Blogger is of course very secure compared to WordPress. Thanks for the reminder on meta description it now works fine in search.
75% of my blogs are still hosted on Blogger for free and I didn’t faced any problem in terms of my blogs going down due to heavy traffic or the rankings. In the last, requirement matters the most.
Hi Radha,
Glad that you have 75% of blogs on Blogger, even Techzene was a blogger blog but now it is migrated to WordPress. As you have said its true that blogger blogs can handle any amount to traffic without going down.
Thanks for your comment Radha…
Both have their important place in using and are different as well..!! for starters if you do not know much about programming and such you can start by learning from blogger but do not try to move the blog to WordPress either practice that on another blog so you get to know about both
Hi Raheel,
Thanks for your visit and thanks for sharing your valuable opinion too. It is better not to move blog from blogger to WordPress as it has got some defects which I have practically experienced.
Very good article! This should clear the doubts of those who hesitate what to choose. Both have pros and cons as said by Matt Cutts. What makes WordPress stand out is the ability to customize everything and you can tailor it to meet the requirements.
But I heard some people say ‘blogger’ blogs have more advantage than WordPress ones in terms of gaining some SEO favour. But I am not sure.
Thank you, Vijesh.
Hi Achari,
Thanks for dropping by, in terms of SEO they say blogger has more advantage but in practice it is WordPress that gets indexed soon compared to blogger but WordPress needs to be tweaked where as blogger need not. Yet blogger too has some good SEO features to equal WordPress plugins.
Good points Vijesh.
Me too started with Blogger, after few months I’ve decided is time to go with self hosting and domain names to test niches and my skills of making money online, more like atracting traffic, when you have traffic you have money.
Best regards from I. C. Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your comment good to know that you too started your blogging journey with blogger.
Great article! I think Blogger is good and empowers newcomers to the world of blogging, but for the tech-savvy and those who have started to become self-sufficient with blogging WordPress (especially self-hosted) is the way to go.
Hi JC,
Thanks for your opinion hope you enjoyed your visit…
Hi Vijesh,
This is a popular question for years now and still is. Blogger introduced many changes in March 2012 and has excellent SEO optimization possibilities. WordPress is customizable but Blogger is less customizable. Both are great platforms and I do not see any disadvantages of using Blogger. Blogger will always perform well compared to shared hosting.
The reason for me using WordPress is team blogging and moderation facility that Blogger lacks. I would prefer Blogger at any time for individual blogs.
Hi Suhas,
Thanks for your valuable opinion, both blogger and WordPress are great platforms as I have mentioned in the article…
Blogspot have magic, they attract all newbies but then they shift to wordpress to become pro blogger. I also enjoyed blogger.com for long time then until then they deleted my blog. Then I shift to self hosted wordpress and now blogging is better 😉
Let me see, I started to learn creating a website when hubby purchased the domain that I have now. He’s the one who introduced me the word “blog” and I said to him I wanted a blog on our site. We found two blog platforms which we tried to connect to our site but it wasn’t the easiest and the design would be different from our home site. I “accidentally” discovered WordPress through visiting blogs and to make the story short, we migrated our site to WordPress. I didn’t try Blogger because I already have my own domain then. Until now I don’t know how Blogger works though I have a blogger account because some of the blogs I visit require me to leave a comment using my Blogger account. Grr!
I think Blogger is good as a stepping stone to start a blog and once everything is learned it’s about time to shift to another platform like WordPress. I followed WordPress’ progress through all these times and I must say it’s getting better and bigger. RE: You have real control over spam – Oh, how I wish we could just eliminate this thing. 🙂
Have a nice day, Vijesh!
I have tried both Blogger and WordPress for several blogs. I think WordPress is far ahead in number of features and support. It is highly flexible and has a large community of programmers to support with themes, plugins, etc. It is continuously revised by dedicated programmers. Moreover, whatever additional features you want, you can get in one or another plugin. So, my choice is WordPress.