WordPress vs. Blogger

It’s Monday, and that means, it’s time for another business post on whaelse.com. I hope you guys enjoyed the last one, and it was a little bit helpful in case you’re thinking about starting a fashion blog as well. Today’s post is for all the not-yet-blogger as well. It’ll give you some tips regarding the right CMS.

WordPress vs. Blogger – what to choose?

There are several options to host your blog, Blogger and WordPress are only two of them. Of course, first you have to decide if you want a self-hosted or free blog. WordPress offers both, but today I want to focus on the self-hosted WordPress and compare it with Blogger. I’ll tell you more about the differences as well as pros and cons of self-hosted and free WordPress next week.

Wordpress and Blogger are the most popular blogging platforms. Blogger is also known as Blogspot, because when you decide to work with Blogger your domain will look like this: yourname.blogspot.com. If you go with WordPress, you can choose and register the domain you like and, of course, the one that is still available: yourname.com. So this is the first difference between Blogger and WordPress. There are many more, but this post would be endless if I would go into details too much. That’s why you’ll find some pros and cons of Blogger as well as WordPress in the following.

Blogger: Pros & Cons

Blogger is a great place to start with blogging because it’s free and pretty easy to use. You need to know what you want to achieve with your blog, what your goal is. Blogger is limited; that’s why it is the wrong choice if you have bigger ambitions and if you want to create a real business with your blog. Find the Pros and Cons in the following:

Pros Blogger:

It’s free; you don’t have to pay for it for an unlimited period
You can start your blog in only a few minutes
Several great features are included, e.g. backup service (automatically), security taken care by Google
You can customize the blog template
Easy drag and drop changes
You can monetize your blog with ads from Google AdSense, Amazon and many more
No storage limit, so you can publish as much content as you want to

Cons Blogger:

Limited template selection, you may have to buy a new one if you don’t like the default ones
You can’t customize the blog post link structure
No FTP access
You don’t technically own your blog, so they can suspend your account forever in case they believe you’re violating their terms of service
You have to pay if you want to move your blog, no matter if it’s another free or a self-hosted one
You have to upgrade your Google account to Google+ to get 15 GB free storage for your photos. Otherwise, you’ll only have 1 GB

WordPress: Pros & Cons

Wordpress is the CMS I use for whaelse.com. I had it from the beginning because I already knew how to work with it. But believe me, even when you have no experience with WordPress it is very easy to learn. You don’t have to be a computer whiz to start and manage a WordPress blog, but it requires some technical skills – those are easy to learn! In the following you’ll find some pros and cons of WordPress.

Pros WordPress:

You really own your blog; you have full control
You can customize and control everything from the template to the link structure
You can monetize your WordPress blog
You can install tons of plugins for more features
You don’t have to pay WordPress for the CMS
SEO! There are much more possibilities to optimize your blog for Google
In case you’re bored from your blog, you can transform it into everything you can imagine, e.g. an online shop or a forum

Cons WordPress:

You have to buy a domain as well as a hosting service
It takes a little bit more time to start and is less easy
You need basic knowledge about some technical components such as PHP, HTML or FTP (no worries, there are a lot of tutorials on the web)
No included backup and security service
A lot of spam, but there are plugins to help you with this problem

What I recommend

Both CMS has pros and cons, but I would always recommend WordPress. Blogger is a nice and easy platform, but there are a lot of limits, and it’s less professional. Almost every blogger I know – even those who started with Blogger – switched to WordPress after a while. Of course, it’s a little bit more difficult and might cost something, but has so much more to offer. You can create a unique web presence; you can create everything they way you imagine it, and you have complete control.