I attended the WordPress di Roma meetup recently. Even though I felt a little overwhelmed as it was conducted in Italian, I still found it enriching and educational. Which is the main inspiration for this post.
When I started blogging, I used to use Blogger/blogspot as it was the standard to use in the early 2000s. I changed to WordPress some years later and it’s been about seven years since the switch, and I haven’t looked back since.
Blogger does have its own strengths like :
- You can get a lot of hits using Blogger.
Interestingly, I still get a lot of hits in my old blog even though I’ve abandoned it for many years now. Just imagine how it would be like if I was still active and posted content on it.
- You can run advertisements with Blogger.
As Blogger is owned by Google, you could easily install Google Adsense on it and maybe earn some passive income. You’re also able to do sponsored advertisments and advertorials which you’re not able to do on WordPress, unless it is self hosted.
But despite that, there are many reasons why I prefer to use WordPress :
WordPress lets you put posts in Categories
This was the main reason which made me switch to WordPress. As a person with diverse interests, I thought that categorising my posts was a useful function which made it easier for readers to arrow in the topics which interests them.
Various plugins for your different needs
There are so many plugins that you could use to help improve your blog and just makes your blogging life easier. All you need to do is to search the database the keyword that you’re looking for and chances are, you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Among some of the plugins that I’m currently using are – Akismet which protects your blog from spam, the Broken Link Checker, and Jetpack which was probably love for me at first installation.
Virtually unlimited Wordpress Themes
While it is possible for you to tweak your blog’s appearance in Blogger, for a non coder like me, I’m always pleased to see the virtually unlimited amount of themes, most of them being free for use.
Blogpost has a limited amount of templates, while WordPress, with its large community, has a collective of thousands of looks that you can use.
More control in WordPress
It was a bit of a learning curve switching over from Blogger to WordPress. As I’m using self hosting, I had to learn how to use cPanel, .Css and others. Some I still don’t understand till now.
Nevertheless, I appreciated the fact that I have full control over my blog – I can install whichever plugin I like, and insert the CSS codes if I wanted to. While you can’t do the same in the free version of WordPress, budgethosting, the host that I’m using costs an affordable $45 SGD per year.
WordPress is for serious bloggers
Blogspot has the unfortunate reputation for users who are new at blogging. Which is not necessarily a bad thing as while there were earlier blog services, Blogger was where I truly learnt the ropes of blogging.
However, once you’ve gotten used to it, and want to advance to something more customizable, it’s advisable to use WordPress for its rich features.
WordPress is Social Media friendly
With Jetpack (in WordPress), I could link up with various social media sites and all of them can be updated by one click which makes it extremely convenient. I love that with it, you are also able to share directly on the post with whichever Social Media that you prefer.
Blogger’s “gadgets” are very limited. And personally, commenting on many blogspot posts is very annoying to me as it forces me to sign in and does not allow me to link directly to my blog, but instead to my blogger profile.
Wouldn’t you prefer to comment on this :
Compared to this?
WordPress has regular updates
WordPress updates frequently, which may be annoying to some, but I like it as you’d always see new features and functions in each update. This means that the team are always trying to improve themselves.
Intuitive mobile App in WordPress
While I don’t know how it’s like for Apple products, I really love the android app for WordPress. It’s so intuitive.
While it’s easy to use, it’s extremely comprehensive. I can even change the blog theme directly on my phone itself and I love getting new notifications in real time without having to log on to my computer.
In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with Blogger but I’m happy with WordPress. Having made the switch about 7 years ago, I adore WordPress and have never looked back.
I started on Blogger too. I imported my posts though. I didn’t start fresh. Maybe I should have? Anyhow, I was just looking at the WordPress app for iOS and realized there’s no way to insert galleries through the app, even if I set it as a gallery post. I have to open my laptop for that. It seems like that’s something the iPad app should be able to do.
But, even so, I do prefer WordPress to Blogger. WordPress has really been improving by leaps and bounds lately, too.
That’s strange though Brad, as you could do that with the android app. I prefer to use the computer for that though as editing pictures is faster there.
Speaking about imported posts, perhaps I should have started fresh too. I think some of the things I’ve imported didn’t port properly during the switch. Nevertheless I really like wordpress. I’ve yet to find anything that would top wordpress as a form of a blogging software.
Awesome post! I need to go to a conference like this. I started out using Xanga over 10 years ago to figure out all my uni. student angst (haha), then switched to blogger, then wordpress.com, wordpress.org, went back to wordpress.com and am finally back to wordpress.org via ProPhoto and plan on staying here from now on! Do you have .com or .org? I feel like .org gives you so much more creative freedom and as long as you have access to templates, editing your site is a piece of cake. Now to figure out SEO…
Once you’ve gone to wordpress.org, I don’t think you’d want to go back after experiencing all the customizations that you can do 🙂
I’m currently using self-hosting with budgethosting. I’ve been using bluehost for several years prior but they were getting ridiculously expensive considering that I’m blogging for a hobby. My current host is now about a quarter of what I used to pay and I think their services are much more personable.
I’ve never heard of ProPhoto before, I should check it out and see what their features are. Speaking of SEO, maybe you might want to install the “All in one SEO” plugin for your site? It’s supposed to bring in more organic searches for blogs.