When it comes to blogging, we have plenty of options to start a blog:
- WordPress
- BlogSpot
- Tumblr
- …and many others…
One of the most talked about topics here at ShoutMeLoud is:
Which blogging platform is better?
WordPress or Blogger?
This debate can get pretty confusing at times. Many users like BlogSpot because there are less technical hassles, and many users love WordPress because of its increased power and features. When someone asks me which platform they should start with, here is my usual answer:
Start with WordPress.com for a month, and once you get accustomed to blogging, start a new blog on the self-hosted WordPress platform.
Alternatively, you are free to use Blogger.com as your launchpad blogging platform, but don’t stick to it for too long.
I say this from experience because I started my blogging journey with BlogSpot and later migrated my blogger blog to WordPress.org.
Back then, there were a hell of a lot of learning experiences trying to figure out WordPress. But now, learning WordPress is quite easy with the help of detailed guides, tutorials, and videos.
Anyway, in this article, I have shared a detailed comparison of WordPress vs. BlogSpot and will explain which one is better for certain situations and why.
WordPress Vs. Blogger: Which Platform to choose?
Why and Why Not Blogger?
The Blogger platform (aka BlogSpot) is very useful when you just want to start a blog to share your thoughts. When you are not blogging for money, or you need a simple platform that doesn’t require any technical know-how, BlogSpot is really good.
While there are many limitations of BlogSpot in terms of functionalities and SEO benefit, if you just need a platform to start a blog with at almost 0 cost, BlogSpot is the right pick.
At the same time, if you are blogging for money, building authority, or for branding yourself, BlogSpot is not the ideal choice. This is because you have limited control over visibility in search engines, and after a while, you become very limited when you want to add new features.
I have read it many times:
- Blogger is a Google product which means it gives more SEO advantages.
This is simply not true.
It doesn’t matter if you are using WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, or any other platform, SEO is decided by how you configure your complete site for search engines.
In the Blogger platform, we have limited control over our site. Despite the fact that they have added some new SEO features, BlogSpot still lacks in SEO optimization.
In a nutshell, the Blogger platform is better than WordPress when you are creating a blog for no other reason than you want to write. If you are OK with the limited features offered by the Blogger platform, then this is a great choice. For making money or creating a long term impact, WordPress platform is better.
Note: WordPress comes in two different forms. You can read about it here.
Why and Why Not WordPress?
Note: ShoutMeLoud uses WordPress (Self-hosted WordPress) as its blogging platform, but this will not make my comparison biased.
WordPress gives you complete control over your blog, and you can technically do anything you want.
You host your own files, can design it however you like, and can use it for any purpose (personal or professional).
You also get complete control over the SEO including adding SEO plugins to make your blog more SEO friendly. Moreover, you can always introduce the latest SEO techniques like “star ratings” using a plugin such as Rich Snippets.
WordPress will let you do everything you want to do.
But at the same time, you need to manage your own blog. You need to install WordPress on your own server and maintain your blog’s health.
It may sound technical, but with amazing support from the WordPress community, you can learn everything in no time.
In fact, if you stumble onto the ShoutMeLoud WordPress guide, most of your queries regarding WordPress will be answered.
Getting started with WordPress may require some effort in terms of watching videos, learning how to add a plugin, getting used to the dashboard, etc.
But we also have to do that with Blogger, right?
If you are planning to create a blog with the mindset of making it popular and making money from it, you should go for the self-hosted WordPress blog.
If you are an occasional writer or a hobby-blogger, BlogSpot is the best pick for you.
Here is a handy chart from HowJoyful, explaining the feature differences between BlogSpot vs. WordPress.com vs. Self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org):
Matt Cutts on Blogger or WordPress for SEO:
Matt Cutts is not only a Google engineer, and he is also the head of the Google Web Spam team.
He is one of those guys who educates normal users like you and me about what Google expects from a website and how the Google search engine works.
In the past, I have shared many webmaster videos from Matt, and he has always helped me learn something new. In a recent video, a user asked him:
- “Which is better in terms of SEO: WordPress or Blogger?”
Matt answered the query with this video:
Interestingly, Matt Cutts uses the WordPress platform for his personal blog, though he mentioned that Blogger is good for new users as it’s very simple to get started. He says that for casual blogging, it’s fantastic.
With regards to SEO advantages between Blogger and WordPress, both are about the same with the default installation.
The WordPress default installation is not SEO friendly, but you can always make your WordPress blog SEO friendly with the help of many available plugins.
In short, WordPress gives you more power and you can customize it according to your needs.
Blogger Vs. WordPress: Why WordPress is better?
As I mentioned above, I started my journey to Blogging with BlogSpot, and later I moved to WordPress. So, I’m aware of the benefits and downside of BlogSpot, and here I’m not going to talk about any benefits, as WordPress offers all those features which BlogSpot offers.
1. Control over your blog:
This is one of the major reasons I support self-hosted blog. Blogspot is owned by Google, and there are chances that they can delete your Blogspot account without giving you any warning. Even if you use the custom domain feature (Using your domain name ), chances are high that if spammers use feature Flag as spam and report your blog as spam.
Google might remove your blog. This is something very common and by doing a quick search on Google, you will realize many bloggers faced this problem while using BlogSpot.
Winner: Self hosted blog
2. Search engine optimization:
It doesn’t matter where your blog is hosted, traffic is the first and last thing any blogger will look for. Search engine optimization in simple words means Optimizing your blog for search engines and getting traffic from search engine”. Comparing WordPress and BlogSpot, WordPress offers more options to optimize your blog for search engine where as in BlogSpot you are limited to certain settings.
Here are few posts which will help you to optimize your WordPress blog for search engine optimization
3. Plugins and support:
WordPress is blessed with features like the plugin and a strong community to get support.
When I was on BlogSpot, I spent lots of time editing my theme to show related posts and adding such features. WordPress makes your life easy using simple plugins for everything you need. By using plugins, you can achieve anything, and if not, you can take help of WordPress support forum to get the custom code and extend the capabilities of your blog.
Here is a list of 30 must have WordPress plugins.
4. Reputation:
This can be considered as the human tendency or perception, that most of the people see Blogs built on blogger platform as non-serious. One of the simple reason is its free, and a mass number of people are using it for Blackhat SEO, spamming and for affiliate landing pages.
When talking about self-hosted blog, people think that the person has paid for the service, and he is serious about his blog.
5. Theme and templates:
BlogSpot offers many templates but due to the commercial nature of WordPress, you will find unlimited free and Premium WordPress themes. Moreover, since you have FTP access, you can alter the complete look and feel of your WordPress theme.
6. AdSense:
AdSense is the lifeline for any blogger who is looking forward to making money from his blog. Initially, BlogSpot used to be the best way to get your AdSense account approved, but later on, it’s becoming tough to get your Adsense account with BlogSpot.
With WordPress and your domain email address, getting your blog approved is very easy. Another advantage of a self-hosted blog.
If you are an AdSense user, you should consider checking out following posts on AdSense:
The Verdict: Blogger vs. WordPress
WordPress platform is anytime a better choice over Blogspot platform.
It’s important to figure out why you want to start a blog and then go from there. Blogger has many limitations that WordPress doesn’t have. In terms of functionality, there’s no question that WordPress is far superior.
If this article convinced you to move your Blogger hosted blog to WordPress, you can read my article on how to migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress.
Do let me know: What’s your verdict on WordPress vs. Blogger? Which platform do you prefer and why?
Here are hand-picked articles for further reading:
- Why You Need To Use A Custom Domain Name For Your BlogSpot Blog
- How To Write SEO Friendly Content (Beginner To Advanced)
- How to Make Money Blogging
Blogger is good for starters, simply because it is free and easy to use. You need to pay for hosting if you want a WordPress blog, but user experience is better in WP.
I would say, start with Blogger, and you can transfer it to WordPress anytime.
Plus, there are premium Blogger themes out there that you can get under $25.
Ya WordPress is a great platform for Bloggers. We can have different page designs, which is not possible in Blogger. A blogger can change from a regular blog to full time website.
And most important, WordPress community is quite big. Millions of users & Professionals are using WordPress. So if we found any kind of problem with WordPress theme, plugins, widgets, just name it – u will get solutions from 1000’s of Professionals all over the world.
Hai Dude
thanks for your post,and I need to know a concept from you.
can I use the members area in wordpress
with login and signup process for my readers
waiting for your suggestion
thanks in advance 🙂
For SEO, i think wordpress is best. It gives us lots of options. There is a big community developing wonderful plugins.
Blogger is also good as we need a domain name only to start new blog.
Great articles comparing Blogspot vs WordPress blogs. I agree with it. But, my suggestion to a new blogger will be to start with blogger and use custom domain from day one. Domain registration costs approx 11$ / year. Buy the domain and link that domain to your blogspot blog. Again as suggested in the post above, choose professional domain name. This will be big saver for your in case you want to migrate from blogspot to self-hosted WordPress in future. You will not have to worry about loss of links to your post. Migration from Blogspot to Self-hosted WordPress is very easy now a days with freely available scripts. There are many professional services available too which can migrate your blog from Blospot to WordPress for small fee.
Blogger sites appear much much faster in Google than do WP sites. They also get higher placing. You can think that’s a ‘rumour’ if you want. I’ve tested it with all of my sites. 100 percent accurate every time.
I moved some of my sites from Blogger to WP last year and what a disaster that was. I lost much of my ‘Google juice’ because of it. Plus, as WP is a nightmare to customize I don’t recommend doing that to anyone who just wants to blog.
WP fanboys like you can keep talking all you like about WP being ‘better’. In actual fact, it’s not. And, as you can have a unique domain name on Blogger, there is no reason not to use it at all.
Your post is very balanced when you compare blogger with wordpress. Anyway, I will always be with wordpress 🙂
Excellent comparison. Well, blogger is choice for someone who wants to do personal blogging with some flexibility and configurations. However, WordPress is better for creating professional blogs, business blogs with many flexibilities and lots of configurations. Thanks Harsh for this useful comparison 🙂
I have used both blogger and wordpress and I found WordPress much better.You can do lot of customisation in wordpress….Nice article by Harsh
Blogger has come a long way and a lot of improvements and new features introduced of late has narrow the gaps in terms of functionality and capability in relation to WordPress.
By the way, you can also customized Blogger scripts much like WordPress plug-ins and themes. I think Blogger is a nice platform and in no way inferior to WordPress or other CMS platforms. The only shortcoming is that Google owns it and the risk associated with your blog account suspension or cancellation makes it less ideal for business blogger.
WordPress dot com is very quick in appearing in search engine, so i like it most. I have one free hosted wordpress dot com blog, and recently i am trying to buy the domain from it. Thanks for your post. It helped me to see to thing differently. regards
Now blogger has all seo features like wordpress,like meta tag.url direction or url display editing,everything about seo like wordpress in the setting. Now blogger can be customized with easier,all about html5 and css3 can improve blogger be greater. In blogspot,we can using json jquery for ajax,and easy to implement to blogger. Include comment box , now can be like wordpress using jquery java script,it’s fast like wordpress. wyswyg has more many features as same as wordpress.
But we can’t use custom title for search engines with blogger.
Well, now you can. You can set a custom permalink of your post titles rather than using the one auto-generated by blogger.
Nice article Harsh. During my days I just used to depend on normal HTML content sites.Hell lot of pressure in updating the code, CSS, alignment and design. My first experiment was directly on WordPress and I never regret my decision of joining the wordpress because of its flexibilty. Blogger , I had created a personal account but could never used during those days because of limited net access for us.
I can’t totally agree with some points here.
SML: “When you are not blogging for money, or you need a platform which doesn’t require any technical know-how, BlogSpot is really good.”
My View: There is a chance that someone read this blog, who is not familiar with blogging, thinks blogging on Blogspot not make much money which is not the case. BlogSpot has it own AdSense widgets which are easy to implement with customization. You can earn more revenue if you enable Blogger mobile template for your blogs. As a BlogSpot blogger, I could say , my major portion of AdSense income coming from mobile traffic. You can also experiment AdSense alternatives too. Affiliate marketing is also possible with BlogSpot blogs. For example, if you are in India, being as an Flipkart.com affiliate you can earn commission for referring its products to your readers. We can expect Google brings its own ‘Affiliate Ads’ for Blogger to India soon.
SML: “At the same time, if you are blogging for money, fame or for branding yourself, BlogSpot is not the ideas choice.”
My view: As a shy at-home lady, I am not familiar even at my home town. But I have online friends all over India and abroad. Thanks to Google.
I never scared of SEO and traffic. I want customers not the crowd.
Blogging only on WordPress not brings always success. I have seen many of my fellow so called professional bloggers goes offline since months.
You can’t easily replicate Harsh’s blogging success. Please, dig in previous posts on SML . You can find some fine inspirational posts by Harsh based his own blogging experience. He achieved all by his hard-work and his own blogging tactics.
In a nutshell, WodPress is an awesome tool for a full-time professional blogger. But BlogSpot is still the best blogger platform for the masses. There is no big technical hazards and don’t leave you in a credit card subscription.
P. S. – If you doubt, what you do when your BlogSpot blog goes some success and want to be a professional full time WordPress blogger , that is Harsh hints at the end of this article. You can easily move your Blogger hosted blog to WordPress without any problems with the help of his professional service .
@Sajitha
I remember your last comment on similar topic article.. I don’t disagree with your point that BlogSpot is good..And as I mentioned in the article BlogSpot is good platform, and good for beginners and for non tech savvy people. I used BLogSpot, and I loved the part that I don’d need to worry about hosting, hacking and many other stuff… But when ever I think about scalability, I’ left with fewer option, where as WordPress offers much more option to scale your blog…
Lets see from the blogging business perspective:
For a business blog, would you recommend BlogSpot?
Do you get complete SEO control, when you are using BlogSpot?
Is 10 pages sufficient for a big blog?
As I have mentioned lots of time, both platform are good..but by the end decision should be based on Goals, technical know-how, and what some one is trying to achieve with his blog. Regarding money, yes one can make money from BlogSpot blog using AdSense, Affiliate and many other ad network. But there are many popular ad networks, which doesn’t accept free blogging platform. For ex: BuySellads. Would you recommend someone to miss out one opportunity of earning, when he has an option to choose his blogging platform.
I agree with your point
“Blogging only on WordPress not brings always success. I have seen many of my fellow so called professional bloggers goes offline since months.”
As one can be a successful blogger on Tumblr platform, Drupal or even on custom CMS.. Success is not related to platform, it’s related to work and dedication one put in.
WordPress Vs. BlogSpot:
“In a nutshell, WodPress is an awesome tool for a full-time professional blogger. But BlogSpot is still the best blogger platform for the masses. There is no big technical hazards and don’t leave you in a credit card subscription.”
Here at ShoutMeLoud, my goal is to help people make business out of blogging, and I teach what works for me, and what is right according to stats. How many successful blogs are there on BlogSpot compare to WordPress? I’m not saying one can’t be successful with a BlogSpot platform, but once you reach there, you want to take your blog to next level, by trying new things.. Integrating forum, personalising the platform, and many stuff that become requisite over time..
As I mentioned in the article, if you are blogging for passion, for your personal diary,writing or anything.. BlogSpot is good.. And I stick to it.. But when you are looking at bigger picture..self hosted blogs are the right choice…If you disagree with me, I recommend you to watch the video, and see what Matt Cutts has to say about this..
is there is benefit of blogger.com PR in newaly created blog on blogger vs our hosted domain ?
I think that there is no doubt about this because WordPress(Self-hosted) is the king 🙂 When compering WordPress(Self-hosted) with other platform there are so many advantages you can get from WordPress(Self-hosted) blog. The best way to find it is, Google. Any one can search this on Google. At least 75% blog post have mentioned that WordPress(Self-hosted) is the best.
Right Harsh , WordPress is better that blogger because with wordpress you may add new features to you blog and get better control over it . With wordpress you may add new function using plugin but the facility is not available with blogger
Matt Cutts also use wordpress for his personal blog, according to me, wordpress is a comprehensive package for blog and blogging is simple and easy to start blog.
Its a 1000$ question to me every time this question arises.I use wordpress with free hosting websites in the starting days that gives better experience to me with automatic script installation,theme installation etc.Due to restrictions on free webhosting sites later i moved to blogger service and it is comfortable to me but at the same duplicate meta description,missing title tag issues are getting problems to me.still i run my blog on blogger due to money problem.
Hey,
I have a number of blogs on Blogger. Recently I shifted to WordPress. I tried WordPress.com also. What I felt is that blogger blogs tend to appear more fast in search engines. Even I barely see any WordPress.com blog on 1st page of google compared to blog spot results. WordPress is best because of plugins and we don’t have to follow Google TOS , policies. You are the king on WordPress. You can do whatever you want. I started with blogger, made many blogs and money too but now shifted to wordpress to enjoy the freedom.