Blogger vs. WordPress: Pros and Cons

Blogspot and WordPress.org are two blogging platforms that dominates the blogosphere today. If you’re one of the people who wants to venture in the blogging industry, chances are you’ll be using any of these two. If you’re really into serious blogging, a good understanding of the two platforms is important to help you decide what platform fits you the most.

If there are three words I’ll choose in describing what blogger(blogspot) platform is, that would be “built for beginners”. Blogger aka Blogspot is the best choice if you are completely new to blogging. That is because blogger is very easy to use and you can easily familiarize the interface in approximately 1 day. If you’ll be using wordpress for the first time, you’ll be lost with some of the functionalities. Although wordpress has a very easy learning curve, blogger still beats wordpress in terms of user-friendliness. Blogspot community are helpful too, and you can easily find useful resources if you have some ideas on what blogspot gigs you want to implement in your blog. The choice of themes is not a problem anymore, there are available sites in which you can download beautiful themes for free. Blogspot blogs are also widgetized and you can simply alter the components of your blog in a drag and drop manner. But what’s really good about blogspot is that you have unlimited space and bandwith that you can use all for free. You can also mask the default blogspot adresss by buying your own domain name.

Beyond this user-friendliness and ease of use blogspot blogs still lack finesse compared to wordpress. You cannot make custom pages and you have too much code interactions if you want to do something extraordinary with your blog. That means the level of customization has it’s limit. Blogspot blogs do not comply to W3C rules too, I’ve never seen a fully developed blog that complies to W3C standards. There’s too much clutter in the code and scaling your blogger blog is next to impossible. And one thing I hate about blogspot is the editor, even though Google have updated the old editor the new one is still not that good compared to wordpress.

If “Built for beginners” is the best way to describe blogger then WordPress is “Meant for hardcore bloggers”. I’ve been to blogger platform before and migrated to WordPress and I’m happy that I did. At first I was at lost in using the WordPress interface since I’m used to the old blogspot way. But in a matter of days (one and a half), It seems that I totally mastered it. Flexibility and versatility is one thing I love about WordPress, you can do so much customizations with it with the help of plugins. You can just do any thing you’ve imagined by just using plugins. In the long, running a wordpress blog is very easy to maintain. The choice of themes are to the max, at the time of this writing there’s 1000+ themes available in wordpress site and there’s so much more aside from the main site. If you really value professionalism then wordpress is the right choice for you.

Well you just have to pay a little to your self-hosted wordpress blog to run. From what I know the most cheap hosting siteoffers unlimited space and bandwith at a cost of $4($3.95) per month. If you’re in great luck you can look for some hosting promotions that could give you big discount. I’ve posted an article here in which I stumbled a $10 value of webhosting offering unlimited space and bandwith for a year of hosting. WordPress.com offers unlimited space and bandwitdh but the functionality is very limited if you’ll compare it to a self-hosted one. The only one thing that bothers me is that why’s wordpress do not have the CAPTCHA functionality to their commenting system. Although Akismet really works for SPAM protection It’s still uncomfortable in my part without a built in CAPTCHA functionality.