Why WordPress (Self Hosted) is Better Than Blogger (BlogSpot)?
Like most of bloggers, I had begin my blogging journey with Google’s Blogger (Blogspot). That actually went very smooth for several years, there are many things that I still love about blogger. Later on I decided to get myself familiarized with WordPress, played with WordPress local host version and found it awesome platform for blogging. Then I had shifted one of my WordPress blog from local host to live host. Luckily I also got the chance to migrate my client’s Blogger blog to WordPress. That single Blogger to WordPress migration for my client’s blog and its further configuration, its customization, its more powerful plugin features and premium themes made me WordPress addict. Before getting started with WordPress blog, I do suggest everyone to opt for Best WordPress Hosting Services that I had reviewed keeping in view their features, speed and reliability. I am also offering FREE WordPress Installation & Optimization Service to my blog readers. In today’s post I would highlight the most popular features of WordPress self hosted version, which you cannot find on Google’s Blogger platform.1. Customization
WordPress blogs are easy to customize with premium themes, plugins and sidebar widgets. You are not required to be a tech savvy PHP Web developer for customizing your WordPress blog. You can use WordPress for running news & entertainment blogs, job portals, social networking site via BuddyPress, e-commerce stuff, video blogs, integrate forums within wordpress, and even run a classified ads site based on wordpress. For Blogger’s customization you need to be familiar with basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript implementation and blogger’s conditional if else statements. So customization of WordPress is pretty easy for non tech savvy person just because of premium themes and plugin options, as compared with Blogger.
a. Plugins
There exists a plugin for almost every customization at WordPress Self Hosted version. For instance you need to have related posts being displayed on your WordPress blog. You will find tons of related posts plugins for WordPress. If you need to provide Facebook connectivity for registration process on WordPress, you can easily do it with a premium plugin. Similarly contact form can be added on WordPress via simple plugin. You need not to be well versed with Custom Php Coding stuff at all for using WordPress Plugins. Be warned that using too many plugins at a time on your WordPress blog might lead towards too much resource consumption at shared hosting environment and hence slow down your WordPress Blog. Perhaps Google’s Blogger platform doesn’t offer such flexibility to use custom php plugins.
b. Premium Themes
WordPress self hosted is blessed with tons of 3rd party wordpress premium themes which are elegant and efficient for WordPress. Premium themes for WordPress offer advanced functionality such as they are well optimized for shared hosting environment, they are optimized for search engine as well as readers. A WordPress blog’s responsiveness may totally depend upon the structure of premium themes. There are even advanced premium theme frameworks such as Thesis and Genesis which are supposed to offer boosted wordpress site performance with their child themes. Premium WordPress themes have to be purchased separately. On the other hand Blogger’s premium templates are way too less in number as compared with WordPress’ premium themes.
c. Sidebar Widgets
Most of the times different WordPress plugins are equipped with their bonus sidebar widgets which you can easily add up to your WordPress blog and further customize them with their inbuilt options. Installing WordPress Plugins and Sidebar Widgets are just click away. At Blogger you have to manually code the sidebar widgets with HTML, JavaScript, CSS. There are some limited but useful Blogger resources and widgets available, but again they are way too less in number as compared with WordPress.
2. Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O)
Search Engine Optimization are set of tactics that help to highlight your blog or website at a better position to grab the organic search traffic from search engines that actually convert wells and generate the revenue for your blog. WordPress offers much more flexibility in search engine optimization, such as keywords, keywords density, meta tags, meta search descriptions, optimized title for posts and sitemaps. On site and off site SEO practices are even better with WordPress. Internal link building within the site and sitemap generation is lot more easier for WordPress users. Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress does its job quite well for WordPress blog’s search engine optimization. Blogger blogs have to be tweaked manually for such sort of search engine optimizations and one has to be familiar with html, meta tags and conditional statements. I have written another detailed article where I have shared Search Engine Optimization Tips, make sure to go through it for better understanding.
3. Control
With WordPress self hosted version you possess complete control over your blog and can perform advanced level of customization using custom php coding techniques. You can easily fetch any kind of data for reporting purposes from WordPress self hosted blog. You can make big changes to all of your posts just by running few SQL queries on the database, you can even replace content of your multiple posts at once, using PHP based search and replace tool. You can backup and restore the complete database, which is your property, using PhpMyAdmin. You have complete rights to sell your WordPress self hosted blog to any other person. Whereas Blogger doesn’t provide any of such advanced features except for exporting your blog on hard disk for backup purposes.
4. Blog Repute
Since WordPress Self Hosted blog requires custom domain name that is usually commercial one (.com). And separate WordPress Hosting Package has to be purchased for installing WordPress blog on that purchased custom domain. It creates better impact on your blog audience that this person has invested money on starting a blog and should be serious and responsible for quality work. Thus building better blog repute among blog readers. At Blogger you are only able to use custom domain name feature while the blogger’s content hosting remains free.
a. More Revenue Opportunities
If your WordPress self hosted blog becomes famous, you will have much better online earning opportunities since you have more control over advertisement distribution and placement using AdRotate plugin that offers extremely useful advertisement management thus driving more earnings for your blog. Even Google Adsense now prefers WordPress blogs because WordPress users have paid money to get the services and there are very less chances that a WordPress self hosted blogger will abuse or spam the web. Publisher networks such as Tribal Fusion and Google Adsense are easy to be approved with heavy organic traffic self hosted wordpress blogs. Whereas Blogger is in reach of almost everyone, even being its Google’s own platform, is still used for spamming purposes and its getting much harder to get approved on Google Adsense program with Blogger Blog.
5. No Risk of Blog Removal
Your WordPress self hosted blog is completely safe against blog removal, since you are hosting it yourself and you possess advanced level of control over your WordPress self hosted blog. You must take care of copyrights and respect them. However copyright violation at Blogger blogs lead towards permanent blog removal. Let’s suppose your Blogger account has 10 working blogs, and only one out of those 10 blogger blogs has repeated copyright infringements, your all 10 blogs are at serious risk of removal. Since Blogger will completely disable your Blogger account and every blog will get effected, just due to single blog that was violating the copyrights. So make sure not to violate copyright laws and respect them, if you don’t want to face troubles with your Blogger Blogs. At WordPress you don’t have such limitations, but you must adhere to copyright laws in any case.
6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Networks can be used to speed up your WordPress self hosted blog. CDN offers fast wordpress site experience to the readers, since global CDN fetches the blog’s multimedia such as images and videos from the nearest available node, therefore reducing the latency and speeding up your wordpress blog. Some Content Delivery Networks such as CloudFlare may also help to trigger security firewall in case your wordpress blog is being targeted with denial of service (DOS) or distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Cloudflare is so intelligent to detect the bots and filter them out from your Blog’s traffic. Other famous content delivery networks include MaxCDN, Akamai Technologies and EdgeCast. CDN networks only work with self hosted WordPress blogs as they require DNS changes to be made at web hosting level, which are only possible with cPanel or Plesk based shared web hosting. At Blogger such advanced features cannot be utilized at all.I guess these points are enough to make any one clear that why wordpress self hosted version is better than Google’s Blogger platform. These are the benefits of WordPress over Blogger and are certainly important to be considered before getting started with Blogging journey. If you are planning to get started with a WordPress Blog or migrate your existing blogger blog to WordPress, you must Claim Free WordPress Installation & Optimization Service. I will also try to come up with benefits of Blogger over WordPress for my valued blog readers. After reading this personal review of mine, you might have some queries in your mind, you are free to make related queries in the comments section below. Cheers everyone!! 🙂
