WordPress or Blogger – Which is Right for Your New Blogging Venture?

Laura Ginn

While there are plenty of blogging platforms out there, the two that get chosen by the majority of bloggers are WordPress and Google Blogger. WordPress is the biggest and most well known, and every day millions of new posts are created all over the world, in every conceivable niche, using it. Blogger is a Google product, and so is highly trusted and also offers some advantages in terms of the community Google has created around it.

Photo by Dimitar Nikolov
Photo by Dimitar Nikolov

If you are going to start a new blog, then, you are probably going to want to use one of these systems to enable you to design and manage it. But which is right for your needs?

The Pros and Cons of Choosing WordPress for Your New Blog

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the web for good reason. It is almost infinitely customisable, and yet still very easy to use. It does have a few drawbacks too, though. Here are the major advantages WordPress offers bloggers:

  • You have the choice of a vast number of themes (especially with a paid account), which you can further customise yourself. This means that even with no web design skills whatsoever you can create professional looking sites very quickly.
  • WordPress has a huge array of add-ons for all kinds of purposes that can allow you to do interesting things with your blog and integrate with social media effortlessly.
  • Account management is easy with WordPress, so you can have a large team working on your site with everybody’s access rights and authorities carefully controlled.
  • It is easy to integrate a WordPress blog into an existing site or move an existing blog on the WordPress domain to your own domain when you get one.
  • Because so many people use WordPress, you can find all the help and tips you need very easily.

However, the downsides include:

  • While it is easy to use, it is a lot more complex than Blogger, so may take a while to pick up if you are not especially tech savvy.
  • You can only put advertising on your new site, including affiliate marketing links, if you have a paid account.
  • You need to install and configure add-ons even for basic things like site stats, which Blogger gives you automatically.

The Pros and Cons of Choosing Blogger for Your New Blog

Blogger has been home to some of the most famous blogs on the web, and has some unique advantages over WordPress:

  • It is highly integrated with Google’s other tools, and it is believed Google looks upon content created within its own suites favourably.
  • It is even easier to use than WordPress – even an absolute beginner can have a basic looking Blogger site up and running in a matter of minutes.
  • Apps that can be added to your Blogger site are less varied than WordPress’ add-ons, but require less configuration and generally can be installed by simply dragging and dropping them onto the site’s template.
  • The Blogger community allows you to find other relevant blogs and network with their owners, and helps other Blogger users find you.
  • Blogger will let you monetise your blog without paying for a premium membership.

Of course, Blogger too has its downsides:

  • While it is customisable enough for most people’s needs, it is not quite up there with WordPress in this respect.
  • Blogger blogs are generally wrapped with a little bar at the top offering general Google and Google Blogger options and services, so even if you put your blog on its own domain it still looks like a Blogger site.

Both platforms have their merits. In general, for professional sites WordPress gives the most options and is the best to work with in teams. However, if you want to do a simple blog and don’t want to spend a lot of your time on the back end of the platform’s interface, Blogger may well be the more suitable choice.