When I started my blog, I searched for the best blogging platform in Google, the top choice in many results was Wordpress.org (the self hosted one). Even Google’s own Blogger was a second or third choice. So I bought a domain and started my blog with wordpress. Everything was going fine until one day I was forced to think of alternatives. My web host deleted my hosting account and my blog was homeless for more than two weeks. It is then I started to think of moving out from Wordpress because of the reasons below.
1. I had no option.
Well, it’s not entirely true. I was unable to get a reliable free hosting service that would provide me some descent space to install wordpress, allow me to use my own domain and doesn’t force their ads on my site. Alternatively, I could pay for hosting, but paying approx INR 6600 ($101) every year just to host the blog was a bit too much for me.
2. Blogger is free.
There is no hosting charges, Blogger hosts your text, image and video without imposing a limit on it. This was a really incredible deal for me. No self-hosting also means, there is no maintenance of your hosting account, no downtime nightmares, no security issues to worry about. Blogger takes care of them all, for free.
3. Zero learning curve
Though I had a blogger account from the day I had the gmail account, I never really used it. but I was surprised to see how easy it is to learn and use. You can get started within minutes. It took me days (if not weeks) to get comfortable with wordpress admin panel. Here, you just select a template and start blogging.
4. Lets you use your own domain
The great thing about having your own domain is, you never really lose all your traffic in case you change your platform. And Blogger lets you have your own domain without asking a penny. Though https is not available with a custom domain, you can easily get that free if you are using cloudflare. If you are not using cloudflare, you are stupid.
5. A decent collection of templates and widgets.
Though you may miss the huge template and plugin collection of Wordpress, there are really nice professional looking templates for blogger available for free. You will also find a great many third party widgets to do neat tricks (like adding an html sitemap) with your blogger blog.
6. You really don’t need so much features.
Wordpress is no longer just a blogging platform. It’s a complete CMS in itself having features to make any kind of websites, from simple port folios to complex shopping carts. But with all it’s bells and whistles, sometimes, it feels a bit of a overkill for a blog.
Blogger has just enough options to write and edit posts or pages, manage your comments, check your stats, tinker with the design and do a bit of administrative settings. It also has Adsense integrated for monetisation. Sometimes, simple is elegant.
7. Policy limitations.
Though it may not affect most people, but most webhosts have a strict policy guideline of what your website can and cannot contain and there are very few languages that are acceptable. Blogger content policy is a lot less relaxed there. You can write about almost anything in almost any language.
8. It is there to stay.
Contrary to popular opinion, that Google may anytime shut the Blogger service down, I feel just the opposite. Because the bulk of Google’s revenue comes from its proprietary advertising service and to place ads you need content. And Blogger is a huge source of content. With adsense being preferred method of monetisation for most bloggers, Google really wouldn’t want to miss that revenue source.
All being said, I also ran into my share of hiccups while migrating to blogger. So do note these if you are also planning the same.
1. No easy way to migrate hosted media
You can export your database in sql format and then convert it to blogger compatible xml format using this tool online. Huge thanks to Google for the code and to the person who made that app. This guide from livewire helped a lot.
However, links to all the images, videos or other files that you uploaded for your wordpress site will still point to the old site and those links will be broken once you point your domain to Blogger. You have to manually upload the files and update the links in your posts. Not difficult but boring
2. Messed up permalinks
If you are a fan of Wordpress permalinks, you’ll miss the flexibility here. The permalinks take a fixed structure of http://Your_URL/YYYY/MM/your-post-name.html. If you are using any other format then, you’ll lose some traffic. You may reclaim some of the traffic from Google if you have webmaster tools enabled for your site. You will also have to fix your internal links in each post manually for the same reason.
To my insane luck, I had exactly the same structure in wordpress. So not an issue there.
Overall, as I continue to work with my blog in Blogger, it continues to amaze me with some nifty feature or trick, that I earlier thought was not possible with Blogger.
I hope this helps you decide if you really want wordpress for your blog or Blogger is more than enough. If you are new to blogging, I would strongly suggest to start with blogger. You can always migrate to wordpress easily when you make it big.
Do let me know your thoughts on this.
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