ReviewHostingASP.NET – Thinking of starting a website or blog? Maybe the question you should be asking now which platform is better? WordPress or Blogger? Choosing the best platform is tough decision specially for new bloggers. Well, you are not the first person who ran into this confusion. We started building websites in early 2008. Obviously, we started out with free option and that was blogger (yes it has always been free!). But later on, we moved to WordPress and never looked back again. We’ve been on WordPress for a few months now and we have to say we’re pretty happy since we made the change. After playing with it for a few months, we suggest you to choose self hosted WordPress than Blogger.
What is Self Hosted WordPress?
WordPress is an open CMS source service that allows advanced personalizations by using plugins and theme if needed. It has two versions of blog, free WordPress blog and self hosted WordPress blog. Free WordPress blog gives users 3 GB of space and automatic backups, while you are not allowed to use other analytics tool, custom themes and plugins to your blog.
On the other hand, Self hosted WordPress blog gives you full control over the appearance of your blog and it is available to use custom theme and plugins (including analytics and tracking services). Therefore, self hosted WordPress owes more customization features and it is possible to create any type of website you want and publish contents easily with advanced content management.
Why Choose Self Hosted WordPress and not Blogger?
Self hosted WordPress Website is way more powerful and it truly gives you complete control of your website/blog. WordPress plugins and themes are one thing that makes your website/blog stands out of the crowd. We personally love WordPress and we advice WordPress platform even for the professional company website. Here are few reasons why WordPress is the best platform and you must choose self hosted WordPress than Blogger:
WordPress is available as open source blogging software through WordPress.org (although most hosting companies have a one-click installation script). A self hosted WordPress site allows an individual or a company to create their own website by installing WordPress on their domain which allow full control on every aspect of the blog. Paying for the hosting service gives you maximum flexibility and customization, among other key features. In addition, WordPress data is stored in an open XML format and allows data to be transferred to other WordPress blogs or different content management systems. Unlike Blogger, template customizations and coding in WordPress can be backed up. If you need to change your template, you don’t need to start from scratch. Most of the web hosting providers offer full automatic backups and also WordPress generates an XML file as the backup and you can re-upload the XML file later to restore your blog, easy, right? Blogger also provides XML backups, but full server backups are always better as they retain your themes, plugins and attachments too.
WordPress has amazing amount of plugins and chances are you can find plugin for almost anything you are trying to do on your blog. No code editing like that of WordPress, it’s just copy pasting stuff. With a built-in plugin network, WordPress plugins are easy to install and find with more than 24,000 to choose from, here are some of the best WordPress plugins:
If we talk about themes, WordPress Themes are one thing that makes any website/blog stand out. Blogger is just too much limited when it comes to design and has no chance against WordPress flexibility of allowing users to design a site from scratch and give it any shape they want without having to worry about anything.
Since, WordPress is clearly much more popular than Blogger, it is obvious that more designers are willing to work for WordPress sites which is why there are millions of stunning WordPress themes to choose from and they range from Business to Travel blogs, from Cooking to Gardening blogs and everything else you can think to blog about.
When it comes to support, WordPress Support is part excellence on WordPress community. There are just so many people to help you. You can post any query on the community forum and someone might end up giving you custom codes to extend capability of your blog/website.
You have so much control over SEO of your blog/website with WordPress. This level of freedom is not offered by Blogger platform. Like we’ve said in the previous point before, you also have the freedom of using powerful SEO plugins that can seriously optimize your blog/website. On the other hand, Blogger uses one long page filled with HTML to do all things which makes it less SEO friendly even though it is managed by Google itself. In addition, Blogger uses only one long page of HTML for doing everything. This not only results in poor SEO, but it drastically decreases the loading time. In case of WordPress, your blog will load pretty smoothly by default. And, if you want to boost the speed, there are also plugins to speed up WordPress.
It’s Time to Move Your Blogger to Self Hosted WordPress
Overall, we’ve been really happy we made the switch. Learning WordPress was quite easy. Then, our traffic has increased a great deal, due to the changes that have been made. No matter what platform, a blog is a constant work in progress, and the content is the most important factor. However, WordPress provides more ways to make your content not only more accessible but simply better. So, If you’re still on blogspot or blogger. we’d recommend you to move from Blogger to self hosted WordPress now. You can also hire one hosting provider to setup your new WordPress blog. If you are worried about the hosting cost then we will recommend to you go with some hosting company with affordable cost. You can choose self hosted WordPress from HostForLIFE.eu, ASPHostPortal.com and Netcetera.co.uk. With powerful features, fast speed performance, full uptime, great supports and affordable price, all of them are the best solution which is more than compatible with WordPress. They are strongly recommended to individuals, ASP.NET developers, and SMBs to self host their WordPress site.