WordPress Or Blogger? Which Blogging CMS To Choose

The choice is kind of simple: if you want just a personal blog to do your thing which has nothing to do with making a living, choose anything you like. Both Blogger and WordPress are excellent content management systems and for a personal blog, either CMS will do. However, for any business to grow, you cannot face a roadblock every two steps nor have someone breathing down your neck.

In other words, you need total control. And with great control comes the need for moderate learning – at least. The more options you have, the more knowledgeable you have to be to make use of them. Or, you could simply hire someone to do it for you if you have money to spare.

Free Options: Blogger and WordPress.Com

Great options and we are not going to add ‘as far as free things go’. Not really. You can have wonderful blogs and rank them too, with enough good content. There are limitations, but if you are adventurous enough but uncertain of where you are going, you can even start your business with a free blog and expand from there.

This, however, is not the recommended option because expansion on both Blogger and WordPress.Com can be rather limiting. You can have your own domain name, sure, but sooner or later you’d want more freedom to choose your themes, to add more plug-ins, or to further customize your URLs.

There is really no point in talking about pros and cons in the usual manner: both Blogger and WordPress.Com in their paid and free avatars are severely limited. We repeat: this is not to say you cannot rank nor have a flourishing business with either of these, but limited is limited, and most of us wouldn’t want that.

Some of us do, and they have done great jobs with these platforms especially since they have no worries about maintaining their sites or paying extra for hosting or worrying about downtime or about getting hacked. Regarding the last one, the general consensus is that Blogger is generally more secure than WordPress.

About the popular idea regarding getting indexed quicker because Blogger is owned by Google and Google practically owns the Internet? We’d advise you to forget about that; even if you get indexed faster or rank quicker, you will never hold your rank without great content, so no help there. Besides, everyone knows this: Google Loves WordPress!

Self-Hosted Paid Option: WordPress.Org

Self hosted means you get your own domain name and hosting (with the earlier options you only needed to buy a domain name to make your blog look like blog.com from blog.wordpress.com) and install WordPress.Org free CMS on it. Most hosting providers have a one click WordPress hosting option and you will have your blog ready in minutes as a sub-domain of your main site or as the main site itself depending upon what you choose. This .ORG version of WordPress normally comes bundled with your hosting. You will usually find it under MySQL databases.

Advantages: Too many to list. Get any theme, free or paid. Install plug-ins – any plug-in you like, so long as it doesn’t crash your blog (yes that happens sometime). Put in your own ads. Insert your own affiliate links without having to worry about terms and conditions. Design your URLs (this is something that is limited on Blogger) to include anything you like or leave out what doesn’t suit you: postname only, postname and date, postname, date and category and so on. This is what your own site truly feels like.

There is no one to tell you cannot do this or that or that you are supposed to abide by such and such terms and conditions or that your domain name may be yours, but the hosting being provided by Automatic (WordPress) or Google for free, and you don’t really, actually, practically own your blog!

Problems: We refuse to call them problems, actually, since every piece of property needs some maintenance, including virtual ones. Updating, making changes to themes, editing themes where required, figuring out why your database is suddenly gone missing, or why you see a white page when you try to log in to your control panel – all these come with having your own site.

Also, unless you’ve chosen a good host, you could have frequent downtime’s, slow loading in spite of the best on -site optimizations, hack attacks and zero response from Support Staff when you are in any kind of trouble. All these is taken care of for you when choose the limited platforms.

Conclusion

The title of this article may be a bit misleading. It is not about WordPress or Blogger. Rather, about WordPress self-hosted or Blogger and WordPress.Com put together, because neither of the latter two options will give you the practically unlimited freedom that a self-hosted WordPress.Org CMS does, although both will keep you protected and pampered with various useful facilities.

The choice, as usual, is yours, depending upon your needs. You want to be a big boy (or girl), choose WordPress.Org and see what wonders you can unearth. You want to play it safe, no worries, there’s the two big .COMs to keep you sheltered: BlogSpot and WordPress.

About Author: Cally Greene is a blogger and works with JoeyGilbertLaw – Domestic Violence Attorney Reno. She likes blogging about online strategies that are related to Social Media, Online Marketing and Legal issues. You can follow her on Google+.