WordPress or Blogspot? Which one to choose?
It depends on what would you like to do with your blog. If you want to monetize it, probably the best idea is to have your own domain. But let’s say that you want to try your hand at blogging about something. At this point you can very well use the hosting offered by WordPress and Google (Blogspot). It’s free and you benefit of having your blog protected via their antispam programms.
Akismet offered by WordPress comes highly recommended to stop spams.
Until you build traffic to your blog I don’t believe it’s necessary to pay for your domain and your webhosting. Even if it comes pretty cheap these days, it’s still money out of your pocket.
If you have just started thinking about having a blog, maybe my analysis would help you make a decision.
I have used both of them and I could say that I really like WordPress.
Blogspot has a few disadvantages, the biggest one being that you can’t categorize your posts.
If you are like me, meaning just a novice on blogging, you will need an idiot proof platform that it’s easy to use. Let’s take the main elements of blogging and analyze wordpress vs. blogspot:
1. Templates
WordPress is the best, no doubt about it. It offers you a large variety to choose from and it’s almost impossible not to find something you would like.
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 0
2. Editor
Both of them have good editor to help you with spelling, adding pictures and links
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 1
3. Organizing posts
Only WordPress offers this important feature. I found working within Blogspot uncomfortable because there is no way you can organize your posts nicely. You can only archive them.
Score: wordpress 1 : blogspot 0
4. Blog stats
That is one of the best features offered by WordPress. You can see how many visitors your blog had, how did they arrive to your site/blog (what search words have they used) and it could help you fine tune your tags or titles in order to make it more findable.
Blogspot shows you your blog activity when you have the adsense code.
Score: worpress 1: blogspot 0
5. Submitting blog to search engines
Blogspot being owned by Google, it will not ping your blog to yahoo for example. WordPress will do it.
WordPress being sort of independent is much more generous with pings.
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 0
6. Getting your blog accepted for AdSense
This one is a no brainer: Blogspot is the only one that will put you on a fast track to be accepted by AdSense. This is the only big advantage Blogspot will have over WordPress. But because AdSense it’ such a dead way of monetizing your blog, it’s not worth it anymore.
Score: wordpress 0 : blogspot 1
7. Transfer you blog to your domain
If you consider using popular webhosts like HostPapa or GoDaddy, the WordPress editor is one that it’s already given as option. Meaning that when you transfer your successful (hopefully) blog to your own domain hosted by these guys, it should go considerably easier than when moving something from Blogspot.
Score: wordpress 1: blogspot 0
Final score: WordPress: 6 Blogspot: 2
December 29, 2007 -
Posted by
kitten2friends |
Monetize Blog |
adsense, akismet, blogspot, godaddy, google, hostpapa, spam, wordpress |
4 Comments
Great comparison. I’ve been a longtime wordpress user and today started tinkering with a blogspot account. In fact, I wrote a much shorter evaluation earlier today, plus threw in some elementary RSS stuff, too.
Thanks for the post.
if i may point out, wordpress has two different blogging platforms. one is wp.com, which we’re using, and which we cannot put ads on. the other is the wp blogging software, which you use on your self-hosted domain and therefore can put as many ads as you wish to.
i think wp.com is better than blogspot in other aspects too: for instance, we a volunteer-based support forums for bloggers experiencing blogging problems. also, the wp.com community is fostered through the tag pages and the blog surfer and tag surfer options within our dashboards. finally, we also have spam blocker akismet.
Thank you guys for visiting my blog.
Honestly speaking I am not a very proficient computer user and most of the things that I am doing are ‘trial and error’. Can you tell that I am a research engineer?
That being said, I really like wordpress.
I have a blog on a self-hosted domain as well, using the wordpress platform. For that one I am trying to find the best plugin to get some stats.
Agree with Sulz. You can use Google Adsense with the regular wordpress software dowloaded from http://wordpress.org WordPress.com is a host that uses a form of the wordpress software and currently doesn’t allow the addition of Adsense. In fact wp.com displays it’s own adsense adverts on your blog.