Google Blogger Is Better Than You Have Heard

Blogger is a better place to host your blog than you have heard.

Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.com

There's a lot of disinformation on the Internet. Google Blogger, aka Blogspot, is a better place to host your blog than you might think. If you are easily distracted, as I am, by technical 'curiosities', then blogger is a better platform for writers. If you view blogging as writing, as opposed to "content management", then I'd argue that you will appreciate Google Blogger.

Google Blogger has fewer features than Wordpress.

Blogger has fewer features than Wordpress, and to me that's an advantage. When I was on the Wordpress platform, I was too busy being "Wordpress Administrator". With only so many hours in the day, I often exhausted my writing time by performing WordPress administrative tasks.

What sort of tasks consumed my writing time?

One time-waster was selecting a hosting companies. This later turned into the challenge of moving the blog from one hosting company to another after the "introductory" blogging price expired. (And if you think it is all Automattic, pun intended, it is not as trouble-free as it sounds.) Some web hosting companies offer to move your Wordpress installation to their servers for free, but I just could not bring myself to trust that it would transfer correctly. I had some files stored in folders that I moved their using FTP and I was not willing to risk losing them.

I found my writing time was encroached by things like:

selecting a hosting company

what's the best host?
what's the fastest host?
what's the price after the introductory rate?

changing a hosting company

how to backup and restore a wordpress blog AND the photographs, sound files, etc.
dns issues
.htaccess setup

file transfers

FTP
SFTP

mysql databases

search and replace queries
table repair
table optimizations

plug-in management

conflicting plugins,
adding plugins,
removing plugins,
obsolete plugins,
determining which plugins were slowing the site down
adding plugins to speed up the site,

WordPress security updates

Wordpress constantly updates. Every few months there's a new version of Wordpress that gets deployed automatically unless you turn it off. /A working site could become disabled when an update would inadvertently disable a key plug-in. However, preventing the updates is a security risk.

Load Times

As the site grew, the site would outgrow its shared hosting. Now it was running slower, which meant I was focusing on load times and 'smooshing' photographs to reduce their size and restore website performance. It is a "hidden" feature that as your Wordpress website becomes more popular it may outgrow your inexpensive hosting plan.

CSS

Content Style Sheets. (Yes, Blogger uses CSS too...somethings cannot be avoided.)

WordPress May Distract You

Too Many Disttractions Photo by Oudom Pravat on Unsplash

My point is that to write you just need to focus on writing. These administrative tasks may distract from getting your message out to the world. At its most basic level, you just need a pencil and paper to start writing. Spending hours looking for the CSS section to modify so your site's is not indented by 20 pixels is an administrative task I'd rather not do. If you like doing the administration, and the writing, and are able to do both well, you have my admiration. I would rather do one or the other, not both. So, for me, Blogger, so far, has been a better platform.

I think Blogger is a Writer's platform.

Photo by Digital Content Writers India on Unsplash

If you like writing, I think you'll like Blogger and its clean white screen. If you like writing, and you also like Wordpress, then I urge you to get a Wordpress administrator, especially if you're going to self-host. Alternatively, if money is no object, then Wordpress.com can host your site and manage the Wordpress CMS for you. Perhaps you'll try it and let me know.

Blogs on Google Blogger don't rank on Google?

The main gripe I see repeated is that Google Blogger sites are at a disadvantage compared to a WordPress site for ranking in Google. I believe this criticism goes back to the days when all Google Blogger sites were on a somewebsite.blogspot.com. Google has allowed custom domain names for years.

One does not need WordPress to rank on Google.

One needs good content. There are plenty of good sites with good content on a variety of Content Management Systems. Websites using Wix, Joomla, Drupal, and even no CMS at all, are likely to be found in your favorite Google search results.