Being present on the Internet has become something that cannot be ignored, and for some people and businesses it is a duty that cannot be neglected, and the best way to be present on the Internet is through a website.
When you reach the decision to create a website, you will find yourself faced with a number of options through which you can build the site, and the most prominent of these options are: the Blogger platform and the WordPress platform; Then you ask yourself: What is the difference between Blogger and WordPress? What is the best option?
Here we present the advantages and disadvantages of each, and provide the necessary information for you to decide which one is most suitable for your goal, and the extent to which each of them excels in the 8 most important points that any website owner needs: site ownership, possibility of customization, cost, ease of use, security, technical support, and compatibility with… Search engines and different screens.
What is the difference between Blogger and WordPress?
The Blogger platform is one of Google’s services that provides article publishing and classification services, with its support for the reader comments system and other uses. As for WordPress, it is a product of Automattic and uses the same uses of Blogger in addition to more. They are the two most popular blogging platforms, with WordPress distinguished from Blogger by having a wide variety of uses and tools.
First: WordPress
WordPress is an open source system that powers 38% of websites at the time of writing this article (1) . You can obtain the entire WordPress system files and install them on your hosting to start creating your site and modifying it as you wish at any time, regardless of its specialty.
We cannot go beyond talking about WordPress without mentioning that it supports you with the necessary capabilities because it is open source, so you can modify the general appearance or even the system itself.
You can even change the way it works to meet your requests, even if they are unexpected. You can use it as a simple blog in which you write your articles, or even an online store that hosts many merchants and products, serves customers, ships goods, and manages commercial and marketing operations such as offers and discounts, marketing and promotion operations, and everything you need. On your website or online store.
Also being open source, this provides a large community of users and programmers who develop thousands of ideas and suggestions and publish them for everyone to benefit from.
To get your own WordPress website, you need the following:
- Obtaining an address for your site, which we call a domain.
- Obtaining hosting, which is a storage space to place the website files and databases on.
- Then link the domain to the hosting so that it displays your site to the visitor when he opens the address. Most hosting companies provide the domain with the hosting, and in this case you will not need to link them manually.
- Then create a database and start installing WordPress, a process that does not take 5 minutes.
- After that, you can enter the control panel of your site that runs through WordPress, and install the templates and plugins necessary to run your site according to the plan you set.
Now you can start publishing and launching your website content to the public.
Second: Blogger
Blogger is a blog management system written in Python. You cannot obtain its files, host them, or modify them. They are only owned by Google. The company allows you, through your account, to create Blogger blogs for free on its servers, as this is done through your unified account that You use it in Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and other Google services.
To get a free blog on Blogger, follow these steps:
- Sign in to your Google account.
- Go to the following link: https://www.blogger.com
- From the right side, click “Create Blog”
- In the “Title” field, write the name you want to give your blog, then click “Next.”
- Type the address you want to assign to your blog, and it will look like this: Example.blogspot.com, then click “Save”
Thus, you have a free blog on Blogger.
The 8 most important points that explain the difference between Blogger and WordPress:
In the following paragraphs, we review some topics and discuss the features that Blogger and WordPress offer to users.
First: ownership
Ownership of your site means a lot, as you are the one who controls the capabilities and contents, and most importantly, you are the actual owner of the site, and the decision to have or delete it is in your hands and not in the hands of another party that imposes its conditions on you.
WordPress
Relying on WordPress gives you ownership of your entire site: domain, code, files, databases, etc., and you can access and modify it all.
Blogger
It gives you the opportunity to choose the name and address of the site upon creation, and then you do not own any of the site’s assets. You are only a writer bound by certain conditions of another entity. If you violate its terms, you and your followers may not see your blog again forever.
Also, Blogger is ultimately a Google service, and you know that some of these services may be stopped if the owner company deems this decision appropriate for it.
Conclusion : WordPress is superior to Blogger in terms of actually owning your website.
Second: customization
One of the basics of building websites is that it expresses the identity of its owner, whether in terms of form or functionality. To what degree does Blogger and WordPress support the customization process on your site?
WordPress
As I mentioned before, you own everything in WordPress, so you can make the modifications you want at any time to anything without restrictions.
You can change the appearance of things, their arrangement, or the way they work. There is even the opportunity to add or remove some features of your site to make it a blog, an informational site, or a social networking site. Even online stores can be created and run very efficiently using WordPress.
Of course, being open source helps you with all of that, in addition to the presence of thousands of templates and plugins that perform various tasks.
Blogger
Your control over your blog on Blogger is not complete. You cannot access or modify the code, as well as files and the like. You can only move within the narrow space allowed by the capabilities of the Blogger platform.
Of course, it does not anticipate all your needs, and therefore you will not find in the available tools everything you need to create a professional website.
Conclusion : The Blogger platform suits you best if you want to blog with basic functions only, but if you want to have an advanced website, then WordPress is the ideal choice.
Third: Cost
You cannot neglect studying the costs necessary to create your website if you are creating a really important website, and below we put Blogger and WordPress in the cost balance.
WordPress
It allows you to create your site in two ways:
Either the free method: through the https://ar.wordpress.com platform , based on WordPress servers for free, and by obtaining a subdomain from the main domain, then you start customizing your site in a limited way within the many templates and plugins available.
Or the paid method: it allows you to host your site on your own hosting, where you have your own domain, and absolute capabilities to modify anything, such as: files, databases, and adding more free and paid templates and plugins, whether from the WordPress repository or from outside it or even from Your personal production.
Blogger
It allows you to create a website in only one way, which is the free one that we mentioned in the explanation previously. If you want to get a domain customized for you, you must purchase a domain and then link it to this service.
As for hosting your blog and accessing and editing files, this is not possible even if you want to pay money.
Conclusion : Both Blogger and WordPress support you with a free plan to create your site, then WordPress is unique with paid solutions that give you more power and control over your site.
Fourth: Ease of use
Before comparing Blogger and WordPress in terms of ease of use, you must determine the tasks that need to be done in order to compare them on the same task. It is not correct to compare creating an article on Blogger and installing a store management system on WordPress, but we should compare creating an article on both. Let us see how easy it is. ?
WordPress
Through a very easy control panel, you enter the control panel, then click the Create a New Article button, then put the title and content, specify the image and section to which the article belongs, and there are some optional things, then press the Publish button.
Blogger
With an easy control panel as well, you click the New Post button, then you write the title and content, select the section you want to place the article in, and there are also some optional things, then you press the Publish button.
Thus, you see that both systems are equal in ease of use for the basic tasks they share. As for the tasks that are unique to WordPress, they are managed smoothly from the basic control panel, as they include clear sections in a logical order that help you manage and work easily.
Conclusion : Both Blogger and WordPress are equally easy to use and basic functionality.
Fifth: Safety
Talking about site security is an uncompromising focus, regardless of the purpose for which you created your site. Let us review what Blogger and WordPress offer us to maintain the level of security on the site.
WordPress
Automattic, the company that develops WordPress, gives high priority to security and protection issues, so it is a system with a high level of self-security.
The company also issues continuous updates to secure users of its system, while providing many solutions that make you reassured about the security of your site, such as backup services and additions to detect malicious codes and files and treat them automatically.
Here it is worth noting that WordPress is an open source system and the site owner has the rights to access and modify everything. He may cause harm if he is not sufficiently aware of the effects of the modifications he makes in the system.
Blogger
You do not have the authority to modify system files, and Google takes care of securing and protecting the site as part of its system. This is enough to reassure you in terms of the security of Blogger blogs.
Conclusion : Blogger is making progress in this area, but it does not make a big difference if you maintain the basics of security and follow the necessary advice when using WordPress.
Sixth: Technical support
If you are just starting out, the technical support option will be necessary for you. Even for experts, technical support is indispensable if some problems occur.
WordPress
The WordPress system has many types of support, starting with the official reference that explains all the necessary details for ordinary users and developers as well, then the support forums where members exchange their experiences and solutions to their problems.
There is also the presence of dedicated work teams in hosting to serve and assist customers, reaching thousands of sites, channels, and blogs dedicated to providing WordPress support and explanations only. ( WordPress blog in Arabic is an example)
The nice thing about this is that this is not limited to the platform only, but there are support forums for solving problems for every template or plugin in the WordPress repository, and of course there is paid support from some companies and institutions that provide this type of service.
This also includes issuing periodic updates to the working system, templates, and add-ons, whether free or paid, which provides a very fertile environment for addressing errors and adding more capabilities.
Blogger
As is Google’s custom in its products, it provides a helpful reference for Blogger users that explains what the user needs, but community and developer support is not available as is the case in WordPress.
Also, the Blogger system rarely gets updates or developments, let alone adding more capabilities and tools.
Conclusion : WordPress outperforms Blogger by increasing and diversifying sources of technical support, updating, and development. Therefore, choosing Blogger will not be suitable for you unless your blog is very traditional and limited to simple tasks.
Seventh: Compatibility with search engines
You probably won’t want to spend effort and money on a site that no one will find on search engines, so here we quickly go over this aspect.
WordPress
WordPress supports search engine friendliness excellently through the basic structure of the system, and then more power is added to that by the presence of specialized plugins to improve the site’s performance more strongly in this aspect.
Blogger
There are almost no apparent differences in this aspect between Blogger and WordPress, except in terms of the abundance of plugins in WordPress.
Conclusion: There is almost no difference between Blogger and WordPress in their good support for search engines, and WordPress excels by having many powerful plugins that give it more advantage.
Eighth: Responsiveness to different screens
Most website users now rely on mobile devices, and therefore it would be a bad idea not to support your website design for those devices.
If we look at Blogger and WordPress in this matter, we will find that they are equivalent, and the difference is based on the skill of the developer who works on producing the website template, and it is not related to the system itself.
Final verdict
Based on the above comparison between Blogger and WordPress, it is illogical to say that one of the two systems is absolutely the best and the other is absolutely bad, but each has an article, and you can compare your needs with what each of them offers you and choose the most appropriate one based on that.
But as a general recommendation, the WordPress system has a huge number of features and strengths that have made it take the lead until now. It alone occupies approximately 40% of the total websites on the Internet, while dozens of other systems combined share approximately 60% of the websites!
