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Yeah! I love using WordPress and I’ll definitely endorse it; suggest it to the newbie bloggers who keeps asking me whether they should go ahead with free blogging platform i.e., blogger or get themselves self-hosting to start WordPress blog. There are good reasons behind this; however, this doesn’t mean I don’t like blogger. I do like blogger to but I don’t love it. Oh yes! I hope you’re aware of the stiff difference between these two words – like and love. If you’re not, please open any English dictionary and find out what do they exactly mean. That’s not our subject of discussion today. Right? So, why do I like blogger?

Let’s find out why I love WordPress but still like blogger. Even if you’ve zero knowledge about how WordPress works, I would recommend you to start using it and you’ll understand why when you’ll reach the end point of this article. Nobody is born genius and I or you; both of us are not exception to this.

You don’t need to be a coder or knowledgeable person to start using WordPress. Installing WordPress through cPanel is the task that you can complete within 2 minutes. Yes, that’s right. Exactly within 2 minutes.

So, assuming you’re not good at coding, you can simply pick up ready-made premium or free WordPress themes and apply to your blog. Once you’ve install the theme, you can go ahead in widgets section to add sidebar widgets. You can also add navigational menu through the appearance > menu. It’s that easy.

When it comes to blogger, there are bunch of free themes available over at various websites. For instance, you can check out these free and best blogger themes of 2013. These themes are mostly free but the customization needs you to have basic knowledge of web languages such as js, HTML and CSS. In fact, adding a navigation menu would also require you to edit and find the places. That’s not recommended when you’re not good at coding. A small mistake of missing simple semi colon (;) would drag your blog in big mess.

WordPress is way better than blogger when it comes to comparing the SEO benefit. WordPress lets you add your custom Meta title, description and keywords for each post. Besides, you can also add custom sitemap.xml and define the category and tags. Blogger still lacks some of these basic features and therefore it is not recommended to go with blogger if you’re SEO centric or care about SEO a lot.

Additionally, WordPress lets you change the permalink structure. What does it mean? It allows you to either display the URL of the post with data, month, and category or with simple blog post title. You can’t really change the URL structure in blogger, however you can change the content of the URL.

WordPress offers a wide range of plugins and short-codes (through themes) which helps in improving the user friendliness of a blog. These plugins can help you every aspect. For instance, I’m using AffiLinker on my blog to convert the keywords into affiliate links automatically.

Not to mention, these plugins are exclusively available for WordPress. You don’t have any plugin support for blogger, however there are bunch widgets that you can add but the number these widgets and quality is really disappointing.

When you’re planning to start a multi-author blog, WordPress is the best solution. You can define roles for each authors and you can also restrict them with certain capabilities so that your blog don’t end up with something fishy.

Blogger does lets you add authors through settings but it’s really difficult to manage them. You can’t really have a good control over them as you get in WordPress.

This is one point where I would say – blogger takes it away all the way down. This is probably the most critical reason to why newbies as well as others love using blogger. Hosting your media, images and everything that keeps your website running is totally free. All your media is stored in Picasa web albums. Also, you don’t really need to be concerned about how much bandwidth your blog is using. It will be taken care of by Google’s own servers.

WordPress doesn’t offer this for free. You need to buy self-hosting package in order to host your images and videos. You also need to take care of bandwidth. This would certainly cost you something around $100.

In terms of security, blogger is one step ahead of WordPress. All the database files are stored internally inside the Google’s server. Neither you nor the attacker is aware of where they are stored. So, there is absolutely no chance of getting attacked by any brute force technique.

That’s certainly not the case with WordPress. All your database files and images are accessible to you as well as anyone who has the permission. If an attacker is able to get those permissions, it won’t take more than two minutes to see your blog resting in peace. Moreover, you can have a look to OddBlogger’s review of the best WordPress security plugin to protect your blog from most of the attacts.

That’s all from the desk today. The last two points especially the security topic sounds important to many of us. Don’t get me wrong that WordPress blogs can easily be attacked. You need to put a proper armor around your blog to save it from the attacks and it can be achieved by using plugins and .htaccess modifications.

As for the hosting and bandwidth usage, I would suggest you to invest in that hosting package which offers virtually unlimited space and bandwidth. You won’t feel any problem till the time you’re receiving views less than 8000-10000 per day (number varies with each hosting provider).

I hope you now know why I’m saying – I love WordPress but I won’t deceive blogger. Let me know your views about these two platforms. Which one you’re using?