If you’re thinking of building a blog or website, you might be wondering: Should I use Blogger for my website in 2024, or is there a better option? As with most things on the internet, the answer is – it depends! Let’s look at what Blogger is, the pros and cons of using Blogger, and what alternatives you might want to use instead. Then, you can have all the information you need to know if you should choose Blogger or another platform for your website!
First of all, what is Blogger?
Blogger is a free platform, owned by Google, for… you guessed it! Blogging! Shocking, I know. It’s a fairly straightforward platform where you can sign up quickly and start blogging right away. If you’re new to blogging, it’s a great and quick way to get started. When I first started building my online business back in 2012, Blogger is what I used. It’s very easy to just set up an account and start posting blog posts.
What are the pros and cons of using Blogger?
Blogger PROs :
>It’s FREE! YAY! We love free things, especially when getting started. I used Blogger for probably 7-8 years until I was ready to commit to paying for my own website. And honestly, it was a great way to remove that financial barrier and just get started.
>You don’t need hosting at all. Blogger hosts everything for you on their free platform. Setting up hosting and a domain is not particularly difficult, but it does require some decision making. It’s an annoying step, to be honest. If you’re not ready to figure out (and pay for) your hosting, Blogger solves that problem for you.
>You can get started really quickly & easily. I mean, literally in 5 minutes. So if you have blogs post ideas and you just need to get them out and start getting traffic, this is a super quick the way to go.
>Blogger is great at what it does. If you just want to blog, this is a great choice. You can’t do much else, but if you just want to blog, that’s what it’s there for.
>It’s user-friendly. Blogger’s interface is similar to Google Docs or a Word Doc, so it’s intuitive for most people at this point.
>great for beginners or people who want a low-committment way to try out blogging. Maybe you’re not even sure if you like blogging or if you’re good at it? This is a way to test it out and see, without spending tons of time and money.
>It’s owned by Google, so you can trust the platform and know it’ll be around for a while.
Blogger CONs:
>It’s blogging software, it’s not a full content management system. This means that Blogger can’t run a store or host your classes or anything more serious like that. If you want to do these more complicated tasks, you’ll need to switch over to WordPress. (.org, not .com!)
>You’re really limited as far as design goes, and it’s much harder to ‘brand’ your site on Blogger. You can’t really customize your website on Blogger the way you can on WordPress. You can set a few defaults to make it feel like your own, but it’s not going to be fully branded.
>If you get good at blogging, you’ll likely outgrow Blogger and have to switch to a different platform, and that can be an annoying process. But you’ll only have to do that once.
What are some alternatives to Blogger in 2023?
If you’re just starting out and you want to try your hand at blogging, Blogger is a great place to start. I started with Blogger myself, way back in 2013 when I first opened my teaching resources store. I had my blog posts on there for years and years and was very happy with it. Once I outgrew Blogger, I switched to WordPress with the Divi theme, and I’m super happy with how that’s going. I get a lot more traffic now and I’m able to have more features and more control over my website. I still have the Blogger account, but all of the old blog posts forward to my newer site.
If you find that you’re ready for more customization or to add in more features that you just can’t do on Blogger, it might be time to switch to WordPress. I moved my teaching website from Blogger to WordPress in about 2019 (I think?). But for this exact website (my web development portfolio), I just started directly on WordPress with the Divi theme. I wanted this site to show off more of my branding and style and to have more content that wasn’t only blog posts, and so I needed a platform that could do more then Blogger could.
