When you’re starting a new site or a blog, whether you’re launching a travel blog or a local news site for your community, it’s important to pick the right platform for your needs. The question of whether to use WordPress.com vs. Blogger is likely to pop up sooner or later.
Which of these platforms is more suitable for your blog? Which one offers more features and more designs to choose from? And for those who might already be using Blogger but would prefer WordPress.com, we’ll show you how to move your site from Blogger to WordPress.com. Let’s get started!
The Basics: WordPress.com vs. Blogger
WordPress.com is a platform where you can build a free website or blog. You can also choose a paid plan which allows you to run a traditional blog, a business website, and even an eCommerce store, all while giving you access to user-friendly web design tools.
Blogger.com is a platform designed only for building a free blog. It gives you access to basic features, plus the option to monetize your blog through Google’s advertising platform, AdSense.
1. Ownership over your site
WordPress.com’s biggest draw is that it’s incredibly versatile. With just a bit of tinkering, you can tune your site to serve as a classic blog, business website, eCommerce store, single-page site, and much more. WordPress.com allows you to customize your site precisely as you see fit.
You can pick from hundreds of gorgeous themes, many of them free, to create the perfect look for your blog. Most of these themes are fresh and modern, and also optimized to work on mobile devices.
From there, you can add specific features like social media sharing or email newsletter integration with plugins that are specially designed to work with the WordPress platform.
You can even take free blogging courses to step up your blogging game, learning how to enhance your branding and attract a bigger audience.
While Blogger can be a useful tool for creating and publishing blog posts and also includes many themes with which you can create an attractive blog, its customization options are much more limited. Blogger is probably a simpler platform than WordPress.com, and is more narrowly focused on building blogs.
One con of Blogger is that its feature set isn’t as wide as WordPress.com’s, and you can’t enable any additional features using plugins.
Another con is the small library of themes to choose from. Moreover, many of the available themes are similar and only differ from each other in terms of color.
Google, whose business spans far beyond Blogger, also has the ability to shut this service down at any time if it decides to move in a different direction. And while you can migrate your WordPress.com site to another host or even another platform, it’s a bit more complicated to do this with a Blogger site.
2. Security and support
When launching a new blog, the last thing you want to worry about is whether your site is secure or whether you’ll be able to get the support you need if a glitch happens. Each WordPress.com plan is fully hosted, providing built-in security features such as strong encryption by default, backups, and access to personal support, as well as friendly assistance in the WordPress.com forums. With a WordPress.com plugin-enabled plan, you can take advantage of a personal setup session and live chat or email support anytime of the day or night.
Blogger offers some strong security features as well, since it is part of the Google ecosystem of technology services, but its support offerings are restricted to basic online documentation and a user forum. If you think you’re going to need help developing your blog in the future, you may find that your options for getting timely assistance are limited by comparison.
3. Flexibility for future growth
As Forbes notes, blogging can be a powerful entrepreneurial engine. With that in mind, it’s important to understand the different capabilities of WordPress.com vs. Blogger when it comes to flexibility for future growth.
Want to start a paid subscription blog at some point? Think you might want to sell an ebook on your site in the future? A WordPress.com blog can evolve into a complete website for your small business or startup, featuring everything from a professional portfolio to Patreon integration and beyond. However, Blogger doesn’t offer the flexibility you would need to expand your blog into a sophisticated, professional website.
With WordPress.com, there are no limits to what you can accomplish. If your blog becomes a lucrative business, flourishes into an incredibly rewarding creative enterprise, or both, you’ll have a powerful platform that opens the door to further opportunity. Rather than wondering if your blogging platform can deliver everything you need, you’ll only have to ask yourself: Where do I want to take my blog next?
Which should you choose?
At the end of the day, the decision comes down to the reason why you want a website in the first place.
Do you want to build a simple personal blog to share your thoughts with friends and family? Or, do you want something more professional-looking that has the potential to support a business later on? Consider this:
- WordPress.com is a multi-purpose, extremely functional platform that grants you the ability to significantly customize your site.
- Blogger is a simplified blogging platform with built-in monetization capabilities through Google AdSense.
So, who wins the WordPress.com vs. Blogger battle? Ultimately, the choice is up to you, but we think you’ll probably choose WordPress.com.
What about those of you who are already using Blogger, but would like to switch to WordPress.com? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.
How to Move from Blogger to WordPress.com
If you want to move from Blogger to WordPress.com, we’re happy to let you know that the process is much simpler than it might seem.
Here’s a step-by-step guide that makes the transition to WordPress.com as smooth as possible.
The steps to move from Blogger to WordPress.com
Here are the steps you’ll need to cover:
1. Export your data from Blogger
Go to your Blogger user profile. From the sidebar menu, go into Settings → Other. Click on the Backup Content button and then on Save to your computer.
This action will generate an .xml file. Save it to your desktop.
2. Build a site on WordPress.com
Go to WordPress.com and either sign up for a new website or log in to manage your existing site.
Here’s a guide on how to start a new site on WordPress.com.
3. Import from Blogger
Log in to WordPress.com, click on My Sites on the top left. From the sidebar, click on Tools and then on Import.
From the list of available platforms, click on the Start Import button next to Blogger.
Either drag and drop your .xml file onto the canvas or click to upload it by hand.
Click on the Start Import button to confirm and begin importing. The import may take a couple of seconds, but then you will be notified when it finishes.
4. Redirect the domain, or get a new one
Depending on what your domain setup is on Blogger, you might want to keep the same domain and use it on your new WordPress.com site as well. Alternatively, you can get a new domain entirely.
- If you’ve had your own custom domain name, like
yoursite.com, then you can connect it to WordPress.com by using a feature called Domain Mapping. Here’s how to set it up. - If you want to begin afresh with a new custom domain, here’s a step-by-step guide on getting one via WordPress.com.
- If you want to run your blog on a free subdomain, you can do that without any additional settings needed. Your subdomain is usually chosen during signup.
Done and done!
That’s it, you’ve just learned how to move from Blogger to WordPress.com! Here’s what you can do next:
- Pick a theme for your blog.
- Connect your blog to social media.
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