Blogger, as a popular free blogging platform, receives a huge number of praises as well as some complaints. This review on it, therefore, is carried out the present the advantages and limitations in detail to offer beginners a guide on whether the platform is the right choice for the goal that you set for the future of your blog.
First of all, we'd like to show some ratings on the cost, features, ease of use, flexibility and support made based on our 2 years' experience of using the platform. Read details in the following chart.
Blogger Review
Website: http://www.blogger.com/
Cost
Features
Ease of Use
Flexibility
Support
The Advantages Making It Popular
Certainly, there are reasons why Blogger enjoys such popularity in the blogging field, among which things like easy search engine submission and rich features weigh much. In below, we are to further analyze the largest advantages that the platform brings to bloggers, especially beginners.
Blogger is totally free of charge. The first thing appealing to most people should be the nature of being free. Therefore, you don't need to spend a single penny to use the basic features offered by the platform. You can simply edit and publish content without any worry about the cost.
Promotion tools are included by default. Since Blogger is a service from Google, your blog hosted on the platform is automatically submitted to Google, which means that you do not need to make big efforts in getting the website and posts indexed. Besides, with the feature of being integrated with Google AdSense, Blogger enables you to gain traffic and sales easily.
Blogger is quite easy-to-use. Being recognized as one of the easiest blogging application, Blogger makes it more than easy to getting a blog started. Just create a Google account and login to Blogger.com with the username and password, then you can take advantage of the wide variety of features to publish posts and upload images with ease. No coding is required, so even beginners can feel free to do what they want to do.
The platform comes with many templates. There are a large number of free templates available at Blogger.com and premium ones from third-party sites, so you are able to customize the appearance of your blog easily. Furthermore, the platform allows changing the HTML code in the templates to better customize the blog.
The good support is helpful. Being a leader in free blogging service, Blogger comes with a large number of documentation that is useful and necessary especially for beginners with little experience. You can seek information and solution via FAQs, tutorials, knowledgebase and user forums. Besides, there are also plentiful third-party resources.
The Limitations Requiring Improvements
As nothing is perfect, Blogger also comes with many shortcomings which result in the fact that a large number of webmasters leave it for some other applications after trying the service for a certain period of time. According to our analysis, the following ones should be the top limitations.
Blogger requires HTML knowledge in changing design options. The platform contains a large number of options in the template designer that may take some time to learn if you are not skilled in programming. Things like adding links, editing background colors and changing width of the page columns need a lot of practice.
Switching is not easy. If you have already owned a blog at some other places, transferring the site to Blogger is not an easy job to accomplish because the platform offers no easy-to-use tools for the importing for posts, images and comments. Instead, it needs the use of .xml files.
The blog is actually not yours. The biggest concern of using most free blogging services is that your blog is not owned by yourself, but instead, it is the property of the platform's. Therefore, Google may shut down your blog or remove posts or something else anytime without your permission or even notice. The tragedy has happened to many webmasters.
Owning a blog at Blogger seems less professional. In the case that you do not want to make any payment, your blog is given URL extensions of ".blogspot.com", which means that you get a domain name as www.myblog.blogspot.com instead of www.myblog.com. For people doing businesses with the website, the former is not recommendable.
Conclusion: Is Blogger Good?
The answer depends on what you plan to do with your blog. If you are a beginner simply starting a new website to get experience or share content, Blogger is a really good choice. However, for those having some businesses to deal with or requiring the full ownership of a website, a self-hosted WordPress blog should be much better.
If you are not familiar with WordPress, read this review or get information about WordPress hosting from the following web hosting providers before trying the software.
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Company
Highlights
Price
1
JustHost
A free domain for 1 year & $200 advertising voucher
Unlimited disk space, bandwidth & email accounts
30 days full refund & anytime prorated refund
24x7 technical support through phone, email & live chat
$2.25/mo
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2
WebHostingHub
1 free domain name & unlimited hosted domains
Daily R1Soft backups & CloudFlare CDN
No hidden fees & 90 days money back guarantee
Exclusive 72% discount for $1.95/mo for 1st 3 months
$1.95/mo
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3
iPage
Free site transfer & automated daily data backups
vDeck control panel with 1-click script installer
24x7 support via toll-free phone call, email & live chat
Up to $500 benefits for security, marketing, support & design
$1.99/mo
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