• 11.4.17

    BACK TO BLOGGER; FROM WORDPRESS

    Towards the end of last year, I decided to migrate my blog from Blogger to Wordpress because Blogger can be relatively restricting and Wordpress has more freedom in various aspects. This isn’t the first time that I’ve drifted away from Blogger – a couple years ago I tried Squarespace and after I year, I came back to blogger (find out why, here). So after a sh*t load of money and couple months of trying to get my Wordpress blog for the New Year, I decided that Wordpress wasn’t for me and that Blogger is my tried and true and has worked perfectly well for the majority of my blogging journey.

    | BLOGGER IS FREE & CHEAPER

    Everything about Wordpress is more expensive than blogger, most probably due to the freedom and how unrestricting it is. As I wanted a Wordpress.Org blog, it meant that it would be self-hosted which means that as a creator, I would need to pay for a website host (either annually or monthly) which would provide a sort of base for my blog obviously host the website and depending on the host you go with, can include a personal email address (for example, info@charlottechristmas.com rather than charlottechristmas@hotmail.co.uk) which just gives off a more professional vide. On top of that, the blog designs in general are more expensive than Blogger. With blogger, you can peruse through Etsy and find amazing designs for no more than £5 and with Wordpress, your minimum is around the £20 mark. I completely scraped this and bought my first Wordpress design for £65 and when that didn’t work out how I wanted due to how technical it was, I purchased another for £30 about a week or two before I then decided that Wordpress wasn’t for me – waste of money, I know. Another thing to note is that even if you purchase a blog design through Etsy, the majority of graphic designers will have an additional cost to install the theme for you and with Blogger, there are a lot more designers who have already included it in the design fee.

    | TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES  & MINIMAL SUPPORT

    I had so many technical difficulties with Wordpress, I would literally spend hours and hours on end searching and trying so many different things to sort things out and when I eventually found out how to sort one thing out, I hit a brick wall with another. The first thing that really irked me was that I couldn’t import my blog posts from Blogger to Wordpress, so it meant that if I wanted all my blog posts over the past 3 years, I would have to manually copy and paste over 400 blog posts which, as you could imagine would be incredible time consuming, especially in such a short amount of time. With Wordpress, you can download lots of different Plugins, which are like Instagram widgets, columns, and Shopify etc. I downloaded so many different plugins, many of which either didn’t work as they said they would or weren’t compatible with the version of Wordpress or child theme that I had. To top it off, I couldn’t get the blog design that I wanted or was proud to show because technically things just weren’t working, as they should. Following on from the technical difficulties, I had minimal support. As someone who isn’t a graphic designer or very tech savvy, I definitely needed assistance because when it comes to blogging, I can only write and decipher small amounts of HTML and CSS. Although Blogger doesn’t have an abundance of support either, it is a lot easier to get to grips with and understand.

    This isn’t a post to bash Wordpress, as there are so many people who use Wordpress and genuinely enjoy using it for various different reasons and Wordpress is one of the top blogging hosts, however this is just my experience and why I’ll be sticking to Blogger. Have you had any experience with Blogger or Wordpress? What are your thoughts?

    Would you like to comment?

    @charlottechristmasx