Advantages & Disadvantages of Google Blogger Platform
Tags: Blogging, Blogger

Blogger is a free platform where you can easily start a blog within a few minutes. Hosting and domain are not required.

Many of us would be well familiar with this platform, anyone can share their thoughts with the world and build trust with other people.

Google acquired Blogger in the year 2003, since then, thousands of publishers and small webmasters using this free platform.

The main reason that many publishers are still using Blogger because it is 100% free & safe. Today, starting a blog on WordPress costs money as a user has to buy their own hosted domain and hosting service.

On the Blogger platform, there is no such thing as personal hosting actually it is provided free of cost by Google and this is the main reason many of us still trust this Blogging platform.

If you are familiar with the Blogspot platform then you may know that the publisher gets a Blogspot subdomain.

After all, there are many factors that make this platform outdated because of the lack of customization and resources.

We gonna point out some advantages and disadvantages of using Blogspot.

Now, let's talk more about what are the real benefits of using this platform.

Advantages of Blogger

1. It's Free to Use

Investing money to own a hosted website really cost you a few bucks monthly and almost every month publisher need to pay for hosting charges to keep their site alive.

Blogger platform provides lifetime free hosting and in this way, you can write thousands of articles and even get unlimited traffic without paying a penny.

Lots of WordPress hosting providers have a high pricing structure and are based on the "Pay as you Grow" model.

2. Lifetime Free Subdomain

While registering an account, the user has the option to register a Blogspot based subdomain.

Example - Google.blogspot.com

It is very easy to set up and it also won't require any kind of DNS management (Sadly, you don't have access to any advanced settings such as DNS)

Note - The subdomain provided by Blogger is not a hosted domain.

It won't cost money and is free for lifetime use. In the blog URL, visitors will always see Blogspot phrase after the name of the site until you move to a custom domain.

Instead of Blogspot's name, the custom domain has many benefits.

3. Custom Themes

With custom templates or themes, customizing the design and look of a blog can be done.

Officially, there are only a few themes available for Google Blogger and to customize look and design serious coding knowledge is required.

There are thousands of templates that are available for the Blogger platform. Many webmasters always say that there is a lack of Blogspot templates but I don't agree with those guys.

Professional blogger templates are an easy way to customize the design and look of the blog including improved SEO, usability, and site loading speed.

4. Using Third-party Gadgets

Without interacting with classic widgets you can also add lots of improved third-party widgets that are even more functional. A publisher can make a Blogspot blog far better than others.

On official blogger templates, we can add our own HTML/Javascript widgets but these are only executed in the web version of the Blogger blog. AddThis is one of the best website tools provider.

You may need some basic coding knowledge in order to customize your blog.

To use external widgets efficiently custom themes would be required.

5. Better Security

Do you know that hacking and cybercrime is rising globally? There are a lot of previous records of website hacking and DDoS attacks. Or similar types of hacking practices are increasing.

The biggest benefit of using google blogger, a publisher will get better security. Even today, digital publishers are paying large amounts of money to get their website secured, and actually, it works for them.

We can not compare large digital publishers, but still, people who are using Google bloggers are more secured than other hosting providers or CMS systems. Because breaking Google servers is nearly impossible.

Disadvantages of Blogger

Considerably, I always tried my best to make the blogger platform best for blogging purposes but later realized that there are lots of restrictions & a lack of modern features.

Many issues on Google Blogger can be fixed with some basic coding knowledge but we can not make it fully customizable and sometimes it is very difficult to use this platform.

Here are some important disadvantages listed below that make this free hosted blogging platform sick.

1. The comment system is outdated

Actually, I never liked the comment system of Blogger, after the end of the Google+ comment system, the latest system is actually outdated.

The WordPress comment system is far better and very easy to use.

Every visitor has to login to the Google account if they want to left an authorized comment.

There are also other ways to comment but those are not easy to use.

I mean, it doesn't have a simple and more engaging comment system.

2. Permalinks can not be fully customizable

No one can fully edit and customize the URL of the post, you can only modify the phrases after the specific date in the Permalink (URL).

The date and month of published posts will always be available in the article permalink.

You can't eliminate the date from the published article permalink.

3. Lack of Modifications

A self-hosted site has the option to install software such as WordPress to better manage the website, admins can modify the design of their blog just by installing plugins.

Blogspot platform doesn't provide services such as Cpanel, website file management, etc.

On Blogger, you can not do modifications in files and it also lacks many resources.

4. Difficult to Remove pre-installed widgets & Footer Credits

Almost all official themes have permanent footer links with proper credits. It is ok, but as of now, a professional look is important I think.

Manually, a publisher can remove these brandings like "Powered by Blogger".

5. SEO Factors

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important factors for a site to rank in search engines. With Blogspot's name, you may hurt some SEO efforts.

Also, managing SEO factors and doing Search Engine Optimization stuff on the Blogger platform is quite hard as publishers don't have access to use third-party plugins for better SEO. All things have to be done manually.

Conclusion

There are many webmasters out there on the internet who thinks creating a blog on Blogspot is a waste of time. Actually, they are right but for those who don't have money to invest for a hosted site then starting a blog with this platform is easy. Newbies can grow their blogs by learning many tactics of SEO, content strategies, and digital marketing.

My recommendation is if you are on the free Blogspot blog and can not afford web hosting charges then continue with this, buy a custom domain and use it instead of a Blogspot subdomain.

In the future, if you migrate towards another platform such as WordPress then you won't lose Domain authority, SEO & Page Rank of the domain.