WordPress has evolved in the blogging industry as the most widely used blogging platform in the past couple of years. Still, there are many beginners in the industry who get confused between WordPress and BlogSpot. Some even argue that BlogSpot is a product owned by Google and the Search Engine giant offers a few favors towards the blog powered by BlogSpot.

Well, if you are someone who believes in this theory then sorry to disappoint you because that’s incorrect and baseless. Well, the post is not about why BlogSpot is not the best platform for blogging but I will focus on my take on self-hosted WordPress as the best blogging platform available today and why you must use WordPress for your blog.

WordPress vs. BlogSpot

Today, blogging has earned its own space as a career option and is considered one of the easiest methods of making money online. Although it seems tough to set up a blog from the outside, it has become very easy with the help of blogging software such as WordPress. Being an open-source platform, WordPress is free and easy to install on your hosting server.

But then, there is a lot of other free blogging software out there, why choose self-hosted WordPress? In fact, BlogSpot was much famous in the early years of blogging among the bloggers but later on, these bloggers started to move from the BlogSpot platform to WordPress, a more professional blogging platform.

With BlogSpot, eventually, many bloggers realized that Google’s platform for blogging misses a lot of quality features such as permalink editing, SEO settings, and the use of plugins. Furthermore, WordPress is more scalable than BlogSpot. Above all, the top most professional bloggers all around the world are using WordPress as their primary blogging platform, so it’s clear that WordPress is in fact, the best blogging platform on the web.

7 Quality Reasons Why WordPress is my choice of Blogging platform:

  1. Self-hosted Blogging Platform

The main reason why WordPress is an ideal choice when it comes to writing a blog is that it’s a self-hosted blogging platform. With BlogSpot, there are so many restrictions that you can’t make changes to the source code in order to customize your blog. In fact, the BlogSpot platform doesn’t give your any access to the main source files of your blog to make changes.

While self-hosted WordPress blog on the other hand lets you make changes to the core of the blog files. Although it’s not advisable, such flexibility and control give you the freedom to customize your blog when you need to.

It’s also very much important when you want to make some small tweaks to the plugins, theme files or even add or delete certain images from the uploads folder, it can be easily done with direct access to the core files using any FTP software or cPanel.

I don’t recommend altering the core files without the supervision of a qualified professional WordPress developer. Also, it must be the last and final option to go for such a daredevil approach as altering the code may tamper with the overall blog structure.

Yet, having full control of your blog to the core files provides a sense of freedom and a feeling that you actually own the blog which is why many bloggers opt for self-hosted WordPress above any other blogging platform online.

  1. WordPress support

Although blogging is quite easy, it requires a lot of understanding and guidance early on. Blogs rely highly on the blogging platform and its functionality and the same applies to a self-hosted WordPress blog. For a newbie, setting up a WordPress blog and managing it could be difficult at the start.

But no need to worry at all when you choose WordPress as your blogging platform. WordPress offers a support forum that actually answers all your queries about setting up the blog and managing it on WordPress as well as you can get all the support you need for your blog. Moreover, many bloggers are running their blogs on the WordPress platform and a simple Google search can find all the answers you need regarding WordPress.

Also, being a very popular topic, lots of bloggers have launched blogs publishing WordPress tips, news, and tutorials to help the newbie bloggers. Hence, you get much-needed support for WordPress both from their technical team as well as the user community.

  1. WordPress Themes and plugins

Another reason why many bloggers love WordPress is the number of WordPress themes and plugins available on the web. The most important concern for any blogger is the design of their blog. Hence, they either hire a WordPress theme designer, opt for a premium WordPress theme, or download and install a free WordPress theme.

You will find a lot of options whether it’s free or paid when you are looking for WordPress themes online. Also being highly popular on the internet, there are plenty of designers and developers who are experts in redesigning, updating, or creating WordPress themes.

Although there are many themes available on BlogSpot, it's limited compared to WordPress. WordPress themes offer many different kinds of layouts that you can select according to your blog or website setup.

Alongside themes, WordPress also offers an array of different plugins which are some great add-ons for your blog and offers some additional features to your blog with a simple plug and play option. Again, there are both free and premium WordPress plugins available on the internet. Yet, you will find all your desired plugins whether it’s for SEO settings, Social Share plugin, Comments plugin, or any other important plugins for free.

  1. WordPress as a static Website

WordPress is also a better option nowadays if you are just looking for a static website. Moreover, it is periodically updated which helps get better and improved results. Creating a static website with the help of WordPress has a lot of SEO benefits and helps achieve better rankings on Search Engines.

Many webmasters in the past have seen a great improvement in their search engine rankings after they made the move from a static HTML website to WordPress. WordPress overall, in addition to some of its useful plugins, helps optimize your On-Page SEO, and the WP dashboard allows easy management even for a non-technical person.

To top it all, WordPress offers the easiest way to integrate Social Media using plugins and it’s not rocket science to understand that Social Media is already changing the SEO industry.

Useful Tip: Whether you use WordPress or not, you must make sure that you have integrated the major social media platforms such as Google+, Delicious, FB, Twitter, and StumbleUpon on your website to get the maximum advantage from the web.

  1. WordPress is SEO friendly

A blogger is simply a writer and it’s very unlikely that he or she would have the knowledge of development or SEO. Yes, SEO is something that’s on the peak of all concerns for any blogger either experienced or a beginner as it’s the main element that can help your drive quality traffic onto your blog.

But, when you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, SEO is the last thing that you will be worried about. As per the experts, WordPress is more SEO-friendly than BlogSpot or any other blogging software on the web. WordPress, itself follows a clean coding structure. Meanwhile, there are many different SEO plugins ranging from Jetpack, SEO by WordPress from Yoast, All in one SEO, etc.

  1. Trust and respect

Blogging is all about your name and influence on the web. To become a successful blogger, you must acquire the trust and respect from a wider range of audiences who may later be converted into your readers or subscribers.

Today, BlogSpot is considered to be the favorite blogging platform by a lot of spammers who create free blogs just to acquire links. This is one of the main reasons why people tend to restrict themselves from any BlogSpot-powered blog. While, if you are using a self-hosted WordPress blog, you will be automatically kept among the list of serious bloggers, and people will start having faith in you as a blogger and consider you and your blog reliable for quality information.

A quality structure whether it’s about the design and layout of the overall blog or the URL of the blog makes a great psychological impact on the readers and helps them decide instantly whether to trust the information available on the blog or not.

With the help of WordPress, you can set up a lot of contests, host giveaways, and hold competitions within the blog in order to gain trust and respect from fellow bloggers as well as the readers of your blog.

  1. Monetization

Monetization is one of the most important concerns of bloggers while blogging. That’s the reason why most bloggers are entering the blogging industry. Once your blog is popular and holds trust and respect among the readers, you need some sure-shot ways to monetize the traffic.

The best way to monetize your blog is to advertise third-party ads on your blog in order to increase the potential of your blog to make money online. There is a good number of advertising agencies like BuySellAds that works as an ideal platform to connect a blogger with an advertiser.

But these advertising agencies have certain criteria that need to be fulfilled to get your blog approved in their directory. These advertising agencies don’t approve bloggers from BlogSpot or many such sub-domain-hosted blogs. Hence, it’s wiser to create a self-hosted WordPress blog and apply for a position in their directory later on.

Moreover, these advertising agencies like Infolinks and BuySellAds have developed dedicated WordPress plugins to make it easy to integrate Ads on a WordPress blog.

Cons of WordPress Blogging Platform:

With the above reasons explained thoroughly, WordPress comes out as an outright winner being the No.1 Blogging platform available on the web today. But alongside the pros of WordPress, if you are willing to set up a self-hosted WordPress blog then you must also be aware of its cons.

  • Self-hosted WordPress blog is resource hungry.
  • You need some technical know-how to fix WordPress errors or contact a professional.
  • You need a Web host to run a self-hosted WordPress blog.

Conclusion

No matter what blogging platform you want to use, at the end of the day it’s all about the quality of content that you create which matters. I recommend using WordPress as a blogging platform against other platforms for your self-hosted blog because it’s the easiest, most reliable, and resourceful blogging platform.

If you’re a newbie and very much serious about blogging then don’t go with the advice that starts a blog with BlogSpot first and later on you can move to WordPress anytime. To experiment with blogging, BlogSpot can be an ideal choice as you don’t need to purchase a domain or web host but if you want to blog professionally then someday you will need to transfer your blog from BlogSpot to WordPress.

Although the transfer is easy from BlogSpot to WordPress with some helpful plugins, it can be a major impact on the overall search engine traffic of your blog. Above all, if you are using images in your post, it becomes a headache to upload them on your WordPress blog.

Hence, it is very much advisable to start with WordPress from the beginning itself as the cost of buying a domain and a reliable host is not very expensive nowadays.

That’s my opinion, what’s yours?

Still, this is my opinion and I am pretty much sure that there would be many contradictions about it and most of you will still debate about why you love WordPress or BlogSpot?

Please write into the comments below regarding your opinion about the best blogging platform on the web. We would love to hear your views on the same.