WordPress vs. Blogger in 2023: Which is Better for Your Niche Website?

WordPress or Blogger – which is better for niche websites in the United States of America? This question haunts many entrepreneurs who want to start their online careers.

This post will review both platforms and their key features – and the primary reasons you might want to choose one over the other when building your niche website in California. By the end of this comparison, you’ll know which platform will serve your website better.

Table of Contents

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a free and open-source CMS application. It has a straightforward UI dashboard that is easy to understand and configure.

WordPress is the go-to choice for many entrepreneurs and small businesses who want to digitize their presence – without breaking the bank.

The origins of WordPress was to provide non-tech savvy users with a quick and easy way of launching their blogs. All default WordPress installations start as blogging interfaces.

However, the growing popularity of WordPress saw many businesses jumping ship and adopting the free CMS. We now have fully developed and professional-looking websites based on the WordPress platform.

You can tinker around with the open-source code makes WordPress ideal for endless experimentation and limitless website designs.

When it comes to website designs with WordPress, the sky is the limit. Want to sell accounting services? There’s a template for accounting sites you can start using right away.

Need to sell physical products and digitize your brick-and-mortar business? The WooCommerce plugin seamlessly integrates with WordPress and lets you sell anywhere in the world. It’s safe, secure, and worry-free.

Or if you want to start a niche website in California – say, a woodworking website – there’s WordPress.

The best part is that you don’t have to learn coding. You can start using popular plugins like Elementor to build your website with pixel-precision control.

This isn’t to say that designing with WordPress is easy – there’s a learning curve that will arguably take a few weeks to get used to.

However, WordPress is definitely the better option for entrepreneurs who want complete creative control over their website, unlike Shopify which doesn’t give you access to the backend.

Check out, How to start a niche website from scratch

What is Blogger?

At its core, Blogger is a blogging platform courtesy of Google. It’s free, and easy to use, but very limited in its features.

You don’t have to buy hosting services to start using Blogger. Simply sign in using your Google account and you can get started right away.

This way, Blogger is more accessible than WordPress with zero startup capital requirements. So if you’re on a budget and can’t spare any extra cash, you might want to look into Blogger.

Don’t let the minimalism and simplicity of Blogger fool you into thinking it’s a primitive blogging platform.

Over the years, countless web developers have built powerful Blogger templates that look stunning and professional. No one would suspect you of using Blogger unless they look for the source code.

Type “blogger templates” on any search engine to find free templates that are SEO optimized and have responsive layouts.

But that’s not all, you can also add an ecommerce shopping cart to your Blogger website. There are plenty of tools that let you do this, including ecwid.com, sellfy.com, and others.

All these features mean that Blogger doesn’t lag very far behind WordPress. If anything, Blogger may be on equal footing with WordPress on many key aspects that matter to niche website owners.

WordPress vs. Blogger – Various Aspects

Now that we’ve given an overview of each platform, it’s time to dig into their differences before giving our verdict.

SEO

SEO makes the digital marketing world go round. If your website can rank higher for target keywords, it’s only a matter of time before you start getting traffic.

This is one area where WordPress wins over Blogger. A quick look at the top search results shows that Google doesn’t favor Blogger over WordPress.

This is primarily because of Google’s own biases toward non-Blogger websites and the belief that these websites are not professionally designed.

This is no longer the case in 2022 with Blogger websites thanks to the thousands of free templates.

If you’re adamant about SEO and want to maximize your chances, you should start out with WordPress.

Note that if you can get other websites with high domain authority to link to your Blogger-hosted niche website, you should be good to go with Blogger. High-quality backlinks could give your Blogger site an equal footing with WordPress.

WordPress lets you control your niche website’s SEO in ways that Blogger doesn’t. You can also use plugins like Rank Math and Yoast SEO to make your website even more search-engine friendly.

These plugins let you automatically use the latest SEO techniques to get a leg up over the competition. You can also deploy social proof in the form of reviews and ratings to let Google know that the website is reliable.

This aspect makes WordPress stand out from Blogger. Blogger does have a few basic built-in features that should not make it challenging to rank.

But if you want more control over SEO features and to optimize all aspects of your blog, then it’s best to go with WordPress.

Ease of Use

WordPress wasn’t always easy to use. It was a more advanced version of Blogger and allowed users to make basic changes to their website.

However, the open source code of WordPress meant that it was only time before professional web developers would create plugins and templates.

This makes WordPress beginner friendly, but you still have to learn a few things here and there. For starters, you need to buy a domain and hosting services.

This is relatively easy to do and takes a few minutes. Some hosting providers install WordPress automatically, while others make the process easy with website builders.

You still need to maintain oversight with WordPress, but it doesn’t take long and the setup wizards aren’t very complicated.

But if ease of use is something you value, then you’re probably better off with Blogger. Setting up a niche website on Blogger is as easy as pie.

All you need is a Google account. Now sign in to Blogger and you can start blogging right away. You can choose a theme and layout from the available free options.

And that’s about it. Everything is done for you. You can add a custom domain if you need. But Blogger gives you a free Blogspot subdomain for free.

For example, if you’ve named your blog “nichewebsiteforbeginners”, your blog address will be ‘https://nichewebsiteforbeginners.blogspot.com’. Note that Blogger addresses are subject to availability. Like social media, the most famous names have already been taken.

Given the ease of setting up a niche website, we have to give this round to Blogger.

Creative Control

Before you start your niche website in California, ask yourself this: do you want complete control over your blog or are you okay with a third-party sharing part ownership with your blog?

If you want complete creative control over your website, down to each pixel, then you are better off using WordPress. It comes with a learning curve, but no one else except you own the website.

When you create your WordPress site, you pay for the cost of hosting and domain. This means you and no other third party have complete ownership of the digital assets.

You control how long the website will stay up and you decide when to shut it. You own all of the data on the site and the blog.

This is not the case with Blogger. As the saying goes, you are the product if you’re not paying for it. Google owns Blogger and all the data hosted on it.

You won’t be able to migrate the blog anywhere except for the Blogger platform itself. Google, if it ever chooses to, can shut down the service or limit your access to the content.

It isn’t uncommon for Google to ban Blogger accounts due to content violations or other reasons. While the chances of this happening to you are slim, the possibility remains.

You risk losing your blog if Google decides to stop supporting Blogger or cut your access to it. What happens to all the content on your website? It’s probably gone forever unless you maintain backups.

Worse still is that all the SEO progress you made on your Blogger niche website will be lost. You will have to start from scratch.

If you don’t want to take your chances with Blogger ever shutting down, then you’re better off using WordPress.

Themes and Templates

First impressions matter to visitors, buyers, repeat customers, and even Google itself. You need to pay attention to how your website looks because it plays a role in SEO.

Google’s new algorithms (and even Bing) will now judge the value of a website based on the user experience while interacting with its pages.

If Google bots get the impression that website users will have a poor experience, measured by their metrics called Core Web Vitals, Google may shadow ban your pages.

If your web pages had a high rank before, but the UI was poor, you’ll probably lose your rank to competitors.

Google also considers other factors such as website loading speed, if the web pages are mobile friendly, whether they use SSL encryption, and the presence of obtrusive ads.

In 2022 and beyond, aesthetics and user interface will make or break SEO for niche websites in California.

This is one reason why WordPress will always beat Blogger in a head-to-head comparison. There are far too many templates, designs, and themes.

You can download themes from WordPress for free or pay a small fee. The official WordPress database has over 10,000 free themes to choose from. The most popular of these is Astra with over 1 million active installations.

But many unofficial databases provide you with a much more extensive selection of WordPress themes to choose from.

In addition to the WordPress themes, you can also find thousands of plugins such as Yoast SEO and Elementor. They make your niche website in California even more helpful.

And the best part is that you retain complete control over your WordPress niche website whether you opt for a free or premium theme.

Many themes provide various customization options to customize your niche website according to your needs.

Blogger pales in comparison to WordPress in terms of themes and templates. While Blogger has many free templates to use, your options are pretty limited.

Moreover, you can’t do much with the template once you select it. The only things you can change are the layout and colors.

This makes Blogger relatively user-friendly because everything is straightforward and basic.

Plugins

WordPress has over 60,000 plugins – both free and paid. Remember the old iPhone 3G commercial, “there’s an app for that”? With WordPress, ‘there’s a plugin for that’ – whatever task you want to accomplish.

Whether it’s managing your finances, running data analytics, optimizing SEO, setting up an online store, or collecting payments.

You can use a website builder like Elementor to configure your website down to the pixel. There is Mailchimp to manage your email list. And there is WooCommerce to sell digital and physical products.

Blogger has its own version of plugins called Gadgets. They let you insert AdSense ads, add search functionality, and so on.

However, there are only 26 gadgets available. You can add third-party widgets to your Blogger inch website by adding a code in the HTML of the blog.

But Blogger doesn’t hold a candle to WordPress due to the unprecedented scale of plugins. WordPress takes the cake for this round.

Wrapping Up – Our Verdict

Here’s a quick summary of which platform you might want to use.

Choose Blogger if you want a no-nonsense platform to set up your niche website and get started right away. You can connect Blogger with AdSense to earn an income from your content.

Choose WordPress if you need complete ownership, creative freedom, and scalability. Of course, there is a learning curve associated with WordPress, but if you ask us, it’s worth your time.

Let us know which platform you use to run your niche website in California and why. Found a better alternative to WordPress and Blogger? Share your comments about them!