Switching from Blogger To WordPress Pros and Cons

I’m super excited to be presenting another cool series on my blog of guest posts that I know you will love. This is my girlfriend Lindsay from Lindsay blogs I’ll include her info at the bottom of this post.  Not only is she an awesome mom blogger but she is one of my favorite bloggy girlfriends.  Due to the fact that I recently switched from Blogger to WordPress I asked her to do this post for me. 

She made the switch quite some time back and I knew she’d have some fabulous thoughts for you.  I know you will enjoy it and I want you to include your thoughts and ideas below . And now Here’s Lindsay:

I have been blogging for two years now. That’s practically decades in the blogging world and I have learned so much in those two years. When I first started blogging, I had no idea what I was doing. That is painfully clear as I look back and absolutely cringe at my first blog design, name, advertising…pretty much everything. If I had only known then what I know now often goes through my mind.

One of the things I wish I had known about two years ago was the difference a simple choice like Blogger vs WordPress can really make. The two platforms are so entirely different and switching to WordPress was easily the best thing I’ve ever done for my blog. I’d like to share with you a few of the things that made my decision to switch from Blogger to WordPress such a great choice (That e-book I just linked is awesome. I have used it myself several times moving others and it was amazing)!

• Traffic - I can’t say that this is true for every blogger, but my traffic more than tripled almost instantly upon switching to WordPress. How is that possible? Three letters. S. E. O. WordPress makes Search Engine Optimization so much easier and I instantly saw the difference. Blogger has absolutely no way to easily optimize your individual posts for search engines. Sure, you can go in and tinker with the HTML coding to include meta tags that might make your site search engine friendly, but there is no way you can include every pertinent keyword for every post in those meta tags. Having the ability to select keywords for individual posts and actually optimize each post made a world of difference.
• Plugins – The SEO I talked about above? That wouldn’t have been possible without the plugins that WordPress offers. That is really the major difference between Blogger and WordPress. If you are on Blogger and you want to change something on your site (say, for example, adding numbers to your comments) you have to go into the HTML of your template and add to, delete from and modify the existing code to get the desired effect. With WordPress, you simply install a plugin. There are plugins for pretty much anything you could want and they are so easy to install and use. Their name really says it all – they are plug and play. That means you don’t have to touch the CSS or HTML if you don’t want to. Ever.
• Customization – There is only so much you can do with Blogger. Sure, you can create a custom template that might change around the sidebars, but let’s face it – most Blogger blogs look essentially the same. With WordPress, there is endless customization in the way of themes, child themes, plug-ins and CSS/HTML editing. A good designer can transform your blog into a fully-functioning storefront or anything else you want it to be. I can’t tell you how many times I have been on a site and (because I’m a geek) looked for the platform behind it only to find it is a WordPress powered site. It’s really cool how different each WordPress site can be.

There are also many other benefits of switching to WordPress that I’m not covering her, but I will say it’s worth the switch. Switching to WordPress was the best blogging decision I have ever made and I didn’t regret it for a micro-second. Now, WordPress does take some getting used to, but I promise the outcome is worth the effort.

I’m sure Lisa is going to agree with me wholeheartedly once she gets settled in on WordPress. I can’t wait to hear what she thinks!

I do love it!! Lots to learn but I love my new site and the plugins I think I may have to go to plugins anonymous!

Do Visit Lindsay  her blog is awesome ! http://www.lindsayblogs.com/