Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Pros and Cons

Pros:

– WordPress is faster and has fewer glitches, especially now that Blogger’s programmers have tried to overhaul the entire system and failed miserably.

– WordPress remembers trusted commenters and doesn’t make you approve their comments every single time they post. This eliminates unnecessary delays in commenting which become especially annoying when a lively discussion is taking place and the blog owner can’t moderate because she is at work, asleep, eating, etc. The blog author is still in control and can easily unapprove comments but, in general, her work is cut in half.

– In WordPress you can answer specific comments in a way that makes it clear whom you are responding to. You can also quote other people’s comments without having to copy-paste them. In Blogger, all comments are placed underneath the last one, which makes it very hard to keep track of who said what to whom in long discussions. (Try participating in a discussion that had between 200 and 350 comments, like I had to several times on Blogger and you’ll see what I mean).

– Inserting quotes is a lot more difficult in Blogger. I quote a lot, so it matters to me that it is easier in WordPress to insert quotes and they don’t mess up the post aesthetically.

-WordPress doesn’t insert huge unnecessary spaces between paragraphs that in Blogger you have to remove manually by editing the HTML code.

– WordPress has an app for BlackBerry.

– The “Most Recent Posts” widget on Word Press does, indeed, show the most recent comments. On Blogger it took up to several hours for the widget to update.

Cons:

– It’s easier to moderate comments by email in Blogger. In WordPress it takes an extra step.

– Widgets are more numerous and more fun in Blogger (when you manage to get them to work). Some templates in WordPress offer better widgets than the one I chose but those templates had many characteristics that made them unsuitable for the purposes of my blog.

– Moving a blog to another url makes you lose visitors. Many regular readers will be understandably annoyed with the change. All of the backlinks that you have accumulated in the years of blogging will be lost.

– There is no way to make Blogger redirect individual posts to the same posts you have imported into WordPress. I scoured the Internet for a working code that would be able to do that. I tried many different bits of code. None of them work.

I’m sure I will have more observations as the time progresses, so keep checking in.