Why I moved back to Blogger from WordPress?

With lots of expectations, I had moved my entire blog to a self-hosted WordPress platform but three years after spending lots of $$$ I have realized I need to move back to Blogger. I decided to write this post so that it helps people who are on the fence whether to migrate to Wordpress from blogger or not.

I think it will be best to list out pros and cons of both Blogger and Wordpress and then express my concluding thoughts.

Advantages of WordPress:

1. An awesome community of developers.
2. Lots and lots of plugins.
3. Blogs look awesome.
4. Get lots of cool UI Templates.
5. SEO Plugins.
6. You are the owner of the content.
7. You can sell your blog.

Disadvantages of Wordpress:

1. You are responsible for your website security.
2. Prone to lots of hacking attacks (Luckily security measures I took prevented my site from being hijacked for all the time I was on Wordpress).
3. Money Money Money. You have to pay to be alive and if you don't post to often it's not worth it.

Advantages of Blogger:

1. It's FREE. Yes its Free
2. More secure as Google plays a role in security(Of course you need to have basic security measures to protect your Google Account)
3. No worry of losing your site even if you don't update too often.
4. Decent blog templates but not as amazing as Wordpress.

Disadvantages of Blogger:

1. You do not own the content even if you are authoring.
2. Not possible to sell your blog as is. (You will frat have to migrate your blog to Wordpress and then sell).
3. Less enthusiastic developer community compared to Wordpress.

HostGator:

I was using Hostgator for self-hosting and I have to mention them here because they are simply amazing. They have some of the finest tech support teams and whenever I had any technical glitch it was resolved in minutes over chat. Also, my blog was never (almost) down due to technical issues, its quite clear HostGator folks know what they are doing and are simply best at what they do. Even when I had final chats with one of their tech support persons after moving back to Blogger they were highly professional and helped me even though they knew I won't be their customer any more. HATS OFF.

Summary:

I will be honest here, I sort of drifted from being an active blogger to a sporadic blogger to a point where I almost stopped blogging for extended periods of time. It came to a point where self hosting became a liability. Also, I though migrating to Wordpress would give me huge SEO advantage and will get tons of traffic from Google. I sort of didn't notice any significant improvements in traffic and in many cases observed drop in traffic (maybe the content was stale). So in short WordPress or Blogger blog traf is not governed by the platforms you host your content but the content itself. Also for a strange reason, I was more comfortable with Blogger. Maybe I will start blogging actively again.

Conclusion:

If you are serious about blogging and want to make a career out of it then it makes a lot of sense to be on Wordpress. But if you are a sporadic or impulsive blogger then Blogger is the best platform for you. In the end, your enthusiasm and content will define your success but not the platform you are on. Hope my experience helps people who are on the fence in making a more logical decision on which platform to stay on.