Blogger

Blogger, and what it is for

Blogger is a free blogging platform run by Google. It has been going for a very long time, which is unusual on its own, and the deal has never really changed: you sign in with your Google account, pick a theme, and start writing. Google hosts it, Google maintains it, and there is nothing to pay, ever. Not a trial, not a free tier with a paid step above it. Free.

That combination of free hosting, no maintenance and near-zero setup is why so many Blogger blogs exist, and why so many of them have sat untouched for years. It suits someone who wants to publish writing without operating anything. It is a poor fit for a business site that needs to grow into something more, and the platform has never pretended otherwise.

What a Blogger site publishes about itself

The platform is unmistakable

Blogger blogs load resources from Google's blogging infrastructure, and references to it appear throughout the page whether the blog sits on a free address or a custom domain of its own. Moving to your own domain changes what visitors type; it does not change what the page is built from. Confirming a site is Blogger is about as reliable as detection gets.

The widget structure

Blogger builds pages out of numbered widgets, and those numbered identifiers stay in the published markup: the post area, the header, the sidebar blocks, the label lists. The naming pattern is distinctive and consistent across blogs, so even a heavily customised Blogger site keeps a recognisable skeleton underneath. Its templating language leaves its own traces alongside them.

The theme name is not there

This is the gap. A Blogger theme is applied by generating the page from a template rather than by loading a named package, so the published source contains the result and not the label. There is no theme name, no theme folder, nothing to read off. We checked live Blogger blogs while writing this and found no theme identifier of any kind.

So how do theme detectors name a Blogger theme?

By recognition rather than by reading. The themes Blogger ships have distinctive layouts and styling, so a tool can compare what a blog looks like structurally against a library of known themes and report the closest match. That works well for a blog running an unmodified official theme, which is a great many of them.

It works much less well in two situations. A blog running a third-party theme downloaded from elsewhere may not be in any library. And because Blogger lets you edit the underlying template directly, a customised theme can drift far enough from its original that recognition fails. So treat a named result as a strong suggestion rather than a fact, and no result as meaning unrecognised rather than not Blogger.

Where Blogger has limits

• It has barely changed in years. Blogger is maintained rather than developed, so what it does today is broadly what it will do tomorrow.
• Design depends on editing the template. Surface options are limited, and real changes mean working in Blogger's own templating language.
• It is built around one blog. Structured content, product listings and complex page hierarchies are outside what it was designed for.
• Your content lives in a Google account. Posts can be exported, which is more than several platforms allow, but the blog itself belongs to the account that owns it.

Frequently asked questions

Can you find out which Blogger theme a blog is using?

Not by reading the page. Blogger does not publish a theme name anywhere in the source, so there is nothing to look up. A tool that names one has matched the blog's layout against themes it already knows, which is reliable for unmodified official themes and much less so for customised or third-party ones.

How can you tell a site is built on Blogger?

Very easily. Blogger blogs load resources from Google's blogging infrastructure and are built from numbered widgets whose identifiers stay in the published markup. Both are visible whether the blog uses a free address or a custom domain, and neither is practical to hide.

Is Blogger free?

Completely, including the hosting, and it always has been. There is no paid tier and no trial that expires. The only thing you would pay for is a custom domain if you want one, and you buy that from a registrar rather than from Google.

Is Blogger a CMS?

Yes, a narrow one. It stores your posts, pages, images and settings and publishes them, which is what a content management system does. What it manages is a blog specifically, so anything that is not a post or a simple page falls outside what it was built to handle.

Can you use your own domain with Blogger?

Yes, and it costs nothing beyond the domain itself. Pointing your own address at a Blogger blog is supported and straightforward. It changes what visitors see in the address bar and nothing about how the blog is built, which is why a custom domain does not stop it being identifiable.

Can you move a Blogger blog somewhere else?

Your writing, yes. Blogger exports posts and comments in a portable format, which is more generous than several hosted platforms manage, and importers for it are common. The theme and layout do not travel, so the blog would need rebuilding wherever it lands.

Blogger is the easiest platform on the web to recognise and one of the harder ones to read a theme from, which is an odd combination and worth knowing before you trust a result. If you want to publish something quickly and pay nothing, it still does that as well as it ever did.