Tumblr vs WordPress

Tumblr, compared to WordPress, is limited with one type of page layout that must be applied to every page on the site. Tumblr has now added Page support for the platform, and you can have normal looking page names. The url’s for those pages used to be really ugly by default and getting to these pages to edit them again was very difficult, but that has all changed for the better. In Tumblr plugins must be custom coded for pseudo plug-in functionality (having things in the sidebars of a theme). Tumblr can support calendar and contact pages but only from third party sites that requires a separate log-in from the Tumblr back-end and some trick coding. You can use Wufoo for contact forms on Tumblr but it will require a developer or knowledge of javascript to make it work well. That said, Tumblr has a cool feature called “Ask Me” that comes with every site, but you will have to enable it from the Community section in the backend to make it work. If that meets your needs you may not need a contact form.

With WordPress a developer can create different layouts for internal pages, posts and your homepage. This is nice for the corporate sites we do, as we often code about 5-6 different page types for a single site, and then apply the right one when we need it. WordPress supports widgets/plug-ins that can easily be added/customized without hard coding. It also allows you to include native calendars and contact forms which mean you can update them all from the same WordPress back-end.

Tumblr dubs itself as “the easiest way to blog” – and with reason. With a plethora of free sexy themes, the ability to post virtually any media seamlessly, and the intrinsic simplicity of the platform, Tumblr is a great choice for someone like me (or you) who just wants to get their thoughts out and share interesting stuff with people.

WordPress is a lot more powerful than Tumblr, totally customizable, and scaleable. The strength of WordPress comes from its huge community. There are thousands of gorgeous themes available for all kinds of different applications (personal blog, news blog, e-commerce site, etc.), thousands of powerful plugins to easily add important functionality to your site, and support for every question/issue imaginable.

Tumblr is well-built for social integration. You can set up your Tumbles to post to Twitter as links automatically, to drive traffic back to your site. On Facebook, you can set up your Tumblr posts to come in whenever you make them, and most of my Facebook friends see my Tumblr content that way, vs. my Twitter friends who actually go to the site. For some reason people like to just hang out in Facebook all day if they are active participants there it seems. You can set it up so that RSS from other sites you might own will be fed into your Tumblr as links, text or pictures automatically. And using simple HTML or custom coding you can integrate just about anything with a widget or api function into the sidebar of your Tumblr theme (such as Twitter updates, an Etsy mini widget, a Facebook widget, Amazon book widget, etc.)

With WordPress, you have to use plugins to accomplish the same thing, though there are several. You would also have to use custom coding to find the right spots in the many files that make up a WordPress theme for more complex integration, though Twitter & Facebook & widgets of all types can be inserted easily using a widget in WordPress. Social sharing tools like ShareThis or AddThis usually require some understanding of development in order to implement into posts or a sitewide area, but it’s not too difficult.

Tumblr has a key advantage over WordPress in the aspect of friends and followers, in that you can follow other people and they can follow you as you do on Twitter/Facebook, etc. This gives you two key aspects of a Tumblr experience: people see your content in their own dashboard and can like it (they click a heart icon to signify that) or reblog it (share it with their Tumblr network and possibly beyond if they have Twitter/Facebook hooked up) AND you have content readily available to you, to share with others by reblogging or liking it. WordPress just can’t compare as it does not have the social networking aspect built in as a function of the platform.

On WordPress, blog comments are the way to develop friends and a “network” or community, and very popular blogs have many commenters who mainly participate and interact via the article postings in this way. Commenting on WordPress is built-in, whereas on Tumblr you have to (oddly) set up a separate account at a site called Disqus and then implement that into your Tumblr theme. A bit of a pain, and I hope someday Tumblr will make commenting automatic but I don’t know they will, Disqus is such a part of the way things is done. That said, people like Disqus so much they have been implementing it on WordPress sites also (replacing the default commenting system), so Disqus is a good system to use and offers some great features that can enhance comments functionality regardless of where you use it. It should be noted that Disqus is a global commenting system and not on your site only, so some corporations would not like this aspect of commenting as comments will be displayed other places and not only on your site.

You can sell goods and services from either platform, but there are more limits with Tumblr than with WordPress as far as shopping tools go. Basically Tumblr can have a Paypal or Google Checkout button added to any post or page where you have something to sell, as can WordPress or any platform where you can add HTML to the site in order to enable payment.

WordPress has several ecommerce cart plugins available, and if you have the need for a “store” of any type or quantities of merchandise, you will find Tumblr too limiting. We used the free WordPress e-Commerce Plugin to design a custom store experience for our plastic surgery client, for their beauty and skincare products. This is a highly customized version, coded by Tom Jenkins who is a very skilled developer - not everyone could have done what we wanted with this WordPress store, so bear that in mind if you have dreams of a beautiful, customized experience using WordPress and a plugin.

Tumblr is typically cheaper as it does not require the installation and configuration that WordPress does – the cost for hosting a Tumblr site is free, and our cost for custom Tumblr design is less expensive than it is for a custom WordPress theme, because it is much simpler to code (but also more limited.) Tumblr offers an extremely user friendly dashboard that makes updating posts easy for text and multimedia alike - it guides you in posting various types of media which no other platform does in the same way. Tumblr is also easy to update from your mobile device and most smartphones have a Tumblr app available that can be downloaded. When it comes to sharing content others have posted, Tumblr is the hands-down winner – WordPress does not have built-in community functions of ‘following” like-minded people, “reblogging” their posts, and “liking” what someone else has posted so that others in your friends list can see it. Of course, there are ways to use tools provided by web browsers like Firefox, or bookmarklets that you can keep in a toolbar, to share things, but with Tumblr this functionality is built in (to share posts within your community there.)

WordPress.com allows free hosting, but the design and functionality is more limited than what you will have access to if you host the WordPress software on your own server. So the “cost” is for hosting, design and development of custom functions, not for the software itself. WordPress also offers a fairly simple (for computer savvy folks) back-end and supports multiple media formats like pictures, audio and video.

Tumblr cannot be installed on your server, ever. Your site is hosted on the Tumblr.com platform, though you can use a unique url instead of the subdomain.tumblr.com address. You have complete control over your content, and can export it and move it to another platform if you want to take it off of Tumblr.

A WordPress site can easily be expanded to replace your current site if you choose. It is a robust Content Management System that has an easy user back-end that allows for page, plug-in, widget and sidebar updates to be made by non-tech experts. It can support multi-page navigation and serve as a robust and comprehensive website with database management and control. WordPress software can be hosted on a server that is user controlled allowing better control over stats and personalization OR you can use wordpress.com to create a hosted blog (making it more similar to Tumblr in that regard.) We often switch many corporate sites done in .asp or html to WordPress, so that marketers, customer support and others in the organization can update content immediately, instead of having to wait for Marcom or worse, the IT department to update site pages for them.

It's been reported that Google has a problem with Tumblr. There is a coding trick that can be added in the HTML to optimize the way page title url’s are created, and it is recommended you use this trick and also read and follow the advice in this post. But Google reportedly doesn’t quite know how to distinguish real, quality posts from frequently reblogged ones, and so has not included Tumblr in keyword searches as it should. We hope this is something they will rectify in the future. We also believe the best SEO is to write good content and share it other places, so we don’t dismiss Tumblr based on SEO reasons but it IS important to be well-informed if you have content you particularly need to show up in search engines.

WordPress content is very well-received by search engines and can be easily optimized with various plug-ins added to the back-end, such as our favorite “SEO All-in-One.” WordPress can also easily support ads which can be placed in different places on pages as you choose, using Widgets. WordPress also has clean code in the back-end which allows for faster performance, providing a better user experience.