11 Blogger features you might loose when shift to custom templates

You might never now that there are features that you lost when you download and put a custom template. Custom templates are designed and developed by a web developer using Blogger API, but you might know that Blogger documentation about its API is not complete. I asked about it on Blogger's help forum and response was not quite promising. The developer might or might don't know about the complete (which is almost impossible) documentations.
Here are some of the features you might loose.

1. Template Editor

You might loose the ability to control colors and fonts on your template, this is quite helpful when you want a color theme for your choice. Custom templates required variable declaration which needs to be learnt. I wrote a article on it, you should read as a developer.

2. Layout Control

Custom template looses your control over layout. Layout might have 1 column, 2 column, 3 column but you won't be able to edit them unless you know how to code. Blogger's templates let your change the width of columns and even let you select the layout you want, while custom templates are handicapped from both of them.

3. Lose in Mobile

Well putting some responsive design code is not enough at all, isn't it? Blogger have mobile tags and some mobile design features like thumbnails instead of images because you can't have big images in mobile. Making the content fit is not enough making it faster to load, faster to browse and easy to read is far more important. Developers out there are not using those special tags.

4. No custom jump link text

When you put a jump break in your blog post so that user can continue from there. The link that do that is call jump link. Usually jump link texts are Read More, Continue Reading or Show More but can you set your own text.

A tag <data:post.jumpText> is available in Blogger's default templates but this tag is not in docs. So eventually many developers might not know about this. This is not necessary that custom template do not have but many of them don't have it.

5. No location sharing

You might never knew that you can share your location with your readers. In custom templates there is an option to share author location. It shows in below every post (if enabled). If you have authors around the world then there will be different locations for each of them. Pretty cool uh.

6. Lose control over Google Analytics

Okay, reading some post from a blog about adding Google Analytic in Blogger is enough. Well, if you know then there is an option in Blogger > Settings  > Other > Analytics Web Property ID. This field let you add your Google Analytic specific ID which then integrates with your code.

If you are adding Google Analytics code yourself then its okay but you might know that Blogger blogs works differently across regions and across devices and it might have effect on your analysis. Custom templates do not have special data tags to do this.

7. Lose control over ads

Blogger let you add adsense ad banners in between posts and between content of the post, but this works on Blogger's default templates not on custom templates. There are specific tags for that too which developers know or don't. Ads control over custom template is lost when tags aren't added in codes. This might not be a problem for those who do not monetize their template but a serious one for either ones.

8. Social Sharing links

Blogger's default template uses micro data, which is helpful in social sharing. When a link is shared on any social networking site  then the a bot gets the data, but what data? Micro Data (known as schema) are used by Blogger. Many developers are not using them either they don't know or they are regretting it.

9. Bad SEO

Well I'm not arguing that Blogger default templates are 100% SEO friendly but they have good markup that is better than what developers are doing. They are using Javascript to get the work done but they should know that search engine bots never run Javascript.

Micro data which is discussed in above heading also used by search engine bot to collect data for search results, no micro data means no good search result.

10. Speed

Blogger default templates uses native API where other developers are using client side scripting that makes the web page load slower in browser. A good site have a good loading time. Make sure that when you download any custom template it should load faster at least.

11. No reactions

Above screenshot shows the reaction option. It is displayed below every post, it allows user to add its reaction towards post. You can set reaction like good or bad and user can vote it, pretty simple and useful.