There are plenty of website platforms out there. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but many people will tell you that when it comes to SEO, WordPress rules the day. Read on to find out why.
Robin Young
Robin Young is the CEO and founder of Fitness Savvy. As a freelance writer, he has written for Muscle & Strength, Sparkpeople, and Inquisitr, and produces video content and blogs on fitness, focusing on body recomposition.
Discover Some Awesome Plugins
If you choose to build your site on WordPress, you will discover some awesome plugins to help with SEO.
The best overall plugin is Yoast. I never realized when starting out that when you restructure your site (delete pages, change URLs) that you need to re-direct your old pages. If you don’t, you will run into 404 errors which are bad for SEO.
The Yoast plugin allows you to quickly and easily re-direct pages.
The Plugin Organizer plugin is another great one for improving speed. It allows users to set the website up so only the plugins required for specific pages are loaded. If you have a ton of plugins on your site, this is essential, otherwise, your site will be slow and that will affect your rankings.
The multisite feature on WordPress is also great if you want to run a similar website with the same plugins. For example, we have a US and UK site and it is easy to run them with two separate domains while keeping the same plugins and settings for both.
There is also an awesome HREFlang plugin to help you ensure thar SEO is properly taken care of (this is widely regarded as the most difficult part of SEO). In fact, we believe it is this set-up that has enabled our US site to rank well, even though it has a different domain name with hardly any backlinks.
With an Abundance of Themes and Plugins
WordPress in itself is an excellent CMS that offers an array of tools, plugins, themes, and services that give businesses autonomy on the ways in which they want to appear to their audience. With an abundance of themes and plugins, WordPress promotes the professionalism of a business, focusing on user experience to decrease the overall bounce rate.
To further explain, WordPress makes the likes of metadata easy to change when you see fit. If the relevance of your metadata isn’t to standard, you can easily go into a page and switch it up for stronger ranking keywords. This will then allow the business to improve its rankings on SERPs.
Page speed is of utmost necessity in this day and age since users are much more likely to bounce and find what they’re looking for elsewhere. The good news is, WordPress has some excellent plugins that help with all things site speed. You can find these in the plugin section of the website as there is an array of plugins to clear your cache, compress images, and so on.
Mobile is king for everything websites as people now spend longer on their phones than they would on desktops. WordPress doesn’t ask you to optimize your website for mobile as the CMS does it anyway, so you can sit back and relax knowing that themes on this CMS have already been optimized for mobile users.
Umarah Hussain
Umarah Hussain is a PR & Outreach Executive at Colewood. She delves into all things backlinks, outreaching and social media.
Mark Webster
WordPress is Versatile and Agile
The important thing to understand is that SEO evolves at such a rapid pace, if you want to truly compete, you’ve got to be able to make changes and make them fast. A big part of the draw of WordPress comes from its flexibility. You can install and uninstall plugins at the press of a button, you can add code, remove features, update things like schema markup with ease, and generally keep on top of things without needing to completely overhaul your website each time.
This modular approach means that you can focus on the things that move the needle most with Google and focus your time and resources in the right area without being tied down to one specific service or plugin.
Why WordPress is the Best Platform to Build on
Comparing WordPress to Wix, here is a list of points as to why WordPress is the best platform to build on.
1. Customizable: WordPress is probably the most customizable platform to build your website on. With full access to HTML and innumerable plugins, WordPress is highly customizable as well as easy to use. Meanwhile, some parts of the Wix backend are not accessible to the common person, and with limited applications to add the desired feature, it can be frustrating.
2. Website Optimization: WordPress comes with highly optimized themes that require little to no intervention on your part. A faster website delivers a better experience to the user and, hence, it is a crucial element of any website.
3. SEO Optimization: SEO or Search Engine Optimization is extremely crucial for the success of a website on the search engine results page. Hardly anyone ever visits the second page of Google’s search results. Appearing on the first page of Google’s search results requires a combination of various factors. Some such factors that are enabled easily by WordPress more than any other platform are factors such as website speed, SEO Plugins like Schema, optimization of content and images, better support for crawlers, impeccable Sitemap management by plugins for search engine indexing and more. Whereas on Wix or other platforms, incorporating these various facets are technically challenging and time-consuming.
4. Cost: While the initial cost of hosting, buying a domain, and SSL certification is split up and may appear expensive, it actually works out cheaper when coupled with packages designed for 24 months and above while letting you choose different service providers for each and every aspect. For example, my WordPress website uses GoDaddy for hosting and domain and CloudFlare for SSL, which enabled me to cut costs since CloudFlare SSL was free. Meanwhile, Wix offers an incredibly cheap package for one year, but the recurring cost for years beyond that is significantly higher.
Rahul BS
Lisa McCloud
There are Many Benefits of Using WordPress for your Website
But can WordPress help you with your search engine optimization (SEO) so that you can get more traffic from search engines like Google.
Well, here are some of the top reasons why you should consider WordPress as the best for SEO:
SEO-Friendly Structure
The way WordPress structures things on your website is done in an SEO friendly manner, including your:
- Posts
- Pages
- Categories
Also, many of the key aspects of your website, such as heading tags, page URLs, and the code that runs in the background, follow the best SEO practices resulting in clean code.
WordPress even thought ahead to automatically ping any new content you add to your website so search engines can find it sooner. All of these make it easy for search engines like Google to crawl and understand your website’s topics better. The easier you make your website to crawl and understand, the better your chances will be to rank higher in the relevant results.
WordPress Is Lightweight
Google has confirmed that speed is a ranking factor, and as it is the most popular search engine, this means that website speed is something everyone should seriously consider for SEO. This is further emphasized by Google’s latest release of its Core Web Vitals, a new set of metrics aimed at measuring website speed. For the first time ever, Google has announced on their Webmasters blog that these will be used in future SEO Ranking factors.
But how can WordPress help?
Well, by default, WordPress can be incredibly fast, providing you’re selective with your theme and plugin selection. For example, some themes like Astra can get page speeds to as low as 0.5 seconds.
Furthermore, the next updated version, WordPress 5.5, aims to include lazy loading images by default so that those who browse WordPress-based websites from their mobile devices will be able to get even faster page loads as only images just outside of your scroll view will be loaded when needed.
Plugins That Will Help Optimize Your SEO Results Beyond The Basics
With the massive amount of over 57,000 plugins at WordPress.org, there’s bound to be a plugin for anything you can think of. Well, SEO is no exception. There are plenty of WordPress plugins out there that will take your website SEO from basic to fully optimized to its peak.
This includes plugins that will optimize your articles for specific keywords, like:
- Yoast SEO
- Rank Math
- All in One SEO Pack
- Squirrly AI Consultant
Plugins to further enhance your website speed include:
- ShortPixel
- TinyPNG
- WP Rocket
- W3 Total Cache
All of these plugins make the more technical side of optimizing your website for SEO incredibly easy. Some will even go as far as automating some tasks for you. Like the ShortPixel and TinyPNG plugins. These will optimize and compress your website images automatically when you upload them to the WordPress media library.
These are just a few ways WordPress can help optimize your website, making it possible for WordPress to have a huge impact on your SEO and get you some of the best results.
Three Reasons Why WordPress is the Best CMS Tool
WordPress is the best content management system for SEO because it’s really built for content creation. It’s the most widely used CMS tool out there for your SEO needs. As for me, WordPress has been a significant part of my marketing strategy. Here are three reasons why WordPress is the best CMS tool for your SEO endeavors.
1. Focuses on User Experience: It is primarily focused to give the user the best user-friendly experience, all the while giving you an easy way to design your website to make it look professionally made.
2. Optimal Website Speed: You want to make sure that your website loads as fast as it can from whichever device a user is using, and WordPress makes sure of that.
3. Social Media Integration: You can add social media buttons to your website that a user can just click on to share your content and encourage your target audiences to be part of your social media campaign.
Sonya Schwartz
Darcy Burk
WordPress’ Flexibility
What makes WordPress the best website platform for SEO is its ease of use. It is extremely simple to set up a WordPress site and start creating content. Many of the popular web hosting companies even have a “one click install” to get up and running even faster.
WordPress’ flexibility is also a key factor in making it the best website platform for SEO. Unlike popular “website builder” platforms that do not provide FTP access or restrict you from adding certain types of code to your site, WordPress is open source. This means a webmaster can control and customize every line of code to make the platform conform to their SEO goals and needs. This level of customization can be extremely beneficial, especially when it comes to Google’s recent emphasis on speed and “Core Web Vitals.” I would certainly recommend WordPress as the website platform of choice for SEO.
Yoast SEO, The Coup De Gras of SEO Plugins
WordPress is the best for SEO because of its open-sourced plugin marketplace. It is this marketplace that enables anyone, regardless of any previous SEO knowledge, to learn and easily configure a website that is about as highly SEO optimized as you can get.
There are plugins for everything: Themes that are optimized for speed and mobile-usability, plugins that minimize CSS, Javascript, and HTML, as well as serve them asynchronously, inline, and more. There are plugins to optimize your images, meaning they are compressed, served in next-gen formats, and lazy-loaded. There are plugins to compact the database and keep the served page small in size so it appears quicker. Some plugins incorporate all JSON-LD schema that Google requires to appear in rich results.
Not to mention, Yoast SEO, the coup de gras of SEO plugins, which allow you to create a fully SEO optimized post BEFORE it is published. Gone are the days of having to publish and then going back to check your SEO ranking so you can edit the post. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds. WordPress is the best for SEO because it can turn anyone into an SEO expert.
Kaleb O'Shea
This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.