When it comes to creating your own website, going with something that is well-established is often the best decision, and there is no site builder more established than WordPress. There is nothing worse than creating a site in a website builder, only to find out it’s not good for SEO or will be difficult to make changes to in the future. No matter what your site is about, whether it’s a business, personal blog or store, you will need a good content managing system – what better choice than the site that made content management systems popular in the first place?
Some of the most recognizable brands in the world use WordPress for their websites, and as one of the most popular content management services out there they have managed to capture 60% of the market. Over 42.7% of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress and with the numerous SEO capabilities, templates, and plugins on offer, it’s not hard to see why.
Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has captured the website building market, going well beyond blogging and reaching new heights with business and eCommerce sites over the past few years. Their open-source roots represented through easy-to-use interfaces mean that even without a lot of technical expertise, you can have a WordPress site up and running within minutes. WordPress gives users a blank canvas on which they can express their ideas and create whatever they want while achieving and maintaining good search engine results.
Many other competing website builders have hit the market over the past few years, like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace, but WordPress continues to be the leader in the industry and is likely to remain so for years more to come. The trouble with choosing some of these newer site builders, is that it can be difficult to judge their longevity. If they’re unable to attract big consumer bases, you face the possibility of them shutting down and affecting the website you have so carefully built using their system.
Keep reading for the breakdown of all the reasons why WordPress is still the best website builder for SEO today:
SEO-Friendliness
WordPress was originally launched as an all-in-one blogging solution in the early 2000s, and it has evolved significantly from there, becoming a prominent CMS used by major companies around the globe to cover fields like eCommerce, business, magazine media and much more. Some of the most famous active WordPress site examples include BBC America, TechCrunch, The Walt Disney Company, Vogue, and many other household names.
Modern businesses know that SEO is a key part of marketing and sales strategies in nearly every industry, and the sites ranked at the top of search engine results receive 60% of all clicks – the type of traffic that can make your site extremely profitable with the right strategies in place. As many as 2.28 Billion results of all Google search engine results are currently WordPress sites, and the reason many rely on WordPress is for it’s SEO potential.WordPress is particularly SEO-friendly because it produces semantic markup which is favored by Google and other search engines. This semantic enriching makes your site more discoverable, and refers in essence to the process of using HTML tags to specify your page content to search engines. WordPress has some semantic markup built in, which you can further refine using several plugins like Semantic Tags, Wordlift or Kaimbo.
Your site today needs to be SEO-friendly not only for desktop but for mobile too. Mobile visits now account for at least 60% of all organic search engine visits and have overtaken desktop web traffic by a mile. To give you a clearer idea of the sheer growth of mobile web search over the past few years, in 2013 mobile phones accounted only for around 16% of worldwide traffic. By 2019, that number had grown to just over 50%, and it is expected to continue growing to nearly 80% of all web traffic by 2022 according to projections by the company Statista.
Why is building a WordPress website better for mobile searches in particular? Because of page loading speed optimization.
Loading Times
When it comes to ranking highly in search engine results, especially in a time when mobile search makes up such a large part of traffic, your page speed will be a differentiating factor in your rankings. This is because mobile users are typically accustomed to speedy page loading times. Research conducted by Google indicated that the maximum amount of time the majority of mobile users are willing to wait for your page to load is just three seconds. For context, the average loading time for sites included in this research was between 14 and 19 seconds depending on the type of network connection. The message is clear; if you can’t minimize your page loading times it will cost you valuable site traffic and click-throughs.
There are several ways to make sure your WordPress site loads quickly for mobile users by limiting your page sizes, optimizing images and using caching plugins. ShortPixel Image Optimizer and WPOptimize are two such plugins that can speed up WordPress site loading times significantly. ShortPixel Image Optimizer compresses documents and images to minimize your site’s loading times for mobile, and is used actively by over 200,000 users.
WPOptimize also speeds up loading times by caching your site, clearing your database and compressing images as well. Caching can be highly effective: if a site visitor has been to your site before, when they return a copy of the site will be stored on their hard drive or in temporary storage and be able to load much faster. WPOptimize has reached nearly a million active installs on WordPress sites.
Permalinks and Metadata
Permalinks will be a key part of anything published on your website, as your URLs are indexed by search engines and have a significant impact on search engine result rankings. WordPress makes it easy to edit and optimize your permalinks which is better for SEO and getting higher numbers of site visitors and click-throughs. SEO titles and metadata have a significant impact on how search engines rank your site as well. Title tags are not only read by search engines, but potential site visitors too and are the first impression that many will have of your page. At the end of the day, a good title tag is what will push potential site visitors to make that click.
Metadata, on the other hand, works in conjunction with search engine crawlers to categorize your site accurately, and works behind the scenes in a series of micro-communications between search engines and your website. These communications tell search engines what to expect from your site in terms of images or blog posts and how to index them.
Adding keywords to your metadata and permalinks will better your chances at ranking highly for given search terms. WordPress makes it easy to manage both of these factors for your site, and optimize them for the results you need. The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is one way to add metadata and title tags to all your pages as you publish them. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, with active downloads exceeding five million.
Social Media Integration
SEO extends beyond just your site and continues into your social media pages. Achieving success in your social media pages will indirectly improve your SEO rankings, and expand your total web presence. WordPress offers several solutions for wielding your social media pages and site in one SEO-friendly package. Social media is built for the purpose of mass-sharing, and by optimizing your title tags you can drive up both your clicks and site visitors. Behind SEO and content marketing, social media was ranked as the second most effective way to increase traffic to your site, closely followed by quality backlinks.
WordPress has several options for you to add and capitalize on your social media pages for SEO. With WordPress you can not only link to social media buttons on your pages and blog content, but also add your social feeds to your site and automate social media campaigns. If in-depth social media SEO strategies are up your alley, you’ll want to check out Open Graph metadata for your WordPress site. Open Graph metadata allows you to get additional info to your website and social media pages – it’s Open Graph meta tags that affect how links are seen when published on social pages.
Many competing website builders have entered the market recently, but few of them have the vast capabilities, reach and longevity that a website in WordPress has to offer. WordPress was built with SEO at it’s core, and this translates to not only being innately SEO-friendly but also improving SEO indirectly by improving loading times and providing options for integration with social media pages. Mobile traffic is becoming increasingly important and is projected to make up the majority of global web traffic within just a year or two.
Building a WordPress website free enables you to download and go into the code of your site as needed and make changes without having your search engine rankings affected, giving you a level of customization that other site builders do not commonly provide.
Furthermore, WordPress allows you to change and optimize what you want, when you want. Not all website builders allow you to customize media types or scale as effectively as using WordPress can. Since so much of the web is made up of WordPress sites, you can be sure that you will find support for any issue you come across quite easily. It’s all about WordPress!
More than 4 million people visit WordPress sites a month. With over 50,000 available plugins, close to 10,000 themes and templates and freely available educational resources galore, 661 WordPress sites are created every day, compared to around 300 WooCommerce and even less Shopify sites, WordPress is still the best website builder for SEO out there today, and likely will be for some years to come.
