Wordpress versus html and google ranking
-
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress).
My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
-
Thank you everyone! I will be building a site for one of our other companies soon... maybe I'll try wordpress to give it a chance.
-
I hear what you are saying re having the control over the code, I've been coding for more years than I care to remember however I prefer to run sites on Wordpress for a number of reasons such as control over content, navigation is simplified, translation management, hundreds of plug ins and it's written in php so is a standard language.
I always use a child theme and recommend anyone to create one for their theme if the developers has not provided one for you. This is where the real control over a well written theme comes into play. I have full e-commerce sites using woocommerce, optimised using yoast and customised to work and look exactly how I want by me and my team.
I would just say try it, get a decent pre built theme (suggestion only - http://themeforest.net/item/impreza-retina-responsive-wordpress-theme/6434280) to give you some idea what Wordpress and a theme can actually do.
-
it is around 20% of the world sites are run using Wordpress (as George says), from simple blogs like you mention to some of the worlds biggest sites.
Wordpress does have its very good features some great plugins like Yoast, which helps to improve your site from an google presepective - changing meta deta, titles etc.
I do use wordpress for my sites for one reason only - I can't code and wouldn't know where to start.
If you are a competent coder and by the sounds of it you are - I would stay away from WP, for all its great benefits and there are loads, its still an out of the box solution that is trying to meet everybodys needs so is not brilliant and while you can do some wonderful themes etc in wordpress you are still working within their framework.
Starting from scratch (if you have the skills and the time) is always a much better solution. So much more can be done
-
I think the notion of WP based sites doing well in search comes from the fact that it makes posting content very easy. So you could end up with more content, and better content (ie with images and image galleries/videos) compared to hand coding everything Also because the market share of WP sites is so high (around 20% of world's sites run WP) google is probably optimised to crawl and evaluate that structure well.
But WP suffers with a few faults out of the box depending on template, for example category pages/tag pages spit out the whole posts which causes duplicate content. Some SEO plugins alleviate that problem. Also another problem i've heard is of stale content, where an old post becomes more and more buried and many levels deep further from the homepage. This only applies if you are planning to use WP in its blog format rather then use the Pages functionality.
-
In the end it is all HTML/CSS and some scripts. What search engines need in code is to be able to find what they're looking for easily: sitemaps, Title, etc
Wordpress does a lot of this automatically, but there is absolutely no reason why a clean hand-coded site wouldn't achieve all these requirements as good as a Wordpress site. Wordpress sites also need optimizations in terms of SEO, speedetc before they become top-rank.
-
Thank you I'll stick with writing my own code for now. Thanks for responding! I am really trying to understand all of this and improve my SEO. I'm good at making a lovely website... just not so good at getting it to rank.
-
Wordpress has the capability to do so much more than be a blog, its like saying a car is only for getting you from a to b whilst technically true there is more to it. If you don't like wordpress don't use it, use a format that gives you passion if you really enjoying coding etc. then do that it will come across better and the more passion you put into a site the better it normally is. Wordpress tends to have more plugins to help with SEO which is why it might seem better but isn't anything you can't get on a normal site.
TL;DR
Use a format you know inside and out and can work well with and you will get better results, Wordpress has lots of plugins that can help which is why it might look good.
Hope that helps & good luck
-
I don't think they rank better but it isn't just used for blogging. You can make decent website but if you know how to code and are happy doing it then probably stick to it.
Wordpress is easy though and you can write a custom theme.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
Wordpress migration
Hi i wonder if anyone can help. I have migrated my site to a new host, with a temp domain name i.e., http://www.test1.com The current site is still live on another host with the domain name http://www.perfecttest.com The temp site is now ready to do live. but we want to use the domain perfecttest.com a. What is the process to move the domain to the new host and to change the test1.com to be perfecttest.com. I kneo that we need to change the domain perfecttest.com nameserver to point to the new host but i am sure there must be more that need to be done inorder to not have issues. Your help will be grateful T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
About how google works
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I want to ask a basic question. If I search for Larry Page lets say.
I think google look for it's index for word larry and page distinct.
And mix it up. But the question ;
Can google show a result which only Larry exist on the page but any of the synonym or the stem of the Page not exist .
If it can happen how this page can be showned in larry page query. Thank you.0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
Rel="canonical" of .html/ to .html
Hi, could you guys confirm me that the following scenario is completely senseless? I just got the instruction from an external consultant (with quiet good SEO knowledge) to use a rel="canonical" for the following urls. http://www.example.com/petra.html/
Technical SEO | | petrakraft
to
http://www.example.com/petra.html I mean a folder petra/ to petra is ok - but a trailing slash after .html ??? Apart from that I would rather choose a 301 - not a rel canonical. What is your position here?0 -
Google plus
With a single Google search, you can see regular search results, along with all sorts of results that are tailored to you -- pages shared with you by your friends, Google+ posts from people you know. **Does pages shared by friends ** Does this mean pages shared by friends on Google plus ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0