Which is the Best Website Platform for SEO?

I get this question from new students a lot. They want to know which website platform is best for SEO, so they know if they need to change their website platform before starting SEO.

Years ago, it mattered which website platform you were on because some were much better for SEO than others. Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore. Today, most of our standard website platforms, like Wordpress, Squarespace, ShowIt, Kajabi, Wix, and others are all pretty good when it comes to doing SEO for sites built on them.

Some platforms are technically better than others for SEO, but there aren’t any that will truly hurt your chances of ranking.

What does your website platform need to be SEO friendly?

The most important things for your website from an SEO standpoint are pretty simple and are things that all of the main platforms offer.

You need to be able to create content and upload images to your website. You want to be able to add ALT text and give your images unique names.

You’ll want to make sure you can add header tags to your content and create title tags and meta descriptions that are unique for each page.

You’ll want to choose a template that is responsive (this means that it looks good on all different-sized screens from phone to tablet to desktop). Most website templates today are what’s referred to as responsive design. Choose one that is responsive to make sure your site is SEO friendly.

What all websites need to be technically SEO-friendly

All websites need to be technically sound before doing SEO on them for the best results. What exactly does that mean? It’s pretty simple. In order for the search engines to read the content on your website and understand it, you need to make sure it’s working well.

You’ll want to make sure Google and other bots can easily crawl and index your website. You can look in your Google Search Console account to find out if there are any indexation issues on your site. Sometimes Google will crawl pages but not index them. You want to be aware of that because if your content isn’t in the search index, it can’t get traffic or be found by AI search to be shown in results there either.

Then, you’ll want to see how fast your website loads because this is important to Google and other search engines. You can use a tool like Google Page Speed Insights or Pingdom to check your site speed. Run a scan and see how your site is doing. If there are issues slowing your site down, you’ll want to address them or hire someone to help you address them if you’re not sure how to fix what’s not working. Most times we find that the thing slowing sites down the most is the size of the image files. If you use an image minification tool, you can reduce the size of your image files while retaining the quality of the image, which will speed up your site load time and can improve your SEO performance.

What matters to your SEO success? 

Since your website can likely be optimized no matter which platform you’re on, you may be wondering what matters to SEO success. Let’s talk about that for a minute. Don’t get hung up on it. I can’t do SEO because I’m on Wix, or I should switch to Wordpress before I try to do SEO. When we start thinking this way, it’s often simply a distraction, a way of staying busy without actually making progress because we’re nervous about something. Rather than worrying about switching platforms and undertaking a big project like a site migration, focus on optimizing your current site.

Start by choosing keywords for the main pages of your website and creating SEO elements for those pages. Write a title tag and meta description for each page and use the keyword in both. Update your content and make sure you’ve used the keyword in your content. Be sure to optimize your images on the page, too, and use your keyword in the file name.

Once you’ve done SEO on your main pages, start to work on your blog posts and either optimize your existing ones or start writing new ones to help you expand your reach and grow your audience. Each new blog post or website page you create on your site is another chance for you to show up in Google and AI search engines.

Final thoughts on choosing the right website platform for SEO

Which platform you’re on is less important than what you’re doing for SEO. Don’t worry about needing to change your website platform to one that’s “better for SEO,” just get started.

If you’re ready to start doing SEO on your website and need guidance, request a copy of my beginner’s guide to SEO here, and I’ll walk you through it step-by-step. You don’t need to change your website platform to do SEO. I’ll add a caveat here: there is one platform I’ve seen that doesn’t work for SEO, and that’s the GoDaddy website builder. You can’t adjust the title tags or meta descriptions on that one, so it’s going to make it a bit harder to rank. If you’re on that, you might want to consider making a change, but otherwise, you’re probably fine right where you are. Don’t add unnecessary complexity to your decision because you think your site builder isn’t good enough for SEO.