When it comes to having a website, choosing the right method of development, whether coding or using a CMS (content management system), can be daunting. Careful evaluation is required as there are a lot of factors to consider.
As you may know, there are plenty of CMS options such as WordPress, Magento, Webflow, Wix and many more. Each CMS has its own advantages and flaws, which can either be a pain in the ass or your golden angel.
This article talks through some of the pros and cons that you can encounter when using WordPress and how this can hinder or improve SEO implementation and performance.
Pros of WordPress for SEO
Mobile-friendliness: WordPress offers thousands of themes from which you can choose from. Most of the themes are designed with mobile users’ intent as they are responsive across multiple devices such as tablets, laptops, desktops, and smartphones. This enables users to browse through your site easily using any device (user experience).
This also helps as Google will index the mobile version of a site first because more users will use mobile search over desktop. Make your site mobile friendly and you get indexed more quickly into Seach Engine Results Pages.
User-friendly: WordPress is an easy and user-friendly CMS which anyone can use to build websites. For SEO, its benefit of user-friendliness, enables developers or SEO specialists to easily create new pages, add content and embed metadata on pages when compared to a hard-coded site.
Furthermore, any changes required such as moving a page into a category (hub or parent page) or changing a URL structure, can also be done in a few clicks. This ultimately makes it quite simple to implement any SEO related changes to help improve the sites performance for SEO.
SEO Plugins: WordPress offers thousands of plugins which makes an SEO specialists job a whole lot easier. Plugins such as Yoast SEO and Simple 301 Redirects can help implement metadata, 301 redirects, set rules in the htaccess file, add canonical links, implement SSL certificates, add tracking codes for Google Analytics and Search Console to track performance. Furthermore, the advantage of most of these plugins, is that they come in both free and paid versions.
Cons of WordPress for SEO
Hacks and Malware: Since WordPress is an open-source software in which anyone can read, use and manipulate. It tends to be vulnerable to hacks and malicious codes being added to the site. This could either be done through an expired SSL certificate which enables hackers to penetrate your site and add malicious codes.
Ultimately, these will be flagged by Google in Google Search Console (previously known as Webmaster Tools) as Malware and your site will eventually drop rankings should it not be fixed quickly. Google will not lead users/searchers to a malicious or unsecured site.
Millions of Updates: WordPress themes run on minimal code and more so on plugins. Each month a plugin or the WordPress theme may have a few updates to enable the site to perform better.
This may have a positive or negative effect, as some updates tend to overwrite any previous settings or rules. I have personally worked on a site that required a Yoast SEO update which overwrote all the pages meta descriptions once the update was complete. This was a nightmare for the client with 2000 pages with missing descriptions.
Site Speed Optimisation: Since WordPress sites run on multiple plugins which have their own JavaScript and CSS files. This can make site speed optimisation a mission. Some scripts and more importantly images can only be compressed or minified to a certain degree, leaving a lot of room for optimising your site speed to the fullest.
Although, this is all dependant on how the site was built and customised. Some themes are quite simple and site speed optimisation can be done perfectly but for some, its a pain.
In Conclusion
Well, there you have it. Even though there isn’t a lot to weigh between these pros and cons, I personally think each CMS has its own advantages and flaws. WordPress makes it simple for SEO specialists to improve site performance for search engine optimisation. Furthermore, a development team (dev team) can make use of WordPress for SEO easier, as any issues SEO specialists encounter can be manoeuvred by working together with the website developers.
Contact us for further assistance on optimising your website for SEO.
Article Author : Solomon Tshielo
