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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Pages not indexed by Google
We recently deleted all the nofollow values on our website. (2 weeks ago) The number of pages indexed by google is the same as before? Do you have explanations for this? website : www.probikeshop.fr
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
Google Analtyics Changes?
Did anyone else's google analtyics numbers jump up this month? Our unique visitors increased some, but our pageviews tripled and our bounces dropped significantly. We have been working to optimize the sites and did have a huge drop in errors in our campaign reports.
Technical SEO | | Stevej240 -
How to rank lower, fast....
Probably the complete opposite to all the questions asked on here before hehe One of my online stores is ranking in Google at no2 for a service we used to offer but no longer do as we do not have the contract anymore.We need to derank the listing as fast as we can we do not offer this service now. Normally we could just get google to deindex the page but it's the homepage we are ranking. It is ranking due to a good collection of exact match backlinks on. Have been trying to get our page off the first page for a couple of months but it appears that we did too good a job of getting it up there...it's not moving! Anyone have a suggestion please on how we can get off page one asap for this keyword without deindexing the homepage for our store? note: the keyword in question has not appeared on the site for a couple of months, removing that has had no impact on the ranking Thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl1 -
Dismal content rankings
Hi, I realize this is a very broad question, but I am going to ask it anyways in the hopes that someone might have some insight. I have created a great deal of unique content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. You can select a video category from the top dropdown, then click on a video beside the provider box to see. The articles I've written are accessible by the View Article tab under each video. I have worked hard to make the articles informative and they are all unique with quotes from expert physicians. Even for strange health conditions that don't have a lot of competition - I don't see us appearing. Our search results are quite dismal for the amount of content we have. I guess I'm checking to see if anyone is able to point me in the right direction at all? If anything jumps out... Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0