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
-
Subdomain Ranking Question
Hi All - Quick question that I think I know the answer to, but I feel like I've been going around in circles a bit. My client is launching a new product and wants us to build a microsite for it (product.clientname.com). My client really dislikes their brand website, and wants to use paid media to push their audience to this new microsite. However, they also said want it to rank well organically. I feel uneasy about this, because of the subdomain vs. subfolder argument. I believe that the product will also be listed/featured on their main brand website. What is the best way forward? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AinsleyAgency0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Google Places Question......
Hi Guys. I am working with a photographer they do not have a studio they shoot on location. However I noticed many photographers within their industry have their home address listed in their google places, and they too shoot on location. My client doesn't want their home address listed so I wondered what options there would be? Do you think renting mail forwarding address would suffice?
Technical SEO | | RankStealer0 -
Does Google Read Javascript?
I would like to include a list of links in a select type box which I would like google to follow. In order to do this, I will be styling it with the help of javascript, and in turn change the select box into a ul and the options into li's. The li's would each contain a link, but if javascript is disabled it will fallback to a normal css styled select box. My question is would google follow the links made by the javascript? Or would the bot just recognize the select box as a select box and not links. Thanks for any help!
Technical SEO | | BrianJenkins0 -
Is this a google dance?
My website keeps moving up and down in ranking but stays within page 2 to 3. Everyday its at a new position.
Technical SEO | | ragivan0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10
