Once upon a time WordPress was regarded as a blogging platform and nothing else. Now, as we all know, times have changed, and it is now used for websites of all types – with some of the biggest brands in the world making use of it for their entire site.
Today’s article isn’t going to focus on the easy-to-use nature of WordPress, or how simple it is to customize through plugins and even development. Instead, today’s topic is going to be about SEO, and why an SEO company is likely to recommend that businesses use the platform. Let’s delve into the reasons.
URL management is a breeze
If we were to wind the clock back a few years, it would be fair to say that the process of creating SEO-friendly URLs was anything-but easy.
This was something that tended to involve changing your .htaccess file (depending on what type of server your website was hosted on), and this was enough to put a lot people off.
Granted, Google has got better at dissecting complex URLs, but in terms of best practice it’s always recommended to strip parameters out of them.
This is where WordPress comes into its own. Almost out of the box, it’s possible to set your URLs to any format you prefer. Ultimately, this can mean that search engines will tackle them like a breeze.
Site speed can be managed
As we all know, there’s more and more correlation between site speed and higher search engine rankings.
On most platforms, this is something that a developer has to combat. After all, it can involve code changes and all sorts of other alterations that the average business owner just isn’t able to do.
On WordPress, the use of plugins can help your site’s speed immensely. It might be a plugin to compress images across your site, or one to condense your CSS and JavaScript files. Regardless, they do help, and this should help your rankings.
The mobile-friendly factor
Little else needs to be said on this next point. From a basic UX perspective, mobile-first is now the way forward and this unsurprisingly translates to Google. In fact, if your page isn’t mobile friendly, there’s every chance that it will be downgraded in the search results.
With most WordPress themes being completely responsive, this is another issue that is instantly resolved.
The power of images
We’ve already touched upon image compression, but let’s not also forget that image search is a key component of SEO nowadays. More and more people are relying on visuals to aid their buying choices, and for websites this presents a fantastic opportunity.
Of course, optimizing for images can be time intensive. Image names and Alt text are just the tip of the iceberg, but WordPress’ interface allows these to be modified as quick as can be. It means that your site should be optimized for images as soon as it goes live – and this is something that would be far from guaranteed if you built your site from scratch.