Ah Wordpress, the CMS we've all come to know and love, powering millions of websites across the globe, this open source platform really does pack a punch when paired with the right plugins and tools.
As its popularity has grown, so has the audience of skeptics and naysayers. In fact, you won't have to look very hard to find tons of posts and forum threads all about the SEO nightmare's that Wordpress developers have faced over the years.
However, we think that actually, although the platform has its fair share of issues, in terms of SEO, it's actually pretty simple to optimise and tend to. Here are a few of our common favourite SEO related Wordpress myths.
1- Wordpress isn't great when it comes to SEO
Starting strong right out the gate with this one. We are sick of hearing people complain about poor SEO performance of the platform when they simply don't follow proper setup and optimisation steps. The Wordpress platform is actually SEO friendly out of the box with logical elements that encourage good SEO practice such as logical page slugs, places to enter key words and other meta information and much more.
As with anything, if the content on the site is poorly optimised or the site structure is very complicated, this will result in poor SEO performance. However, when planned correctly and with proper thought given to content and user journeys, we can create something that actually provides a positive experience and thus is more likely to be ranked well by Google.
2- Just install an SEO plugin, it will manage your SEO without you being involved!
As much as we would love for this one to be true (after all it would make our SEO teams’ life much easier!) it is simply not the case. We always recommend using an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, arguably one of the most popular plugins offered for Wordpress, to assist you in creating good meta information and content. The problem arises when clients tend to open them up once, configure content for pages then kind of forget about it.
It should be a part of your regular website maintenance to check over all content and new pages or posts to ensure that meta information and content is optimised for the keywords you are trying to rank for and to keep content up to date and as relevant as possible, so make sure your auditing your pages!
3- You don’t need to worry about Social Metadata
Although it might not be a priority for you, the fact cannot be ignored that Social Media channels are a key element in building an audience for your content. One of the key traffic sources for most blog and eCommerce sites are Social Media platforms which help boost page rankings and can help get your site pages crawled and indexed faster.
It is fairly simple to enable Social Media sharing data by using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to enable Open Graph meta data. You will be able to separately populate these fields or instruct Yoast to automatically populate these with the same meta information already set for the post or page to make life simple.
4- Wordpress is not responsive / mobile friendly
A site’s usability on smaller device screen is paramount in the mobile, content driven world we live in. Over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices in 2024! Wordpress is no stranger to this statistic and has a wide range of fully mobile optimised, responsive themes in its marketplace to add to your site. Not sure if your current theme is mobile friendly? The easiest thing to do is load it up on your own mobile device! Do you notice any issues with content, layout or sizing? Then you may need to update or change to a more responsive theme, there are even a ton of free templates for you to try out!
Wrapping up
So to stick a nice red bow onto this thing, Wordpress is just as capable if not MORE capable than most other platforms on the market when it comes to delivering a positive user experience, making it an ideal candidate for Google to consider in its ranking. It just comes down to making a few well informed choices in terms of the structure and content on your site and keeping an eye on your SEO recommendations from your favourite plugins.
As ever, if you want to dig a little deeper into your site performance for SEO, why not reach out to us to see how we can help you!