WordPress powers just over forty-percent of all sites on the internet and over sixty-percent of all websites running on a CMS (Content Management System). While the platform has had its fair share of critics, there’s no doubting the popularity.
One of the harshest criticisms aimed at WordPress is the perceived lack of security options. That’s usually from people who installed WordPress and left “Admin” as a user-name. That’s asking for trouble.
WordPress can be as secure as you want to make it. Update all your themes and plugins, install a decent Firewall plugin, and you’re good to go. Keep in mind here for 99.9% of websites online, we’re looking to keep opportunistic hackers out. If a foreign power decides they want to hack your site, then what your website is built on is pretty much irrelevant.
One other criticism levied at WordPress is the poor SEO structure of the platform. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The default out-of-the-box settings might not be fantastic for SEO, but again, anyone leaving the default settings on is asking for trouble.
First off, start with the permalink structure. The default permalink setting looks something like this:
https://www.mywebsite.com/?p=123
Not the most SEO-friendly permalink I’ve ever seen in my life but luckily, a doddle to fix.
Choose the “Post Name” option, and your permalink automatically becomes:
https://mywebsite.com/post-name
Much more SEO-friendly and sets up quickly for a Silo site structure that Google will love. Basically, a silo site structure makes it really simple to spider an entire website and employs a hierarchical structure.
Take a website about golf, for example.
A silo site structure might looks something like:
golf==> golf clubs ==> titleist golf clubs ==> titleist drivers ==> titleist hybrids
Once Google spiders the top page “golf,” they can drill down to all the other pages on your website.
WordPress makes an easy job of setting that up with the “parent page” option when adding new pages, so in the golf example, your permalink structure would look something like:
https://www.mywebsite.com/golf/golf-clubs/titleist-golf-clubs/
That gives Google a way to spider your website and understand exactly what it’s about at the same time.
WordPress has some other tricks up its sleeve when it comes to SEO. Add in an SEO plugin such as Yoast (the gold standard for SEO plugins), and not only will you be able to see things like keyword density in your posts and pages, but you’ll get actionable insights on what needs to be tweaked as well.
Making it easy for Google to understand what your website is about is a critical component of any SEO strategy. WordPress and Yoast make that a little bit easier with XML sitemaps. An XML sitemap is made for search engines and makes the job of spidering your website about thirty-five times easier. So important are they, in fact, that the Google Search Console has a dedicated function to submit them.
One other important element of WordPress and SEO is the tag feature used in conjunction with internal site linking. Tag your posts and use an internal linking plugin to automatically link to related posts in the same silo, and you’ve built a site with some serious internal link juice flowing around – link juice, by the way, that Google will love.
Page load speed is critical to SEO success, and that, admittedly, is one area where WordPress needs a bit of a helping hand. WordPress uses PHP, which comes with inherent speed issues, speed issues that can be fixed, however.
First and foremost, don’t expect a site hosted on $1.95 a month shared hosting to be fast! That’s not going to happen. Put your WordPress site on a decent host, and with some simple tweaks, you’ll have a super-fast website.
Once you’ve got your hosting sorted, install a caching plugin. Caching makes a copy of a page on your site on the first load and then displays a cached version for subsequent visits. Caching can speed up your website by anything from 2x to 5x faster.
Optimizing your images is the next step. Your 12Mb hero image might look impressive, but nobody will really notice the difference between the original and a 100Kb compressed version. Big images kill website speed, so always optimize your images.
Keep your plugins and themes up-to-date, delete any plugins you’re not using, and don’t go overboard on fonts, and you’ll have a fast-loading website.
Don’t be put off WordPress by the doom and gloom brigade. We’ve used WordPress in hundreds of projects, so if there were any SEO downside, we would be the first to switch to something else.
Need some advice on your next WordPress SEO project? Drop us a line, and let’s work on it together!
