Business Catalyst better than WordPress for SEO?

[Glen1308]

Hi BC community. We're and Auckland based web design co. We've been developing with WordPress for 5 years then started using Business Catalyst. We still use both. An interesting case study. We recently migrated a few websites from WordPress to BC, same design, content and SEO structure. We noticed the rankings of these sites improved. In other words, same sites, same content, same SEO, same design. Different platform and the SEO jumped +20%. I wonder if it's because BC, being a SAAS solution, loads quicker. What are your experiences using BC for SEO? Good?

[Lynda-S]

Interesting!

Overall I am one to say that the platform you build a site on has little impact on SEO. It is the site, how it is coded, content, etc. that matter more but to see a 20% jump is huge. Did you measure page speed before and after to see if there is a big difference?

Overall with BC I have had decent SEO but I also try to use best practices when building a site for SEO.

[Glen1308]

Hi Lynda,

We used to use Google site speed tool but that's been discontinued (for now). Yeah, site download is now a critical ranking factor. Google ultimately wants to rank websites that allow users to get quick answers to their search queries. We found WP tends to load slower with all it's plugins. You are correct; there's a lot more to SEO than just the platform . Seems most developers focus on platform and links these days. Good to see Google is onto the ploy.

[Lynda-S]

It's funny, I have actually had people tell me WP is better for SEO than any other platform. Obviously that is a myth and it would seem your results prove that point. =>

Ultimately what people need to learn is SEO is really building a good quality site (IE: semantic code, easy to navigate, etc.) with good quality content. While that is an oversimplification I find people spend too much time worrying about platforms or other things (such as https that Google just announced).

With that said, there are cases where the platform may play a role such as what you are experiencing but I believe it is an exception in general.

[Robert_K__Bell]

We used to use Google site speed tool but that's been discontinued

You don't mean Google's PageSpeed Insights online tool, or their Chrome extension? Both of those are still live...

[Liam Dilley]

In terms of the overall scope to this question there is really just a few key points.

Every system has positives and negatives including SEO. Both Wordpress and BC have good and bad elements. The topic of SAAS over hosted, security - That is long.

The core is the person that builds the site, good developers, good design, GOOD CLIENTS! (making good content under the guidance of good marketing and SEO) are the factors that matter.

Good framework, content is king and good builds.

If these are not good then a site does not rank as well, really as simple as that.

Wordpress can show and hide content better with server side code, BC has to be done with CSS or javascript (until liquid) and You can do better social and meta with wordpress but lots of small updates at the start of the year/end of last year made BC better on that front.

Liquid will be a massive boost to SEO efforts let alone design and functionality on BC sites so that will increase BC in that sense further.

But a bad developer will not utilise any of those and do a bad job, and same to for wordpress. Bad content or content that is not updated will also cause bad ranking.

Page speed, what type of system, wether it is https or not, for me are people making excuses for ranking rather then tackling the core issues. Content, Marketing and the good foundations and structures of a site - This is your SEO and focus on that.

[Glen1308]

Great points. From a practical point of view we find clients, especially the less techy ones, find the BC CMS easy to use. This enables them to update content easily, which in turn is great for SEO.