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WordPress vs Squarespace: Which Is Better for SEO?

Are you looking to optimize your website?

Businesses benefit a lot from having an established business website. This is because it helps them sell their services and products in a convenient platform that conforms to today’s norm. When you’re about to create a website, you have to choose between WordPress vs Squarespace.

This is because they’re the two best platforms used for creating websites today. They both have great functionality and features for you to enjoy. However, one factor is most important when it comes to website creation, and that’s SEO.

SEO allows you to make your website more visible on the Internet. With over 1.5 billion active websites today, you’ll need all the help you can get to stand out. Read on to learn which platform is better for SEO today.

Benefits of Squarespace For SEO

First, let’s take a look at Squarespace. This platform launched a year after WordPress did in 2004. However, it’s only seen popularity recently through the help of effective marketing on popular social platforms.

Here are some of the reasons why it’s also gaining popularity nowadays.

Simple Interface

What attracts most people to Squarespace in the first place is the interface. It’s easy enough to understand that even people without much knowledge about SEO can optimize their websites using the platform.

This makes it so that you can optimize your website without much trouble. You’ll find configuration boxes that will help you in this aspect. These allow you to input the titles of each of your web pages.

This is important for SEO since it’s what bots use to gather keywords from your website. It’s vital for ranking your website higher on the search engine results page.  

Automated Social Media Integration

The main benefit of Squarespace SEO is that it has automatic social media integration. This is a big advantage because of how integral social media is to SEO. A large part of its importance is because there are 3.8 billion people in the world who use social media.

Integrating social platforms into your SEO strategy makes it so you expose your website to the users. With that many people using social media, this means that you can get more people to notice your brand.

Doing this also helps your website rank higher on search engines. This is because a good social media presence means you get a lot of engagements. From reactions, comments, to shares, each engagement is a sign of activity, which plays a vital role in ranking your website.

Better Mobile Optimization

Another great thing about Squarespace is that it automatically optimizes your website for mobile devices. Doing this is important since 81% of Americans now own a smartphone. They’re likely to go online using these devices, too.

SEO bots always prioritize mobile-compatible websites because of this. With the platform’s automatic responsive web design, your website will get set for common mobile resolutions.

Squarespace also gets regular updates, too. This means that your website will also get set for the latest resolutions in the future. It’s a great way to future-proof your website for the latest developments along the line.

Better SSL Encryption

What’s great about Squarespace is that all packages included in the plans provide SSL encryption. This is essential for SEO since it means that your website is safe and secure. This is good for your SEO since unsecured websites aren’t as highly rated by engines.

You get an SSL certificate upon signing up to Squarespace. You’ll be able to tell by the lock icon by your URL. Customers will also be able to see this when visiting your website.

This also helps your SEO indirectly by comforting your customers. When a visitor sees that your website isn’t secure, they’ll likely leave at once. Leaving immediately raises your bounce rate, which is a big factor in lowering your SEO score.

Drawbacks of Squarespace For SEO

Of course, there are also drawbacks to using Squarespace. While it’s a great websites building platform, the SEO side of things suffers a bit. Here’s why going for Squarespace causes your SEO to take a hit.

No Customizability

The biggest downside of Squarespace is that it has almost no customizability. This means that what the website offers you is the best you’ll get. While this doesn’t sound as bad, it can mean that your website will miss out on a lot of nice features.

Among these features are the newest trends in SEO. Despite their ingenuity in integrating SEO into the platform, Squarespace’s SEO methods are basic. This means that it’s likely to go outdated in time when you create a website with it.

It also means that any new update in the search engine algorithm will impact your current SEO standing. As mentioned above, you’ll get updates on the regular. However, the updates will be slow and can get deployed well after the algorithm updates roll in.

Difficulty In Adding Rich Snippets

Snippets are the descriptions that you see below the URL when someone does a search on Google or Bing. They give more information about the webpage and show the exact URL of the page. These help inform the potential visitor and entice them to visit the website.

A rich snippet adds more elements to a search result. It allows you to add an image, the rating of the page, and more info relevant to the search. This is even more engaging, and it can drive even more traffic to the website.

Adding rich snippets to Squarespace is difficult. It requires a workaround that basic users are sure to not understand. You’ll need to dive deep into your website’s data to inject a code that allows you to add rich snippets to your site.

Platform Doesn’t Use Breadcrumbs

The absence of breadcrumbs affects the navigation of a visitor on a website. Breadcrumbs are what websites call their in-site navigation system. This helps the user find out where they are, how they got there, and where to go next on your website.

These are great ways to enhance your visitor’s experience while on your site. This allows them to find what they want to find while letting them know where they’ve been through. Doing this results in less activity on your website, which most people don’t realize is a good thing for SEO.

Above, we mentioned something about your website’s bounce rate. This refers to how fast a user leaves upon arriving on a specific webpage. The bots interpret this as a user getting tricked into visiting a page.

The higher the bounce rate, the lower your score goes. With a breadcrumb system in place, there’s little chance that visitors leave a webpage. This is because they’ll find the right page immediately, lowering the risk of increasing your bounce rates.

Benefits of WordPress For SEO

WordPress is the most popular content management system today. This is often the first thought of people when they think of creating a website. Because of their popularity, there are over 75 million active websites made from WordPress to date.

It’s also easy to find these websites on the Internet. This is because of how good WordPress SEO is. Here are a few reasons why WordPress is so popular.

Unparalleled Customizability

The biggest advantage that WordPress has is its customizability. WordPress is an open-source website that allows users to add tons of plugins onto the website they’re building. This means that they can add tons of useful features to customize their websites.

Among these plugins are tools used for SEO. Plugins such as YoastSEO helps with the SEO efforts of a website. They increase the organic searchability of any website with this plugin installed. It also updates itself quite regularly, and it’s faster than Squarespace updates, too.

Great Alt Image Tagging

Images are also a big part of SEO. Search engine bots ensure that websites use images that are easy to load. They do this so that any visitor doesn’t have a bad experience when they visit the website.

Much like websites and content, keywords are also attached to SEO-optimized images. With the help of WordPress, you’ll be able to tag the right keywords to your images. This makes them much easier for search engine bots to detect.

More Options For Headings

On a website, headings allow you to place the appropriate titles and names for each of your webpages. This is a great way for you to help engines show the right page to any user searching for a keyword that you’re using. What’s great about WordPress is that it allows you to use up to the H6 format.

This means that you can customize a lot of headers for different purposes. It means that you can cover a wide array of topics under a single webpage. Combined with how easy it is to make a meta description and tags on WordPress, you’re sure to drive lots of traffic to any webpage.

Backlinking Is Much Easier

Another feature that WordPress brings is customizable permalinks. This means that you’re able to have a custom-made URL instead of a lengthy, ugly one. It makes it so your links are more fitting for your webpage.

Doing this also makes it more attractive to other websites. Linking to different websites is another way for you to increase a website’s SEO score. With an attractive URL, there’s a bigger chance that other websites use yours.

Drawbacks of WordPress For SEO

Despite its benefits and advantages, WordPress also has some shortcomings. Here’s a list of the things that can compromise your SEO with WordPress websites.

Poor Website Security

One of the biggest drawbacks of WordPress is that it doesn’t have the best security measures. Being an open-source website means that it’s easy for others to access your data.

This can impact your total SEO score since bots lower the ranking of unsecured websites. What’s great is that there are tons of plugins that can cover the lack of security measures on the platform.

However, these plugins are often large in size. This means that your website will suffer from another one of the SEO-compromising problems that WordPress faces.

Slow Page Loading Speeds

Another major problem that WordPress has is slow page loading times. This is the biggest obstacle that you can encounter if you’re using WordPress to build a website. This is because people tend to leave a website if it takes too long to load up.

Most people leave if a website doesn’t load up in 3 seconds. As mentioned above, it can raise the bounce rate of your website. What’s different in this case is that even bots will lower your score when they check the loading times of a website.

A great way to reduce the page loading time of your webpages is by reducing the number of plugins you’re using. This reduces the processes that the website loads up before loading itself.

More Meticulous SEO Efforts

The biggest difference between Squarespace and WordPress is the effort needed to improve your SEO. With WordPress, you’ll need to do a lot of the work by yourself. While there are tons of plugins to help you, but it doesn’t cover 100% of your SEO needs.

You’ll need to pour a lot of your time to maintain your website’s SEO. You can also hire SEO professionals to maintain your website for you. This means extra expenses, but it’s something you need to do to improve your website.

Choose Between WordPress vs Squarespace For SEO

Creating a website won’t be enough to help your business shine. You’ll need the help of SEO to help you generate traffic, make your website more attractive, and appeal to your customers. Choose between WordPress vs Squarespace and optimize your website today!

Are you looking for a great service to help you market your website? SEO can get you there, but you’ll need great digital marketing services to take you all the way. Contact us here and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as we can!

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Antonio Calabrese GHAX

Hey, I’m Antonio Calabrese, Founder at GHAX. We love working with businesses who are serious about growth.

If that’s you, get in touch and be 1 of 20 this month to claim a free marketing strategy session.

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