WordPress and Squarespace are two of the most popular content management systems (CMS) available. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, which one really out shines the other?
The answer may or may not be surprsing but in truth neither one is really more search engine friendly than the other.
The Real Determining Factor: Programming Languages
If Googlebot can crawl it, It can be indexed and ranked. Both WordPress and Squarespace use programming languages that Google can crawl and rank (HTML, AJAX). So, simply put, Google has no problem “seeing” content on WordPress and Squarespace frameworks.
Squarespace Will SEO Itself…Mostly.
So where is the difference then? SEO implementation user experience. Search engine optimizing a squarespace site is not as straightforward as it should be and part of the reason is that squarespace automatically applies some of the SEO just from content being added to it. In Squarespace, the title picked for each page becomes the H1 tag. Other types of content are a bit tricky to optimize on the platform. For example, adding alt tags to images requires adding captions and then hiding them so that visitor experience isn’t poor (a picture with a bunch of keywords written below it may be confusing to some visitors).
If you know next to nothing about SEO and don’t want to teach yourself SEO, Squarespace’s on-page defaults, crawling and indexing settings, page builder, and high-quality hosting will all make your SEO better without even trying.
WordPress SEO Is More Thorough…With The Right Plugin
A lot of SEO happens at the page level, and this is where WordPress shines. With Yoast SEO or All-In-One SEO editing title tag, meta description, and image alt tags in WordPress is easy to search engine optimize. but if a plugin like Yoast SEO or All-In-One-SEO isn’t installed then it’s actually impossible to completely optimize a wordpress page (meta descriptions cannot be manually added).
With the proper plugin, on-page SEO can be completed at the header tag (H1-H6) and meta description level in it’s entirety at every single page.
And The Winner Is…
At this point one could argue that Squarespace “wins” at SEO because a plugin is not required out of the box. Therefore, if someone is not familiar at all with SEO but is familiar with developing websites, it’s much easier to “get lucky” in SEO with SquareSpace.
However, the counter-argument is that with a plugin SEO’ing a WordPress site is more throrough and therefore in this respect has a higher chance of performing well in a major search engines.
In the end, neither platform will handle 100% of your SEO needs because on-site factors are just a fraction of a real SEO campaign.
Ultimately keyword research, building high quality backlinks, and creating keyword optimized content will be the deciding factor on a page ranking high in a search engine, not the framework that the page is built on.