Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best SEO-friendly CMS platform?
-
I have been tasked with rebuilding a small e-commerce website using a CMS, but I'm not sure which one has the most SEO compatibility. One SEO company recommended Squarespace. Another warned me against Squarespace because of its limited SEO features and instead recommended Wordpress with the WooCommerce toolkit. I've also heard Drupal and Joomla mentioned. Are certain CMS platforms more SEO-friendly? If so, what are the best ones that can also handle e-commerce?
Thanks!
-
I'm also going to recommend WordPress. It's big, battle-tested, and relatively easy to set up and use. They also get security updates out quickly, and your site will auto-patch itself if the security update is critical enough. Non-crucial updates are also very simple to install, (click a few things in a web interface).
For the E-commerce part, WooCommerce is the big guy in the room. I'm also happy with WP e-Commerce, (disclosure: I contribute to its development sometimes), if Woo doesn't work for you. Shopify just launched WordPress integration as well, if that's more up your alley.
As for SEO: Yoast SEO will do a ton. Also, if you really like code you can make WordPress output markup in pretty much whatever way you want without sacrificing the upgradability I started with, so if you're willing to go deep enough, it's, (to me, a WP fan), the perfect CMS.
-
I'd have to 3rd the wordpress suggestion, if you had a big site with lots of pages and a involved user portal then Drupal would be the goto suggestion. But if it's a smaller site, no need to deal with the issues of a huge site if you don't need to.
Joomla isn't bad, and can be managed but unless you're a webdev you'll want access to info and scripts and by far the most popular choice is wordpress.
Just make sure you do a thorough product audit so you can reduce the overall amount of product before you put them online, this will help SEO drastically, since you'll have less pages that users would draw attention to that don't work too well.
-
I suggest WooCommerce, which is a free WordPress plugin and one of the fastest growing shopping carts. Many small business used WooCommerce for their online store. They recognized that it allows them manage site with simplicity and SEO friendly. It is difficult to say that WooCommerce is the best SEO friendly CMS platform. However, I think it is a good solution for small business because of cheap cost and effectiveness.
If you are sure about WooCommerce and WordPress, you should try WooCommerce migration tool by Litextension to convert to new site with keeping SEO URLs. Check it: http://litextension.com/woocommerce-migration-tools.html
-
By far the most SEO-friendly platform overall is going to be Wordpress.
While other platforms can be made to do what Wordpress does, almost a quarter of websites online are powered by Wordpress which gives it a huge community to draw resources and information from.
I don't mind Joomla (i'm the one guy, I know) and I have friends who prefer Drupal or other things for security reasons (the biggest always gets attacked most, right?) but Wordpress has Yoast SEO plugin and that is a huge help.
I have a few ecomm stores online and I use Woocommerce with Wordpress for most. I have a Magento store but ... shew. It's so much harder, it's so much more resource intense and it's not as good for anything unless you're a developer.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
How is Single Page Application (SPA) bad for SEO
Hi guys. I am quite inspired of SPA technique. It's really amazing when all your interaction with the site is going on the fly and you don't see any page reloads. I've started implementing the site with this instruction and already found nice guys to make the design. The only downside of the using SPA which I can see **is the **SEO part. That's because the URL does not really change and different pages don't have their unique URL addresses.
Web Design | | Billy_gym
Actually they have, but it looks like: yoursite.com/#/products yoursite.com/#/prices yoursite.com/#/contact So all of them goes after # and being just anchors. For Google this mean all of these pages is just yoursite.com/ My question is what is really proven method to implement the URL structure in Single Page Application, so all the pages indexed by Google correctly (sorry I don't mention the other search engines because of market share). The other question, of course, is examples. It will be great to see real life site examples, better authority sites, which use SPA technique and well indexed by search engines.1 -
Too Many Outbound Links on the Home Page - Bad for SEO?
Hello Again Moz community, This is my last Q of the day: I have a LOT of outbound links on the home page of www.web3.ca Some are to clients projects, most are to other pages on the website. Can reducing this to the core pages have a positive impact on SEO? Thanks, Anton
Web Design | | Web3Marketing870 -
Website Redesign SEO Checklist
I am looking for a comprehensive Website Redesign SEO Checklist. One of my customers is changing its website design (including URL structure) and I need all kinds of suggestions for a smooth SEO operation. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | stradiji0 -
Best Webhosting Suggestions??
Good morning my fellow Mozzers! I am currently looking at adding some diversity to my current web hosting and I was hoping I could get some suggestions. I dont currently need a VPS or Dedicated Server, I just need some shared hosting, you know, packeges that are sub $20 a month...i mean i will pay more than that, but so far everything i look at that meets my needs(basic hosting, email, ect...). This is for client sites and they are growing in number somewhat rapidly. I currently host with GoDaddy and they are amazing in the support department, but I do question whether their servers are causing slow page loads ect...but all in all I am happy with them. I have used Netword Solutions in the past, but left them because i was not a big fan of talking to support people in india and malasia. I do think that their servers might have performed better than GoDaddy so i am not ruling them out at this point i am looking for a provider that has excellent support and who has servers that are not so overloaded the can render pages and content slowly. Performance is very important to me. I am not looking for the cheapest, I am looking for the overall best. Thanks in advance SEOmoz family!!!
Web Design | | WebbyNabler0 -
Best method to stop crawler access to extra Nav Menu
Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text. We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages. You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu. Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else. I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this? I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else. Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all. Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider. What would you do and why? Thanks, James
Web Design | | DWJames0 -
Should I Remove URL extentions for SEO?
We are having a developer design our website with Magento. I noticed the main pages such as About Us have no file extention in the URL. But the product pages have a .html file extention. I was once told to remove the file extentions. Are there benefits to removing the .html file extension and if so, is there a way we can do this using Magento?
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
Best Wordpress Hosting
I've had a horrible experience with the security on wordpress hosting with GoDaddy. Someone recommended Blue Host as my next option. Does anyone have any experience with BlueHost and what other hosting companies would you recommend for wordpress hosting?
Web Design | | ChristineCadena0