Does The CMS Matter For Search Rankings?

Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller answers whether there’s an SEO advantage to choosing one type of content management system (CMS) over another.

This question is addressed in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot series on YouTube.

It’s common to hear that WordPress is the best CMS for SEO, which may lead a person to believe they’re at a disadvantage if they choose anything else.

However, Mueller confirms there’s no difference from one CMS to another when it comes to ranking signals. Read his complete response below.

A CMS Is Not A Ranking Factor

Google isn’t concerned with what’s going on in the back end of a website. What matters is the final result shown to visitors.

You can send the same signals to Google using WordPress, Wix, or CMS at all. Mueller states:

“As far as I know, our search systems don’t look for any particular content management system to treat it differently. For us, a CMS is just one way of creating webpages. Google systems don’t focus on how the page was created. Instead, they focus on the final result. Hand-created webpages can be just as good as those generated by WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or similar.”

Mueller continues his response, saying you can create pages that work well in search using any of the major content management systems.

It’s not as though SEO is a proprietary formula that only one CMS developer has access to.

SEO isn’t a highly guarded secret either. As Mueller says, what works in search is well documented.

If you understand SEO fundamentals, you can achieve good results regardless of your choice of CMS.

Mueller continues:

“As far as I can tell, all mainstream CMS systems can create pages that work well in search. For the most part, SEO is not magic. It’s well documented, and there are many testing tools so all providers can include SEO elements if they choose to do so. There are slight differences across systems, just like all webpages are slightly different. For the average site owner, they either all work well for search out of the box, or can easily be tuned to do so with a few settings or plugins.”

See the full video below:

Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, July 2022.