Does Wordpress have better SEO than Squarespace?

If you're weighing up what website platform is better for your business, you've likely asked the question: which is better for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – Wordpress or Squarespace?

It's a good question.

And on the surface, it might appear that Wordpress does tend to take the lead with SEO, particularly due to the Yoast Plugin, which is especially useful for bloggers.

But, if we look a little deeper, particularly at what Google prioritises when in comes to search rankings, there are a few factors that Squarespace does significantly better than Wordpress. Which could, in fact, make Squarespace the preferable platform over Wordpress when it comes to SEO.

Let's take a look.

01 // Security

Google loves a secure website, so which website platform is more secure?

Wordpress is an open-source platform, which relies on plugins. The security downfall here is that literally anyone can create a plugin and there's not really any quality check done on those plugins, leading to all sorts of security and technical issues after installation. Being an open-source platform also means you are responsible for managing all your website security updates yourself.

On the other hand, Squarespace is a closed-sourced platform which means anything added to your website has been thoroughly tested and quality checked by the Squarespace team first. It also means they manage all security updates for you. Plus they offer free, automatic SSL (if your website doesn’t have SSL, you will be penalised by Google). Ultimately, all these things equal a more secure website.

02 // Mobile Responsiveness

This is another thing Google prioritises and if your website is not mobile responsive, it may be penalised.

Squarespace websites are mobile responsive by default.

With Wordpress, your site may or may not be mobile responsive – it depends on the theme you are using. To ensure your Wordpress site is mobile responsive, you'll either need to: (1.) install a page builder plugin (refer to point 1 about plugin security vulnerabilities) and then build a mobile view or (2.) write a ton of code (eek) – neither options are ideal.

03 // Page Optimisation

Sure, Wordpress does have the Yoast plugin but Squarespace does pretty well at giving you all the tools you need to optimise a page for search.

All Squarespace sites are built for clean indexing by Search Engines, and you can optimise your pages by using the correct heading structures, adding in SEO page title, SEO descriptions, and image alt text quickly and easily from the page and image settings screens.

04 // Written content

In the end, it’s the written content on your website that is going to have the biggest impact on your SEO rankings. Your content needs to be up to date, interesting, written well and speak directly to what your visitors' want and need.

If you've ever used Wordpress you’ll know that, when it comes to making what should be simple updates to content on a page, it’s actually not always that simple. And when pages are hard to update… we tend not to update them, right? Which leads to an out of date website (= not great for SEO).

Squarespace however, is super easy to use and makes updating content and adding new content (including blog articles), swift, efficient and streamline. Which therefore, you could argue, also makes it a better platform for SEO.

If you’re still weighing up between Squarespace or Wordpress, you might like to read this article here where I compare the two platforms in more detail.

** Thanks to Rach from Squarestylist and this Squarespace expert discussion which helped me formulate the content for this post.