So you’ve just launched a small business website. Congratulations! It’s a great way to create new leads and land customers. You’re not done yet, however—once a website is launched, your next step is to promote it using search engine optimization (SEO).
We’ve written this article to talk about why WordPress is the best platform for SEO.
Clio Website has been helping clients launch websites since 2007. We specialize in WordPress development and offer SEO service. Contact us to get started today or jump straight to the WordPress SEO benefits section.
Table of Contents
What Is SEO?
A definition of SEO by moz.com defines SEO as:
“… the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid … search engine results.”
It’s a great, quick definition, but what exactly does it mean for you and your business? In short, SEO is a great way to increase the digital presence and exposure of a website. It can help generate new leads for your business. It can help generate more sales, too.
We understand that SEO can feel complicated. In all honesty, SEO is a complex topic. It includes many approaches and techniques, consisting of both organic concepts (website usability, user experience, website performance, etc.) and paid advertising (like Google Ads). Using both paid and organic techniques can give you maximum website exposure and performance.
Your budget matters, and we understand that you don’t want to waste money on marketing that doesn’t work. Choosing the right strategy for a small business is important—if you want to learn more about SEO and the services that we offer, check out our Calgary SEO article.
What Is WordPress?
Back in the early 2000s, WordPress started off as a blogging platform. It’s since grown to power over 40% of all websites on the internet. WordPress is a content management system (CMS), offering various capabilities like blogging and e-commerce.
You can start a new WordPress project in two different ways. Either download and install the open-source version of WordPress from wordpress.org, or create an account on wordpress.com and purchase a hosted WordPress website.
The technology WordPress uses is both very powerful and very flexible. You can use it as a web development platform or as a simple blog. However, we’d like to offer a word of caution: Developing websites can quickly become complicated and overwhelming. You don’t have to do it alone. Hire a Calgary WordPress developer if you need support.
Why WordPress Is the Best Platform for SEO
Since 2006, Clio has been building websites and helping our clients rank on the first page of Google. Here’s the reasons why WordPress is the best platform for SEO, in our experience:
- Availability of free tools and plugins
- Creating and maintaining sitemaps is easy
- Automating labor-intensive SEO tasks
- Easy to create and update content
- Automated image compression
- Proper HTML structure out of the box
- Responsive and mobile-friendly out of the box
- Programmatic (pSEO) benefits
Availability of Free Tools and Plugins
WordPress has so many free tools and plugins that can be added to improve SEO. Plugins can supercharge your efforts, and are definitely one of the main reasons why WordPress is the best platform for SEO.
Our two favorite WordPress plugins for SEO are Rank Math and Yoast. Both offer awesome functionality such as specifying unique page titles, meta descriptions, and social cards. They also enable power sitemaps out of the box, which helps Google and other search engines understand your website structure and pages better.
We recommend Rank Math because it includes a few extra features for free, which Yoast doesn’t offer. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can purchase Rank Math using this affiliate link.
Creating and Maintaining Sitemaps Is Easy
WordPress creates sitemaps by default. It also updates them when you change your pages or add new ones. Sitemaps are a great way to help search engine bots discover and crawl your website.
SEO plugins like Rank Math offer greater functionality and perform better when maintaining sitemaps. That’s a huge advantage of WordPress because this task can be automated, meaning you won’t have to modify your sitemap as you create or remove pages from your website. These sitemaps can also easily be added to Google Search Console for additional crawling benefits.
Automating Labor-Intensive SEO Tasks
One of our favorite SEO strategies is creating JSON schemas to improve how search engines interpret your web pages. It can be labor intensive work, but it also can help websites rank and land rich snippets on Google.
SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast create schemas by default for certain pages and sections. This frees up our clients and allows them to focus on creating content—the SEO plugins take care of the rest.
On a traditional non-WordPress website, a developer would need to create schemas manually for each page or section. This eliminates the need for that work.
Easy to Create and Update Content
Another major SEO benefit that WordPress offers is streamlining the process of creating and updating content. Clients can easily create and update content on their own, without needing a developer.
Search engines love new and fresh content, and WordPress makes it easy to keep content up to date and relevant. That’s a benefit of not just WordPress, but any CMS over a traditional static website.
Automated Image Compression
Image compression is a major component of customer experience. It can impact bounce rates and hurt your SEO efforts if it isn’t done correctly. When images are slow to load, website users will quickly hit the back button.
Images that are properly tuned and compressed can help with both user retention and increased website load speed. Both factors are important for SEO. WordPress plugins like Short Pixel take the guesswork out of this task and automate image compression, ensuring that websites load quickly.
If you’d like to learn more about image compression, visit or buy Short Pixel using our affiliate link.
Proper HTML Structure out of the Box
One of the best WordPress features is that it creates HTML pages that are easily understood and crawled by search engines out of the box. This means that clients don’t have to worry whether or not their developer used sound coding practices when creating their website.
While WordPress is primarily developed using PHP, pages are rendered into HTML. This means that bots can easily crawl and understand pages, unlike some JavaScript frameworks that are used for website development.
Responsive and Mobile-Friendly out of the Box
Mobile visits account for almost 50% of all global web traffic. Given that half of all website visitors will be viewing your website on a mobile device, websites must perform well on mobile in order to rank on Google.
We’ve got good news for you, if you’re wondering how to optimize your website for mobile viewing: WordPress offers responsive and mobile-friendly out of the box. Search engines love to see this and often reward mobile-friendly pages with better rankings.
Programmatic SEO (pSEO) Benefits
Programmatic SEO is all about creating content at scale. It lets content creators use programming languages and code to create pages. Those pages can then be filled with relevant content—without creating the content manually.
Many big brands use this method to create location or service pages. For example, Zapier uses programmatic SEO to create brand integration pages, like “How to Integrate WordPress and Evernote.”
WordPress is a great platform for pSEO. Users can define and create custom post types, design and implement post templates, and fill those posts with content using Google Sheets based on a set of criteria and parameters.
It’s also possible to integrate ChatGPT and other AI tools to create high quality content at scale. Once content is created using programmatic SEO, it’s easy to import into WordPress using APIs or plugins.
WordPress SEO Drawbacks
Even though WordPress is great for SEO and marketing, it does have a few drawbacks.
The most common SEO issues include slow site speed, poor hyperlink structure, and a need for better hosting. In this section, we’ll cover these issues in more detail and tell you how you can resolve them.
WordPress Website Speed
WordPress can have a bad reputation in regard to site load speeds. Since Google announced that speed will become a ranking factor, business owners have found themselves scrambling to improve their website speeds.
At Clio, we design websites that are tuned for speed and performance. We also offer website tuning services to improve the speed of existing WordPress websites.
A few of the most common issues that can cause slow website speeds are poor quality or cheap hosting, inefficient and large images, slow themes, and inefficient plugins.
Take the time to do your research—selecting an efficient WordPress theme and a good quality hosting provider can help dramatically, and increase website speed.
Poor Hyperlink Structure
We understand that hyperlink structure isn’t easy to visualize. Let’s make this easier with a few examples.
By default, WordPress permalinks (the hyperlink shown in the address bar) look like this:
https://sitedomain.com/?p=1278
This hyperlink structure makes it hard for search engines to understand what the page is about. This is an easy fix, though—it’s easy to change this in the WordPress permalinks setting screen. Instead, you can display the page name in the address bar like this:
https://sitedomain.com/best-webpage-ever
Requires Higher Tier Hosting
Investing in a better hosting plan will increase website load time, and can also help build your website’s reputation. Ultimately, cheap hosting can hurt website SEO performance.
Though this issue isn’t unique to WordPress, WordPress specifically needs a bit more processing power than a static website. With this in mind, investing in a good hosting plan is even more important. Even with this in mind, we still feel that WordPress is the best CMS for SEO.
How Clio Can Help with Search Engine Optimization
Clio Websites is a full-service website design and marketing company in Calgary. We have vast experience in responsive website design, website maintenance, WordPress development and speed optimization, and online marketing. Clio offers free consultations and free website evaluations and we receive glowing reviews from our clients.
We are always here to give you a helping hand.
Our team is always happy to answer any questions regarding why WordPress is the best platform for SEO, so please contact us today.
Why WordPress Is the Best Platform for SEO FAQs
1. What makes WordPress the best platform for SEO?
WordPress stands out for SEO because it combines flexibility with powerful built-in features. From easy content updates to mobile responsiveness and clean HTML structure, it offers everything a small business needs to improve rankings—right out of the box.
2. Do I need SEO plugins on WordPress?
Yes! While WordPress is SEO-friendly by default, SEO plugins like Rank Math or Yoast unlock advanced features. They help manage metadata, generate sitemaps, optimize images, and even automate complex tasks like schema markup.
3. Is WordPress better for SEO than other website builders?
Absolutely. Unlike many drag-and-drop builders, WordPress gives users full control over SEO settings, page speed optimization, permalink structure, and more. It also offers access to thousands of plugins tailored for organic growth.
4. How does WordPress help with technical SEO?
WordPress helps with technical SEO by generating clean HTML, supporting mobile responsiveness, and automating sitemap creation. Many SEO tasks that would normally require a developer—like adding schema—are handled by plugins with a few clicks.
5. Can I do programmatic SEO (pSEO) on WordPress?
Yes. WordPress is an excellent platform for programmatic SEO (pSEO). You can use custom post types, templates, and tools like Google Sheets or APIs to publish content at scale—especially helpful for location pages or service listings.
6. Does WordPress have any SEO drawbacks?
Like any platform, WordPress has its limitations. Slow load speeds, poor hosting, or default permalink settings can impact SEO. The good news? These issues are easy to fix with proper setup, quality hosting, and smart plugin use.
7. How can Clio help with WordPress SEO?
Clio specializes in WordPress development and SEO strategy. From launching a fast, mobile-friendly site to optimizing content and performance, we help small businesses grow their online visibility. Contact us today for a free consultation.
