@tjrobertson52

I've been talking with a small business owner about building a new website for them today. He sent me an email that said, why don't we build the website on Webflow instead of WordPress? His reasoning was that Webflow's code is lightweight and therefore more SEO friendly.

This is something I hear a lot and so I just thought I'd tell you what I told him. It's true. You can build a website on Webflow with much less code then on WordPress.

This is especially true if you have a lot of plugins on your WordPress website. However, the issue with this reasoning is that it assumes the code bloat from WordPress is gonna harm your SEO efforts. And as long as you have a competent developer, this is almost never the case for two reasons.

The main reasons your website are gonna load slow is because your images are too big and you have too much Javascript running before the page loads. Both of those issues are easy to address on WordPress. In fact, with a lot of modern plugins, they're easier to address on WordPress than on Webflow and the second is that page speed is almost never a factor in your ranking.

This is a very common misconception. Page speed is important for a lot of other reasons, which is why it's important to make a fast website even if you are on WordPress. But for s E.

O. It's just almost never a factor. If someone's Going to Google to search for a business like yours, Google wants to give them the best experience possible.

Does that mean showing them the fastest website online for the best business? Google has even said themselves that page speed is merely a tie breaker, rarely a factor. The only exception here is if your website is so slow that it's not loading for people at all.

That will hurt your ranking. So while there are use cases where Webflow makes more sense, for the vast majority of small businesses, WordPress is going to be the best platform. It's way faster and more reliable to build a professional high quality website.

And their plug in ecosystem makes it super easy to add any kind of functionality you want. And for SEO, plugins like Rankmath and Linkwhisper are irreplaceable. They will save you thousands of dollars in SEO cost.

There's a reason why WordPress is still the No. 1 website builder.