If you're planning a new website or thinking about moving your existing one, there's a question that tends to come up pretty quickly:
What's the best website platform for SEO?
WordPress? Shopify? Something custom?
The answer isn't as exciting as declaring one platform the winner, but it's a lot more useful.
There isn't one.
Different platforms suit different businesses, and choosing the right one depends on what you're selling, what your website needs to do and how you plan to grow it.
Because when it comes to SEO, the platform matters. But what you do with it matters a lot more.
Does your website platform affect SEO?
Yes.
Your platform can affect things like website speed, how easily pages can be edited, URL structure, redirects, technical SEO and how much control you have over things like metadata and structured data.
So it's definitely something worth thinking about.
But simply building a website on WordPress doesn't give you good SEO. And using Shopify doesn't automatically put you at a disadvantage.
We've seen enough websites to know that the platform name tells you very little about how well the finished site will perform.
It's how the website is built, structured, optimised and maintained that makes the difference.
Is WordPress good for SEO?
WordPress usually comes up pretty quickly in conversations about the best website platform for SEO.
And there's a reason for that.
It's flexible, gives you plenty of control and makes it relatively straightforward to manage pages, content, URLs and other important SEO elements.
There are also plugins such as Yoast and Rank Math that can make managing some SEO tasks easier.
But there's a misconception here too.
Installing an SEO plugin doesn't mean you've done SEO.
We've seen WordPress websites with every light showing green that still struggle to rank.
WordPress can also become bloated if it's poorly built or overloaded with plugins. That can affect speed, usability and the general health of the website.
So, is WordPress SEO-friendly?
Absolutely.
But it still needs to be built properly.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
If you're running an ecommerce business, Shopify is probably somewhere on your list.
Shopify SEO has improved considerably over the years, and for many ecommerce businesses it gives you most of what you need to build a strong organic search presence.
You can optimise product and collection pages, edit important metadata, create content and handle plenty of the SEO basics without too much hassle.
There are some limitations compared with more flexible platforms. Shopify controls certain parts of the URL structure, for example, and more complex technical requirements can sometimes need workarounds.
Does that mean you shouldn't use Shopify?
No.
If Shopify is the right ecommerce platform for your business, we wouldn't recommend choosing something else purely because somebody told you WordPress is "better for SEO".
A well-built, properly optimised Shopify store can perform brilliantly in search.
What do we use at Surge?
This is probably a good point to mention that we don't just build everything on WordPress.
For a lot of the websites we build at Surge, we'll use Statamic. For ecommerce projects, we'll often work with AeroCommerce.
Why?
Because we're choosing the platform around what the website actually needs to do.
Statamic gives us a lot of flexibility when we're building bespoke websites, without having to rely on a huge stack of plugins to make everything work. From an SEO point of view, that gives us plenty of control over how the website is structured, how pages are built and the technical setup behind them.
For ecommerce websites, AeroCommerce gives us the flexibility to build stores around more specific requirements where an off-the-shelf setup might start becoming restrictive.
But we wouldn't tell every business they need Statamic or AeroCommerce just because they're platforms we use.
That's the whole point.
The conversation should start with what the business and website need, then we work out which platform makes the most sense.
What about Wix and Squarespace?
Wix and Squarespace used to get a pretty rough ride whenever SEO came up.
Some of that criticism was deserved at the time, but both platforms have moved on.
For smaller businesses with relatively straightforward websites, they can provide enough control to handle many of the fundamentals of SEO.
The question is what happens as the business and website become more complicated.
If you need greater control over technical SEO, large amounts of content, custom functionality or more complex integrations, you may eventually start running into limitations.
That doesn't make either platform bad.
It just means we'd think about where the website needs to be in a few years, not only what you need today.
What about a custom website?
Sometimes an off-the-shelf platform isn't the best answer.
A custom-built website can give you far more control over performance, structure, functionality and how different systems work together.
From an SEO perspective, that can be brilliant.
It can also be terrible.
Give a development team no SEO input and it's perfectly possible to build a beautiful, incredibly fast website that search engines struggle to understand.
This is why we'd rather have SEO involved during a website project than brought in two weeks after launch to work out what went wrong.
The platform and SEO strategy need to work together.
So, what should you actually look for?
Rather than asking whether Google prefers WordPress or Shopify, we'd ask a few different questions.
Can you easily create and update the pages you need? Do you have control over URLs, metadata and redirects? Can the website perform well on mobile? Is it fast? Can search engines crawl and understand it properly? And can the platform handle what you're likely to need as the business grows?
Those questions tell you far more than the logo on the CMS login screen.
The best website platform for SEO is the one that gives your business the flexibility and technical setup it needs without creating unnecessary problems.
Don't forget about the people using it
This gets lost surprisingly often.
A website can tick every technical SEO box and still be a nightmare for customers.
If somebody lands on your site and can't work out what you do, find the product they need or figure out how to get in touch, better rankings aren't going to solve much.
SEO and web design need to work together.
You want a website search engines can understand, but you're ultimately building it for the people you want to turn into customers.
Get one side right and ignore the other, and you're making life harder than it needs to be.
Already ranking? Be careful before changing platforms
This is the bit we'd pay particular attention to if you're considering a website redesign or migration.
Moving platforms can affect your existing SEO.
URLs might change. Pages might disappear. Internal links can break. Redirects can be missed. Content that currently ranks might get rewritten or removed without anybody realising what it's bringing in.
Then the shiny new website launches and the organic traffic drops.
Not ideal.
That doesn't mean you should avoid changing platforms. Sometimes moving is absolutely the right decision.
It means SEO needs to be part of the migration plan from the start, rather than something you think about once the new website is live.
So, which website platform is best for SEO?
There's no single winner.
WordPress gives you plenty of flexibility. Shopify can be a strong option for ecommerce. Wix and Squarespace can work perfectly well for simpler websites. At Surge, we regularly use Statamic for bespoke websites and AeroCommerce for ecommerce projects.
The important bit isn't choosing the platform somebody on the internet has decided is "best for SEO".
It's choosing the one that makes sense for what your business needs now and where it's going next.
Then you need to make sure the website is built properly, technically sound and backed by an SEO strategy that helps the right people find it.
And if you're considering a new website or moving away from your current platform, get SEO involved before anything starts moving.
It's much easier to protect what's already working than try to recover it afterwards.
