For small business owners like me, having a website is a crucial part of showing how professional we are. Even if you have a website, are you sure that you’re using the best website builder for SEO? With all the options out there, it can be difficult to decide which to use.
I’ve heard many entrepreneurs—both online and in person—ask about how important Search Engine Optimization is for getting a business off the ground to make a profit.
Short answer: It’s absolutely critical!
Without a good SEO strategy, which includes the choice you make for your website builder, you can feel like a castaway, stranded on a desert island with nothing but an emergency flare—with a lot of luck and hope, maybe, just maybe, someone will find you.
As anyone in business knows, though, you can’t survive on luck and hope. You have to do something to increase sales. You can’t just wish yourself onto the front page of Google.
All website builders are not created equal. So, which is the best website builder for SEO? I had my suspicions—I’m a diehard WordPress fan!—but I wanted to dig a little deeper before I addressed this critical question.
Here is how Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and HubSpot COS compare to WordPress.
How These Website Builders Stack Up
The following table, created by Rebecca Gill at Web Savvy Marketing, shows how the five most popular website builders compare to one another.
| WordPress | Squarespace | Wix | Weebly | HubSpot COS | |
| Custom Domain | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SEO friendly URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Manual override for URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Content silo creation | Yes | Yes | |||
| Canonical links | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Breadcrumbs | Yes | Yes | |||
| H1 headers | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Subheader control (H2, H3) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Set focused keyword | Yes | Yes | |||
| On-page optimization scoring | Yes | Yes | |||
| Meta titles by URL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Meta descriptions by URL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| No index, no follow at URL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Image alt text | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Link anchor text | Yes | Yes | |||
| Featured image for social | Yes | Yes | |||
| Facebook Open Graph | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Twitter Open Graph | Yes | Yes | |||
| Social sharing buttons | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrated blogging | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Blog categories | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Blog tags | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Blog post commenting | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| RSS feeds | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Podcast support and embeds | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Video support and embeds | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Online stores | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Mailing lists | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Template Switching | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Custom CSS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Mobile responsive | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| XML sitemaps | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Robot.txt files | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| 301 redirects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| HTML5 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Schema and structured data | Yes | ||||
| CDN Option | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| SSL Certificates | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AMP Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
As you can see, the best website builder for SEO that checks all 39 boxes is WordPress. In close second is HubSpot COS with 37 out of the 39 criteria checked off. The other three—Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace—leave some pretty big gaps in your business’s SEO strategy. These missing criteria not only reduce the functionality of your website and how you are able to manage it but also lower your chances of ranking on search engines.
Does Your Business Need the Best Website Builder for SEO?
Let’s take SEO off the table for a minute. Does your site really need the SEO integrations that WordPress has to offer?
If you look at some of the sites that people build using Wix and Weebly, you can see that you don’t necessarily need all the trappings of the highest scoring website builder in order to make your business look good. But unless you run a small business that only needs an online presence that makes you look professional rather than a website that actually pulls traffic in, then these builders won’t be adequate.
While Squarespace makes up some ground in SEO functionality, if your business relies at all on online searches to bring in traffic and leads, then it will put you at a disadvantage. HubSpot, though it comes in close second, is way too expensive for what you get.
Are you interested in building a website that both looks good and brings traffic to your business? At ZenChange, we recommend WordPress, the best website builder available. Get in touch with us to learn how we can put you on the front page of search rankings.