The Website Platform Calculation: Backend UI Vs. SEO Potential
The term search engine optimization (SEO, for short) has been kicking around almost as long as websites have been broadly used by businesses and the public.
With ChatGPT recently launching a search feature to compete with Google and other big players in organic search, SEO seems to be ebbing right now when it comes to reputation and implementation.
No matter how you feel about SEO, if you have a website — even if it’s only a one-page site — I believe you need to keep SEO as a top priority. Considering visitors’ web browsing habits (including bookmarks), search engine brand loyalty, and the engines’ ubiquity in popular culture (at this point, hundreds of TV shows and movies have a character saying, “Google it,” for example), among other factors, SEO is far from dead — despite recent proclamations to that effect.
If you run a business website and believe SEO is important, you need to weigh its potential against another important factor
What’s that other factor? Your website platform’s backend user interface, or UI for short.
A recent conversation I had with a marketing agency lead for my website conversion tracking service brought these two factors top of mind for me. My lead uses WordPress for his website and for his clients’ websites. A huge selling point of WordPress is the ability to minimize the lines of code used for a page design, relative to the same design being used in a different web content management system. This is important because less page code for search engines to crawl equates to a shorter load time — which then translates into a better visitor experience.
After I told my lead that I use Squarespace, he showed me that my homepage is at least 25% longer, in lines of code, than it would be if I hosted my website on WordPress. I replied to him, “That’s interesting,” but in my head, I knew that that fact wasn’t going to nudge me to move to WordPress or any other platform where I’d have more control over the lines of code for my pages.
It wasn’t about the time and cost involved in moving to a different website management platform
Sure, I thought about that. But the biggest reason keeping me in the Squarespace ecosystem is that I just flat out love using its UI for both adding/editing pages and for making site-wide changes.
After using most of the top website management platforms since I entered the marketing space in 2006, I was introduced to Squarespace through a freelance client gig in late 2020. I could immediately tell that its backend UI was designed with non-marketers in mind — which means it’s super intuitive to use.
With that client gig continuing on and off at the point that I decided to form my company, choosing Squarespace as my own website platform was a no-brainer. I knew I wanted a platform that was going to frustrate me the least amount possible since I was going to be immersed in it day after day.
This is not an ad for Squarespace
You’ll notice that none of the mentions of Squarespace in this post are linked. I’m not an affiliate for them — but I am using them as an example of a platform that differs substantially from WordPress.
Why the comparison to WordPress? Because most marketing agencies and fractional chief marketing officers (fCMOs) I have sales calls with use it for client work — mainly because of its SEO capabilities.
WordPress considerations when looking at the UI part of the UI vs. SEO calculation
If you take SEO functionality off the table and just look at it as a platform that your marketing team will use all day, every workday, there are some serious drawbacks. These include:
Time to determine which theme to use for a page design — among thousands of themes that are available from myriad providers. By comparison, the far fewer themes available in solutions like Squarespace means that you’ll be up and running more quickly.
A sea of menu options. In my web analytics work, I actually work in client WordPress properties, which means I’ve seen how it looks and experienced what it’s like to navigate recently. It’s telling that, on Zoom calls with my agency and fCMO clients, they sometimes have trouble pointing me to the specific area where I need to update something in order to get their client’s website to communicate properly with Google Analytics 4 for conversion event tracking.
A learning curve to set up plugins and stay on top of them when they have issues. Third party plugins are a huge part of what goes into making WordPress sites work. But plugins can be removed without notice when their providers run into financial trouble. And if you use a lot of them, you’ll be stuck in an eternal game of whack a mole, where you’re constantly seeing them turn red (ie, the current version becomes outdated) and needing to devote time to update them. By comparison, Squarespace (among many other platform alternatives) doesn’t use plugins, so that’s a ton of time saved right there versus WordPress.
In conclusion
As the majority of the most experienced SEO practitioners believe, SEO is here to stay in some form. Your site visitors benefit from it in ways they both notice (ie, page load speed) and don’t notice. Therefore, SEO is important to keep in mind when considering which web content management platform is the best fit for your business.
However, an equal factor to consider is both the time and lack of frustration (or abundance of joy, in other words) that your website-management staff experiences as a result of your website platform. If your website team is constantly pulling their hair out keeping up with the latest updates within an overly complex website backend architecture, the associated costs (which could even include staff turnover) might surpass the revenue your site generates as a result of top tier SEO.
