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Will the Website Platform I Choose Influence My Results in Search?

You Should Know | Jun 30, 2015

Will the Website Platform I Choose Influence My Results in Search?

Many businesses are faced with the challenge of deciding which platform upon which to build their company website. Should they develop with Wordpress, the open source giant CMS that has 10s of thousands of developers and plugins available? Should they develop upon a proprietary framework with a custom CMS, or should they find a combination of both; an open source custom framework and CMS developed and configured specifically to their business needs with the ability to scale as the business' needs change?

As website developers and marketers we were faced with this same question while deciding which platform we wanted to adopt, if any, for our client's websites. We worked with Wordpress for quite some time and found that although the core of Wordpress is fairly secure and stable, the introduction of plugin after plugin continued to introduce security issues, incompatibility problems and poorer site performance. We were spending the majority of our time supporting other developers plugins to try and overcome these items, instead of focusing our time on improving our customers conversion rates, brainstorming promotions and measuring results. We decided to build our own open source framework and fully customizable CMS that is optimized for site performance, ease of use, is mobile responsive, extremely scalable and resource efficient. However, I digress. The focus of this post is to take a look to see if the platform itself can have an impact on my site's search placement results.

We recently had the opportunity to test our framework in a very straightforward installation. We were approached by a company, seomarketing.com, to move their website from their existing platform to our framework and CMS. Hosting would not change. Neither the content nor the URLs would change. Why would they? They are SEO experts! And, being experts, they were able to identify that there were some technical barriers their current platform presented which were affecting their placements in search.

So we went to work making minor modifications to the site's design assets so the site would respond well in tablet and mobile viewing; mirrored the URL structure and ported over all the content. Here were the results 14 days post launch.

14 Days Prior to Launch 14 Days Post Launch
Site Load Time 7 seconds (DSL connection) 2 seconds (DSL connection)
Google Average Search Rank #30 (term: seo marketing) #4 (term: seo marketing)
New Site Visitors +43.32%

This test had very positive results. Since we only modified the framework and some graphics, we feel confident that our framework had a direct positive affect on this site's search rankings. Plus this client now has a responsive website, an easy to use drag-and-drop CMS and the ability to add features without the fear of incompatibility issues or unknown security holes.

If your company website could benefit from an SEO optimized framework, responsive design and easy to use content management system (CMS), please give us a call or . Chances are, we can help.

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