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Is Wix and Squarespace Bad for SEO?

Website builders like Wix or Squarespace are very convenient.

You can get a website in minutes, they’re mostly easy to use, and many of the templates available are good looking.

But beneath the convenience, there are other factors that, as a business owner, you have to consider.

You can have a nice looking website, but if it doesn’t help you get traffic, what’s the point?

So for this article, we are going to discuss whether Wix and Squarespace can actually help you get traffic.

In other words, is Wix good for SEO? Is Squarespace good for SEO?

Is Wix and Squarespace Good For SEO?

Spoiler Alert!

We’ll just come out and say it upfront.

We won’t work with a client unless they get off Wix or Squarespace.

It’s just not fair for anyone.

SEO is hard. And as convenient as Wix or Squarespace can be, trying to rank a website and win the battle of SEO is like bringing a twig to a gunfight.

So now that we got that out of the way let’s begin.

Why are Wix and Squarespace not recommended for SEO purposes?

There a few reasons why these website builders are not ideal to try to rank a website. Some of them are a bit technical, but we’ll try to be as clear as possible. We will focus mostly on Wix.

Site Speed

One of Google’s ranking factors is site speed.

It’s official, and there is no way around it.

But even if it wasn’t, a website that loads fast is good for business.

People will leave if they have to wait more than one or two seconds for your website to load.

The faster your website is, the easier it is to rank a website.

There are three reasons a slow website can hinder your chances of success in ranking your website:

  • Site speed is a Ranking Factor for Google.
  • Poor User Experience. People will leave your website if it doesn’t load fast.
  • Index Problems. Google needs to “read” your website. And with billions of websites to read every day, Google will not waste resources trying to read a slow website. So even if you have a great website, you will go down in the priority list simply for not having a fast loading site.

So, are Wix websites slow?

There are some forum threads where Wix users complain about their sites being slow, especially on mobile versions. You can find more threads here, here, and here.

And here’s a full case study to test how Wix performs in simple SEO metrics.

In short, Wix makes too many server calls to load a website. That means that Wix generates too many files to load a website. So it has to retrieve each file from the server, and every call takes time. Think of it as a checkout line. It’s faster to checkout (load) one big item, instead of ten small items.

That said, is Wix terrible?

No. In fact, they’ve improved a lot recently, BUT if you are serious about getting better ranking for your website, you should NOT use Wix.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are important for SEO because they tell Google how your articles are broken down. It provides the search engine additional information that helps them index your website properly.

So you can imagine how important it is to have full control of your heading tags.

The problem is that Wix makes it difficult to setup heading tags on some templates.

Structured Data Problems

Structured Data is the language that search engines speak.

While you publish content on your site, your website has to translate your content into something that Google understands. That’s what structured Data is for.

This way, Google can give you what’s called Rich Results, which are things like video thumbnails, recipes, lyrics, and things that don’t look like a regular link on the search results page.

The issue is that Wix has a problem with pushing out Structured Data.

In short, the options are limited. It’s not built-in intuitively, so it can get tricky.

The biggest issue with Structured Data is that whenever Google updates its algorithm, Wix has to update its engine, and while that happens, you are left hanging.

Sitemap Customization

A sitemap is a blueprint of your website. The sitemap tells Google where every page is located, and what sections should have priority over others.

A sitemap is the most basic tool for SEO. And you need control over it.

But Wix does not let you customize it. Wix decides what’s important and what’s not. And that is not good

So what’s the bottom line?

We will always recommend using WordPress for your website. So the comparison here is Wix vs. WordPress.

We’ll give you the cliff notes here.

According to ahrefs, they studied 6.4 million websites and found that 46.1% of WordPress websites got at least some monthly search traffic, compared with only 1.4% of Wix sites.

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What should you do?

We will ALWAYS recommend having a WordPress website. Not only do you get full control of your website, WordPress sites simply rank better and get more organic traffic than Wix websites.

Besides, Wix can get costly with its monthly payments, and its platform is closed. That means that if you ever want to leave Wix, you cannot transfer your website anywhere else. On the flip side, WordPress powers 35% of all websites on the internet. So transferring your content is easy, and you will have no problem finding a developer who can help you.

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