Best CMS for SEO in 2023

Written by
Svetlana Shchehel
May 18, 2023
29 min read

The rapid development of content management systems (CMSs) has revolutionized website creation and management. Now, even people with little to no technical expertise can create, edit, and post content on the web. But when it comes to online success, simplicity alone isn’t good enough. To reach high positions in Google’s search results, you absolutely must select a CMS with SEO in mind.

In this article, we will outline the distinguishing features that make a CMS SEO-friendly, and provide an in-depth analysis of leading platforms in this area. By the end of this post, you will be equipped to select the best SEO CMS for your business needs.

What is a CMS?

A CMS is a software that simplifies the creation, management, and publishing of digital content, eliminating the need for advanced technical skills. With a user-friendly interface, CMS applications streamline website creation and maintenance. Thanks to CMSs, you don’t need to know how to code to build a website, but coding might be required for additional tweaks.

Most SEO-friendly CMS platforms include two central components: a content management application (CMA) and a content delivery application (CDA). The CMA, by means of its interface, enables users to modify or manage various aspects of the content. In contrast, the CDA delivers the content to the website or other digital channels, such as mobile apps or social media platforms.

CMS platforms vary in complexity, ranging from simple blogging tools to complex enterprise-level systems. Some CMS platforms are open-source, allowing users to freely modify and customize the software code. Others are proprietary, developed and sold by commercial vendors who retain control over the software code.

To begin exploring this topic, it’s helpful to determine the CMS used by the website you have in mind. Consider using our free CMS Detector to identify the technology behind your own website or analyze your competitors’ websites. Once you have that information, we can then delve into the specifics of what makes a CMS good for SEO and explore the best ones available. 

Important Features for an SEO-friendly CMS

It is generally believed that Google uses over 200 ranking factors when determining search results. Many of these factors are directly related to a website’s technical performance and on-page HTML elements, which are influenced by the CMS used. Google should be able to easily crawl your website’s pages, understand what they are about, and associate them with relevant keywords. For this reason, proper HTML markup is an absolute must. There are plenty of other CMS features that matter for SEO, with some being crucial and others simply being nice to have.

Let’s take a look at the key characteristics that a CMS should have to meet the needs of the SEO world. 

Customizable Page Elements

Having customizable page elements, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and heading tags, is one of the most crucial features of an SEO-optimized CMS. On-page optimization functionality is an important feature because it gives you the ability to tell search engines what the content of your website is about. This improves your website’s visibility in search results and attracts more organic traffic.

  • Title and Meta Description

Title tags and meta descriptions are what users see in SERPs, and they play a crucial role in generating clicks, also known as the click-through rate. The title tag itself is tremendously important for SEO because search engines use it to understand the page’s content and determine its relevance to the user’s search query. By crafting unique and relevant titles and meta descriptions for every page on your site, you can improve your click-through rates and boost your website’s ranking in SERPs.

  • Canonical Tags

In addition to titles and meta descriptions, the CMS should allow you to make use of canonical tags. A canonical tag is a piece of code that tells search engines which version of a page to display in search results. This is important for avoiding duplicate content issues and ensuring that the correct version of the page is being indexed.

  • Alt Text

Another page element that should be customizable in the CMS is the image alt attribute. Alt text is a description of an image used by screen readers and search engines to understand what the image is about. Google also uses ALT tags for the image search, and screen readers, which are used by visually impaired people, rely on ALT tags.

URL Settings

The CMS should also provide convenient options for customizing URL settings. URLs tell search engines and users what a page is about. From an SEO standpoint, it’s better to have sleek, human-readable URLs that incorporate relevant keywords while avoiding unnecessary parameters or numbers.

Robots Meta Tag

The robots meta tag is another essential element that should be easily customizable within a CMS to have control over how search engines interact with your content. You can prevent low-quality or duplicate content pages from showing up in search results by using the “noindex” attribute, and prevent link penalties by using the “nofollow” attribute. An SEO-optimized CMS allows you to add these tags in a matter of seconds by providing convenient options, such as special fields, checkboxes, or a dashboard.  

If you want to include meta tags on your website, check your CMS documentation to find instructions on how to add or modify robots meta tags. 

Redirects Settings

The CMS should also support the use of redirects. Redirects are crucial for guiding users and search engines to a different URL when the one they requested is no longer valid. They are especially useful when pages are moved or deleted, ensuring that users do not see a 404 error. Redirects can also be useful for merging pages or for website migrations

To check if your website’s redirects are set up correctly, make sure to use SE Ranking’s free Redirect Checker.

Internal linking tools

Internal linking is a powerful SEO tactic that involves linking from one page on the site to another. This helps in establishing a clear hierarchy of pages on the site and passing link equity from one page to another. It is important for the CMS to provide easy internal linking tools, such as the ability to create navigation menus and easily add internal links within page content.

XML sitemaps

XML sitemaps are files created for bots that list all the pages of your website. They help search engines crawl your website more efficiently, which can improve your website’s visibility in search results. An SEO-optimized CMS lets you create this file in just a few clicks.

Robots.txt

The Robots.txt file tells search engines which pages on your website should and shouldn’t be crawled. It gives you control over how search engines access and index your website. By using the robots.txt file, you can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing specific pages that you don’t want to appear in search results.

To ensure that search engine bots can crawl your website properly, SE Ranking offers a dedicated Robots.txt Tester, a free tool. This tool lets you test whether any important website URLs are being blocked by your robots.txt file.

SEO Plugins

SEO plugins or extensions are essential for optimizing your website for search engines. They provide features and functionality that can help you easily make changes to your website without advanced technical or coding skills. For example, the Yoast SEO plugin can help you optimize your title tags, meta descriptions and create a sitemap.xml file, while the Redirection plugin can help you easily set or remove redirects between pages.

Analytics

An SEO-optimized CMS should include analytics functionality that enables data-driven decision making regarding the website’s performance in SERPs. This feature includes various capabilities, such as the seamless integration of Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager tracking code, connectivity to Search Console, the ability to conduct A/B testing, and tracking important metrics like user engagement and page views directly within the CMS. By leveraging this information, website owners can identify areas for improvement and optimize their content to attract more traffic from search engines.

What is the best CMS for SEO?

We handpicked a list of the top-rated CMSs capable of meeting the requirements of even the most fastidious SEO experts. Each of these CMS options were designed to enhance your website’s search engine optimization and help it rank higher in search results. We’ll outline the distinctive characteristics of each one so you can make your own decision about which CMS is best for your website’s SEO.

WordPress can become any site you want it to be

WordPress started as an open-source blogging platform, but its thousands of themes and plugins make it a suitable choice for various purposes, including e-commerce and flight-booking websites. As of 2023, WordPress dominates the market, with over 43.2 % of all websites powered by it. The millions of users who chose it did so for a reason, and WordPress’s SEO capabilities play a big part in it. 

WordPress is believed to be a great CMS for SEO because it offers many valuable optimization features right out of the box. With its default installation, you can set custom URLs, proper headings and image ALT tags, but that’s it. WordPress is all about plugins, so you’ll need some for decent SEO. 

One of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins to date is Yoast SEO. This plugin grants you control over meta tags and tons of other technical stuff. Yoast makes it easy to set canonical URLs or meta robots tags, enable breadcrumbs, and to tweak your XML sitemap. It can also generate a robots.txt file for you. This single plugin, combined with standard WordPress features, covers most of the items on our checklist. To take care of the rest, you’ll have to install more plugins. 

Yoast Plugin

In addition to Yoast, you can also install the W3 Total Cache right away. It will help you speed up your website by caching its pages. But there are a lot of other useful plugins out there, both free and paid. Just make sure to do your research before installing any as plugins can often pose risks to your site’s security and site speed.

Advantages

  1. Easy to use: WordPress is a user-friendly, simple-to-use CMS. This makes it the ideal choice for beginners and for anyone who needs to create a website quickly.
  2. Customizable: WordPress offers thousands of themes and plugins, making it easy to customize your website according to your specific needs.
  3. SEO-friendly: WordPress’s built-in SEO features help in optimizing sites for search engines.
  4. Mobile-responsive: WordPress websites are designed to be responsive, ensuring seamless access and usability across mobile devices.
  5. Large community: WordPress has a large community of developers and users who are constantly creating new plugins and themes, making it easy to find support and resources.
  6. Flexible pricing: You can build a fully functional site for less than $100, or even for free.


Drawbacks

  1. Security vulnerabilities: WordPress is regularly updated, but hackers often target it and exploit it for negative SEO tactics. Hackers can use many themes and plugins, especially free ones, to take control over your website.
  2. Website speed: Installing too many plugins and extensions can cause page speed to decrease.
  3. No dedicated customer support: You’ll have to work with a developer or fix your site on your own if something goes wrong.

Joomla – a scalable alternative to WordPress

Joomla is the second most popular CMS. Just like WordPress, it is open-source and free. Joomla also provides themes and plugins, but it refers to them as templates and extensions. Joomla also isn’t as intuitive and easy-to-use as WordPress, making it a less ideal choice for newbies. Still, it’s more versatile. 

Joomla is ideal for larger websites that require organized menus, sections, and categories, as it allows you to neatly organize website content without relying on extensions. Joomla also gives you the opportunity to use different template settings or even different templates across the website. 

But what about SEO? Upon installation, Joomla is not a very SEO-friendly CMS.

You can easily set proper headings with just one click and add meta descriptions with a few more clicks, but there are some SEO challenges to consider Joomla offers dynamically-generated URLs that can be difficult to read, and you may encounter issues such as duplicate content and non-indexed images. The default robots.txt file that Joomla automatically generates instructs search engines not to index the image folder, requiring manual editing of the file to fix this issue.

To enable search engine-friendly URLs, you can tweak Joomla settings or install an extension. If you decide to fix it manually, keep in mind that changing the setting can often result in broken link issues, which you’ll have to handle on your server side.

Examples of non-SEO friendly and SEO-friendly URLs in Joomla

Alternatively, you can use the sh404SEF extension. It can help you turn messy URLs into SEO-friendly ones, create meta descriptions, title tags, canonical tags, and set up redirects.

To add ALT tags and create an XML sitemap, you’ll need separate extensions, which you can find in Joomla’s official store. Keep in mind that some extensions offer more features than others. The SEOFLI extension, for example, generates ALT tags automatically. 

On the plus side, Joomla, being one of the market leaders, is known for its speed. You can enable caching without installing any extensions. Also, optimizing Joomla for mobile is easy, as most templates are mobile-friendly. For those that aren’t, you can use special extensions.

Advantages

  • Flexibility to mix and match different themes for different pages or website sections.
  • Large library of extensions available with easy SEO tweaking functionality and no coding.
  • Easy to create a fast-loading website, crucial for SEO and user experience.
  • Hands-off caching, which further improves performance.
  • Automatic gzip compression without needing an extension.
  • Responsive templates by default.

Drawbacks

  • Its vast feature list and less intuitive interface may pose challenges for users transitioning from WordPress or other simpler website platforms.
  • Manual installation of an SSL certificate is required, which can be a technical challenge for some users.
  • An extension is required to generate and submit XML sitemaps.
  • Time-consuming manual edits to the robots.txt file are required to enable crawling of images and other media.

Shopify – a highly intuitive hosted e-commerce platform

Shopify is an intuitive and user-friendly hosted e-commerce platform, enabling swift and hassle-free setup of online stores. It was founded in 2006 by Tobias Lütke, Scott Lake, and Daniel Weinand, and has since grown to become one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world, with over 2 million active users.

Shopify CMS

In the default version, you can easily add meta tags, ALT tags and format text using h1-h6 headings. You can also customize URLs, but the content type prefixes (such as /collections, /products, /pages or /blogs) cannot be changed. This isn’t a big issue, but it is not ideal for SEO. 

On the plus side, whenever you decide to edit the URL of an existing page, you can create a redirect by ticking a simple checkbox. Shopify is set up this way to ensure that you don’t forget to set up a redirect and encounter a 404 page. 

As for canonical tags, Shopify generates them automatically, which is great, but autogenerated tags won’t always point to the right URL. You’ll have to manually edit the code to rectify this.

Shopify also automatically generates an XML sitemap and a robots.txt file for you. Unfortunately, you’ll also have issues with these two because Shopify gives you limited control over their content. For one, you cannot remove any rules from the robots.txt file, despite being able to add additional ones. To edit an XML sitemap, you’ll have to install a paid app.

Now, let’s talk about site load speed and mobile optimization. As a hosted solution that uses CND technology, Shopify is really fast. On the other hand, its platform infrastructure does not allow for leveraging browser caching. As for mobile optimization, Shopify currently only accepts themes with a responsive layout.

Advantages

  1. Shopify provides essential SEO tools to optimize your site for search engines. You don’t need to install additional plugins that may slow your site down.
  2. Shopify’s interface is user-friendly and straightforward, which saves you time. You won’t spend time troubleshooting or on tedious processes.
  3. Shopify generates canonical URLs, robots.txt, and sitemaps for you automatically, which is an SEO advantage.
  4. All themes in Shopify are responsive, which means your site will look great on any device.
  5. Pages load quickly in Shopify because it has an integrated CDN that speeds up page loading times.

Drawbacks

  1. While Shopify automatically generates a sitemap and a robots.txt file, you can’t edit them directly in the tool.
  2. To ensure your site is indexed by search engines, a paid plan is required, starting at $32 per month. There is no free option beyond the trial period.
  3. Shopify limits customization of URLs, which limits optimization opportunities.
  4. Sometimes auto-generated canonical tags may point to the wrong page, which could cause SEO issues.

OpenCart — decent CMS for online stores

OpenCart is an open-source, free-to-download, and highly customizable CMS, but it’s not as versatile as some of the more advanced CMSs out there. OpenCart was originally designed as a platform for eCommerce, making it perfect for people who want to create an online store. It’s not the best choice, however, for users aiming to launch a blog or another content-driven site. 

Presently, OpenCart powers approximately 1% of all sites in the world, making it the third most popular eCommerce builder, trailing behind Shopify and Magento. 

So, what do you need to create a website using OpenCart? Firstly, you will need a hosting plan, typically starting at around $5 a month, with higher-quality hosts incurring additional costs. After that, you’ll receive the standard online store functionality, which can be enhanced with modules and extensions. On the Extensions page, you’ll find a lot of commercial and free plugins. To find extensions relevant to SEO, you can filter your request in the search bar by using particular keywords.

Keep in mind that with OpenCart, installing additional modules for search optimization is not an option, but a necessity. 

Advantages

  1. A unique SEO feature that lets you assign keywords to product pages and offers recommendations for improvement.
  2. EssentialSEO tools, including editable on-page elements, robots.txt file, and customized 404 pages.
  3. Flexibility in theme customization, positioning Opencart between Magento and Shopify in terms of customization capabilities.
  4. A wide variety of eCommerce templates and designs.
  5. Support for multiple store functionality.


Drawbacks

  1. Manual installation of SSL certificate is required as Opencart isn’t self-hosted.
  2. Missing some SEO functions such as setting up 301 redirects, establishing canonical tags, modifying information without coding, or starting a blog without extensions.
  3. Page speed might be slow compared to other platforms, even with commercial plugins to improve caching and ignore unneeded JS and CSS.
  4. The inability to remove content type prefix from the URL can lead to canonicalization issues for SEO and the presence of duplicate pages.
  5. Creating SEO-friendly URLs can be challenging.

Magento – a customizable e-commerce CMS for tech-savvy users

Launched in 2008, Magento (formerly Adobe Commerce) is currently one of the leading e-commerce CMSs. Initially, it was tailored to developers, so setting it up properly will not be possible without a basic knowledge of coding. But if you want your store to expand, Magento’s robust set of features and high level of customization can turn your website into an e-commerce powerhouse. 

Magento CMS

Magento gives you the ability to handle large product catalogs, perform advanced order management, and create flexible pricing rules. It also offers a wide range of third-party integrations, such as payment gateways, shipping providers, and analytics tools, making it a versatile and scalable platform for any type of e-commerce business.

On the other hand, Magento is complex and its advanced features come with a steep learning curve, which can be overwhelming for beginners or small businesses with limited resources. 

Magento also entails higher server requirements and hosting costs compared to other CMS options, which can end up being a significant investment.

Advantages

  1. Extensive functionality: Magento allows you to make various changes to your website’s layout, theme, content, and URL structure directly from the admin section.
  2. Canonical URLs: Built-in features in Magento help prevent duplicate content and self-cannibalization issues by creating canonical URLs.
  3. Sitemap and Robots.txt: Magento automatically generates an XML sitemap and robots.txt file.
  4. Integration marketplace: Magento has a large integration marketplace that offers a range of SEO apps and tools for enhancing your website’s performance.
  5. Mobile-friendliness: Magento is designed to be mobile-friendly, catering to the growing number of internet users accessing websites on mobile devices.

Drawbacks

  1. Complex setup: Setting up Magento can be challenging, especially if you don’t have experience with the platform.
  2. No built-in blog functionality: If you want to have a blog on your Magento website, you’ll need to install an extension.
  3. H1-as-logo issue: Magento has an issue where the logo is used as the H1 tag across the website, which requires coding to fix.
  4. High development cost: Depending on the system’s complexity, a website built on the Magento platform typically costs $10,000 or more, which can be expensive for small businesses.

Drupal – a technically advanced solution for large websites

Drupal is a powerful and versatile CMS specifically designed to handle large, complex websites. Its flexible architecture, advanced features, and scalability make it a popular choice among organizations that require robust and technically advanced solutions. Drupal provides a wide range of modules and functionalities that can be customized and integrated to suit the specific needs of any website, making it a popular choice for creating personal websites, eCommerce sites, and even portals and forums.

Drupal comes equipped with a variety of modules designed to enhance website functionality. These modules include content optimization, webmaster tools, link management, advanced tagging, keyword research, drag-and-drop functionality, competitor analysis, and integrated analytics. 

Drupal’s key strengths are its competitor analysis and analytics integration capabilities. It also has user-friendly dashboards that seamlessly integrate with Google Analytics, providing a data-driven approach to website optimization. Drupal is also very SEO-friendly, making it an attractive option for anyone looking to improve their website’s search engine rankings.

Advantages

  1. Advanced SEO capabilities, including keyword research and management, content tagging and autolinking, duplicate content alerts, metadata optimization, redirects, XML sitemap generation, and integration with Google Analytics.
  2. Advanced access controls and user permissions, allowing the creation of new roles with specific permissions.
  3. Built-in multilingual functionality in Drupal 10, enabling the creation and management of new languages directly within the admin interface.
  4. Stringent security, making it a popular choice for government institutions.

Drawbacks

  1. Extra features and code in the back-end may slow down page load speed.
  2. Drupal’s technical complexity can pose challenges for users without coding experience.
  3. A smaller selection of modules and themes compared to other CMSs.
  4. Getting acquainted with Drupal can be challenging, particularly for inexperienced users. 

HubSpot CMS – a versatile platform for your marketing needs

Launched in 2020, the HubSpot CMS has rapidly established itself as a powerful content management system, empowering businesses to effortlessly create and manage their digital content. Built with user-friendliness in mind, Hubspot’s CMS is accessible to businesses of all sizes. Users can easily create, publish, and update content without the need for technical expertise. The platform offers a diverse range of features, including customizable templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and personalized content recommendations, enabling businesses to deliver outstanding user experiences.

Hubspot CMS

HubSpot CMS offers a major advantage through its seamless integration with other HubSpot tools. By integrating with HubSpot’s CRM, marketing, and sales tools, businesses can manage their entire sales and marketing funnel in one place. This integration makes it easy for businesses to manage leads, automate marketing campaigns, and track site analytics. Additionally, HubSpot CMS integrates with third-party tools like Salesforce, Zapier, and Google Analytics, providing businesses with a comprehensive solution for managing their digital content.

Another key advantage of HubSpot CMS is its focus on SEO. The platform offers robust SEO features such as content optimization recommendations, customizable meta descriptions, and automatic sitemap creation. These features help businesses improve their search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to their website. With HubSpot CMS, businesses can effectively optimize their content for search engines without the need for specialized knowledge or technical skills.

Advantages

  1. Seamless integration with HubSpot’s CRM platform, including Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and Sales Hub, providing a cohesive marketing and sales experience.
  2. The CMS comes with an SSL certificate and auto-generated sitemap.
  3. Wide variety of SEO-friendly website themes.
  4. Google Search Console integration, inbound link tracking, and page performance stats, altogether providing an all-in-one solution for SEO and performance tracking.
  5. Comes with essential out-of-the-box SEO options, requiring no third-party extensions or plugins.
  6. Robust support options, including a direct phone line and a knowledge base.

Drawbacks

  1. No free version is available, but it offers a trial.
  2. Migration may take a lot of time depending on your previous CMS provider.
  3. Works best as a full-service solution.

Wix — the best CMS software for personal sites and small businesses 

Wix is a popular CMS that provides both basic and premium solutions, allowing users to create, change, and grow websites with its convenient drag-and-drop editor. It is an affordable platform, with personal plans starting at $8.50 a month for personal use and basic business plans at $17 a month, which include the ability to accept online payments. It serves as an all-in-one solution for entrepreneurs or small business owners with no coding experience, empowering them to design professional-looking websites with no need to hire a developer. But when it comes to SEO, how does Wix fair?

Wix CMS

Well, if you are looking for an entry-level website builder, you won’t run through many roadblocks with Wix. It provides built-in SEO tools, eliminating the need to navigate through thousands of extensions. With Wix SEO Wiz, you gain access to a step-by-step tutorial that walks you through the basics of SEO, identifies any weak points in your site, and provides helpful tips for improving your search engine visibility.

On the other hand, Wix could stand to improve its multilingual SEO functionality. Currently, all languages share the same URL for each translated page, which can put you at a disadvantage.

Advantages

  • Wix provides essential SEO features built into the dashboard, eliminating the need for additional extensions.
  • Websites created with Wix are automatically SSL-protected.
  • It creates XML sitemaps automatically and submits them to Google Search Console.
  • The drag-and-drop interface is intuitive and easy to use, making it simple for beginners to create a website.

Drawbacks

  • Loading speed can be slow, impacting user experience and search engine rankings.
  • Changing the selected theme requires an entire site redesign.
  • While Wix offers standard SEO capabilities, implementing advanced SEO tools may present challenges.
  • The basic plan shows ads on users’ websites.

GoDaddy Website Builder – a simple yet effective CMS for small businesses

GoDaddy is widely known as a leader in domain name registration and web hosting. In addition to these core services, they also offer their own website building tool that uses Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to simplify and speed up the website creation process.

GoDaddy Website Builder

Using GoDaddy Website Builder is as simple as follows: select a template, edit it using the drag-and-drop editor, add content, and publish your site. As of now, no third-party apps, add-ons, or plugins exist for the GoDaddy website builder, which means you’ll only be able to use built-in features to create your website. 

The main advantage of this tool is that you can create a decent site with minimal effort and in a matter of minutes, even if you’re a beginner in website building. While it offers simplicity, it lacks in terms of creativity and advanced options. Customization options for themes and layouts are very limited. What’s more, if you’re looking for an advanced solution for scaling your website, GoDaddy Website Builder will not be of much help due to its limited depth in website building capabilities.

Advantages

  • GoDaddy’s Website Builder is straightforward and intuitive, which makes it a perfect fit for users who don’t feel tech savvy.
  • By subscribing to GoDaddy, you also get access to other marketing tools like GoDaddy Appointments, GoDaddy Email Marketing, GoDaddy Social Media Marketing, GoDaddy Content Creator, and GoDaddy Connections.
  • Fast loading speeds compared to its competitors.
  • Optimized layouts for smartphones.

Drawbacks

  • Limited customization options for layouts.
  • Not suitable for ecommerce, as the tool only offers basic features (checkout not hosted on your domain, no email receipt customization, poor tax & donation system).
  • The templates are not as impressive or as professional as those offered by similar tools.
  • This tool may not be suitable for complex sites or ambitious users looking to scale their businesses, as it lacks advanced SEO features.

Squarespace – the best CMS system for creativity

Over the past 20 years, Squarespace has become one of the most popular website building solutions in the market. With over 2 million users, this platform offers built-in ecommerce and marketing features tailored for photographers, bloggers, artists, and people looking to set up an online store with a small inventory.

Squarespace CMS

One notable feature of Squarespace is its blogging suite. With this tool, even users with no prior experience can easily create a blog, thanks to the availability of pre-made posts. You can even manage your blog from any mobile device with the help of the Squarespace Blog App, which makes it a perfect choice for users who are on the go.

Squarespace is also widely recognized for its ability to create stunning portfolios, which can be attributed to its excellent selection of portfolio themes. When scrolling through this tool’s website, you’ll immediately notice the abundance of well-designed templates that provide plenty of space for images. You can use these templates to showcase your work and leave minimal distractions.

Finally, its combination of tools for social media marketing, email marketing, and SEO inspires small businesses to join the millions of other creators using Squarespace. Squarespace offers a selection of third-party integrations, including its tools for shipping management, product label printing, print-on-demand and more. This makes the process of building an ecommerce store as easy as it gets.

Advantages

  • Wide selection of templates and designs.
  • Comprehensive blogging feature.
  • Squarespace app is available for both iOS and Android. You can use it to edit different aspects of your website, including pages, blog, and store.
  • SSL is included with all plans.

Drawbacks

  • You can’t edit the sitemap or robots.txt files. 
  • It doesn’t support any plugins.

Conclusion

When it comes to achieving SEO success for your website, the CMS you choose can make it or break it. The best website CMS for SEO ultimately depends on the goals you set. Here are some common goals that users might have when choosing a CMS and how different CMSs align with them:

  • For blogging and content management: WordPress, Drupal, HubSpot CMS, Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy Website Builder.
  • For ecommerce: Shopify, Opencart, Magento.
  • For customization and flexibility: Drupal, WordPress, Magento.
  • For security: Drupal.
  • For ease of use and quick setup: WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder, Squarespace.

Regardless of the CMS you choose, we highly recommend that you run a website audit after the setup phase to make sure that all the plugins/modules work properly and to see if you’ve successfully addressed all potential SEO pitfalls. SE Ranking’s Website Audit software can help you identify errors ranging from website speed to URL rewriting and canonicalization issues. The tool is available under a 14-day free trial.

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