Squarespace vs WordPress & Showit for SEO - Real Ranking Results
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For years the internet has said "If you want to rank in Google, you need a WordPress site. Squarespace sucks for SEO."
The question I always had with this whole "WordPress is better for SEO" statement was how did anyone actually test it 🤷🏽♀️ ?
Or are people on the internet just shooting off opinions without any actual real evidence? (Wouldn't put it past ya internet 😉 !)
Which made me think, how could you ACTUALLY test which platform, Squarespace or WordPress is better for SEO?
One way you could do it is if you created the exact same content on two sites, but Google wouldn't like it because it's duplicate content so the test wouldn't work…
And if you create different content, then it still wouldn't work because then you're comparing two different things, comparing apples to oranges so it just wouldn’t be an accurate comparison… so no cigar…
if however, you had content on one platform that was ranking and then moved that content to another platform, THAT sounds like as fair a comparison as you could get…
And friend, would ya believe it?! That's exactly what I did (yup yours truly, 👑 Queen of all things Squarespace sneakily moved our site onto Showit & WordPress for OVER A YEAR!)
And the results might shock you…
How it occurred to me to test Squarespace against Showit & Wordpress for SEO
OK, buckle up, here’s the back story…
Our website for years was getting about 50,000 - 65,000 page views a month, that was our norm.
Oh and context: The vast, vast majority of that traffic comes from Google. Organic content marketing is my thing… and if it’s a bandwagon you wanna jump on, I highly recommend these free content creation outlines to help ya on your way! 👇👇👇
Then suddenly in Spring 2021 our traffic was down. I figured it was a fluke and waited a couple months for it to come back.
It didn't.
Let me explain what this means for my business.
Blogging is our marketing strategy✍️
We have killed it over the years ranking in Google with articles that bring exactly the right clients and customers into our business who then completely booked out my web design business and also sold out my online courses.
📉 When the traffic dropped we noticed an effect in the business pretty quickly…
Email list
We noticed our email list growth started stagnating, which is built by the blog traffic and we also noticed our evergreen course sales funnels making less sales, which those funnels if you were wondering, were also fed by the blog traffic…womp womp
So I started investigating 🕵️♀️ "Giles, do you see that? That could be it!"
During my investigation, one thing was really getting to me…
I had tested my site on the Google Page Speeds insights and it was always getting a brutal rating on mobile.
Which, seemed very off because I know website building backwards and forwards, I've done this for years and I know what to optimize.
I then tested the sites of other people, other Squarespace sites also all had terrible scores on mobile.
I then tested a few WordPress and Showit sites and their mobile Google page speeds scores were much better.
But know the people whose sites 🖥️ I was testing, these were not people who knew more about websites best practices and settings and ranking than me…
Google has said that more and more, sites with a good mobile experience would be prioritised in mobile searches and that generally your website loading quickly and the performance of your site really matters.
When I looked at the list of things the Google Page Speed insights said to fix, these were all out of my hands but instead were just inherent aspects of the platform itself.
Which brought me to the pretty terrifying conclusion…
What if Squarespace wasn't keeping up with the updates THEY needed to?
I legitimately teach people how to build amazing Squarespace websites and become web designers on the platform (peep my courses Square Secrets™ and Square Secrets Business™!) and what if I was now promoting a platform that was no longer working?!
I needed to see if it was indeed the case and the only way I could think of to find this out for myself was to do a test…
So… deep breath…we’re doing this!
I decided, as the internet’s Squarespace expert, to move my site off of Squarespace. We moved our entire blog with over 500 posts over to a WordPress blog on a Showit website.
It took us 3 MONTHS to move the site and the content to Showit! It was a seriously complicated move, my tech team member who was in charge of moving it definitely has a few more grey hairs from it and I apoligized to her on many occasions for the brutal job I had given her… (one more time won’t hurt tho’ …sorryyyy Vicky…!!!)
Genuinely though, what I think about Showit versus Squarespace in terms of ease of using the platforms and what it's like to move and the steps to move is another video 👉
But finally, FINALLY our website was moved in July 2022 and I couldn't wait to see the results.
Now just before this, remember our traffic (pre the traffic hit!) was 63,000 pageviews a month with 30,000 users a month, then it fell to 40,000 and even 30,000 page views a month with 16,000 to 20,000 users a month.
In the first month on Showit, our visitors stayed about the same, 16,000 - 17,000 users but our pageviews suddenly skyrocketed 🚀 back to close to what they had been before, 55,000 - 60,000 pageviews!!!
Now logically this makes absolutely no sense.
Why would moving our website result in the same number of people visiting it but them looking at way more page, which is what those numbers mean.
(I should clarify, when we moved the site we literally recreated the exact same design just on the new platform, so the layout and design was the same and this strange phenomenon wasn't due to a suddenly significantly better site organization and layout or design.)
*Hello Future Paige here! Now with a bit of hindsight, I can actually tell you exactly what was happening in this time! In the Google trends 📈 which accounts for this exact time period, July & August 2022. The term website designer, a term a lot of our content is based around, saw it's biggest spike in search results in Google Trends in 5 years. You'll realize why this is important in a second.*
Come September 2022, still on Showit with a WordPress blog, our traffic dropped back to what it had been before. About 16,000 users and 30,000 - 35,000 pageviews.
And it stayed this way for September and October and November.
Which to me told me one thing, the mysterious drop in traffic had nothing to do with the platform the site was on.
When it was on Squarespace, we were getting 30,000 pageviews a month, down from our previous high of 60,000 a month.
When we moved all of our content over to Showit & WordPress, we had a little spike as our specific search terms enjoyed a massive bump in Google Trends, but when that trend ended, so did our traffic spike.
And suddenly our traffic was back to pre-move traffic which we had been getting on Squarespace.
Let me just say that one more time for the people in the back!
Our traffic was THE SAME on Squarespace as it was on a WordPress blog on a Showit site.
The platform the content was on didn't change the Google rankings or the traffic at all!
Now remember how I had spoken about Google Page Speed Insights.
I retested the site when it was on Showit.
Remember, it was the exact same design and layout.
Except this time we were getting rankings like this (on the left below), not like this (on the right).
So our Google Page Speed insights rankings were prettyyyy different, but our traffic was the same.
All of this to say, if your website is on Squarespace or Showit or WordPress, the truth is, it doesn't really matter.
This is the first actual, legitimate comparison of the same content, the same 500+ blog posts which were getting a ton of organic traffic, just moved from one platform to the other and seeing how the search ranking and traffic was affected.
I've never seen anyone else do this, understandably, because it took us almost a full year to do this test, but I hope to show once and for all, that the platform your site is built on is completely irrelevant and insignificant.
What matters is the quality of your content (make sure to grab these content templates to help ya with that!!)
Now I know, I know even when I just said all of that you might still be thinking…
“ but Paige Showit is sexy, Showit is cool, you can do pretty things on Showit, I think I want to use Showit”
In which case, you're going to want to watch the video below (or read this post!) next for my in-depth review on moving to Showit and my comparison on Showit vs. Squarespace.
