Why is it difficult to rank a WordPress site on page 1 of Google?
Most people aren’t aware of something called the code to content ratio. The code to content ratio is a factor for Google’s ranking algorithm. What does this mean? Google looks at the amount of source code there is on a web page versus how much content is on the same page. And WordPress sites just happened to be about 90% code versus content on the average website.
This ratio is one reason why you have to blog regularly to show up in search results.
There are two different reasons for blogging: 1) You can blog for visibility and trying to bring people in from outside the website, or 2) Create keyword content, to be crawled by Google on their webpage.
The obstacle you face is how much code is in the typical WordPress site.
People download lots of plugins, and they’re loading up all of these extra features and things on their website, which also slow the site down by increasing the amount of code and resources required.
One time, I worked on a Realtor’s website created with an outsourced team from India. The homepage took over a minute to load. The customer didn’t see a problem because they wanted all the features and didn’t understand that visitors weren’t going to wait that long for the page to load.
So the content to code ratio is a huge deal. Also, keep in mind originality. One of the things that search engines look for is original code and style, and if 90% of your site is code and that code is also in use on millions of websites. Google and other search engines are going to see it as not original or unique, and that’s going to hurt your rankings as well.
Many of the sites that I’ve built that rank at the top of search engines have very little code. I created them only with HTML and CSS. Even adding popular frameworks like Bootstrap can dangerously increase the size of your code. In that case, only the rendered content shows. These are not things that are easy to do with WordPress. And so I’m just here to share why you may be struggling with ranking a WordPress site in search results.
The reality is, a lot of these platforms that make editing your website convenient, are costing you your ranking in search engines.
In other videos here, I’ve talked about different ways of showing up and how you should be designing your pages for people and not for search engines. But, this is one problem that you can’t get away from when you’re using something like Wix or WordPress. They’ve got an extremely user-friendly interface, and you’re trading that convenience for your search results.
There are some things that you can do to help WordPress, like minifying your code or caching your information or your content. Minified code and cached code loads faster. When people go to the site, there’s an optimized version of that gets served up. However, this gets complicated and requires technical skill that’s beyond the average user.
I want to offer this for consideration to people who are struggling. It isn’t too hard to build a site that isn’t using WordPress if you talk to the right people and spend a little bit of time learning how the internet works. Just be careful not to trade results for convenience.