Cya Later WordPress

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I'm Michael Costin, Arthur Fabik's joining me and today it is a momentous occasion. We are making the move or we've already made the move from WordPress to Webflow. We thought we'd talk about it on the show, what we like, what we don't like, why we did it and some of the SEO learnings that we've had so far. So Arthur, are you excited? I'm excited.

ARTHUR: You know what? Let's just get right into it.

MICHAEL: Okay, well, why switch? Why change from WordPress? We've been using WordPress for years, even decades now, which is scary to say. And Webflow is, I guess, relatively recent compared to WordPress CMS out there. We've been seeing it in the wild, some clients, maybe some. competitors of clients sort of thing. And, um, we hadn't had cause to use it, but we started building a new site for our agency, um, earlier this year and we thought we'd make a switch to Webflow as part of that. So yeah, the reasons behind that first and foremost is out of interest. You know, we're nerds, we want to try it. But, um, the big one for me is WordPress constantly has to be updated. Like if you think about a normal WordPress install, there's a CMS, there's a theme, There's all the plug-in files. They all get out of date frequently. And if you don't update them, your site can get compromised. It's just a ball ache.

ARTHUR: It's a pain, isn't it? That's a big one for me. I hate updating WordPress websites.

MICHAEL: There's tools that make it easier, but it's still a pain.

ARTHUR: Yeah, but then there's certain things that might like, for example, a theme might get so out of date that it's no longer supported. And we've had issues with clients who build a website on a theme. That theme is no longer supported, been out of date for a few years and then they can't update specific plugins and other things. So it becomes super problematic and then longer term they have to rebuild their site because it's just no longer supported. Um, not to mention, not to mention like WordPress is constantly updating. So it's not like once a year you're doing it every couple of weeks sometimes.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yep. Massive pain. And, um, a lot of sites, we've found in the past with clients, they might hard code stuff in rather than doing it in a way, you know, a child theme, for example, which means when you update the theme or all sorts of different updates to the site, it can just break the site. You get the white screen. Oh yeah. And then you've got to go figure out like some people don't have backups and then you've got to go try and restore the site. It's just a nightmare. Whereas Webflow doesn't have that problem. All the updates and that's magic stuff happens in the background.

ARTHUR: I might be a bit ignorant, but they don't have any kind of updates in the way that WordPress does. Like, does it just automatically update in the backend by itself without you having to actually do anything?

MICHAEL: Correct. Yeah. So they would be releasing updates themselves. It's sort of like, um, I would think of it as like the Apple ecosystem as opposed to windows or Linux. Yeah. You know, like open source, all sorts of stuff can happen. And then Webflow is a much more controlled environment, like the Apple ecosystem. So they would be pushing updates, but they do it in a way that doesn't break your site. Good comparison. Thank you. Yes. Just came up with that one on the fly. What else? Page builders in WordPress. So like Elementor, Divi, those types of things. Some people are for them. Other people are against them. We use them, makes life easier to build sites quickly. But the bloat that it creates in the code can be a bit of a pain in some cases, and those things need to be updated too. The page builders themselves need to be updated, and if they're not, plugins will update, and then there's conflicts cause, and I'm talking WordPress now. That's not a problem with Webflow because Webflow itself is a page builder. It's got a page builder, as part of its UI that is very controlled. Again, it doesn't break on you. So they were the reasons we switch. Any other reasons that you had that you wanted to switch over to Webflow?

ARTHUR: I will not, not the reason why we switched over the LD side, but I a couple of years ago just started noticing them. Like a lot of them look very similar, but they're very like minimal, clean looking, nice looking websites. So before we even migrated or thought about migrating over the LD side, I actually built a little, site myself and Webflow just to play around with it. When I say build a site, I just played around with the Webflow builder for maybe an hour or two, but I think that was one of the reasons I liked it. It just looks nice, clean, modern, minimal.

MICHAEL: Yep. So if anyone's interested, you can head to localdigital.com.au right now and see our Webflow site. And hopefully the words clean and minimal come to mind because that's what we were going for. So yeah, let us know. You can send us a speak box or speak pipe or whatever it's called on our site, giving us your thoughts on our design and maybe the pros and cons of it. It's been a while since we've had some voices on the show. So yeah, head to theseoshow.com and give us your feedback if you want. How many people do you reckon would do that, Arthur? One. One? Gee, I think you're being generous. We do get a few. Yeah, I know we get a few. I know. We're putting the call out. Give us your feedback. localdigital.com.au, that's our web flow site. And we're going to run through what we like about it. You know, we've been building it for the better part of, I don't know, maybe like 10 months. Feels like forever. Yeah, we started building it and then we just left it there and staging for ages. Couldn't be bothered and had other stuff and then got around to finishing it at the end of last year. And we've got some pros and cons. So on the pro side, So the, the no, it's no code drag and drop to an extent, drag and drop designer. The UI is relatively nice to use and you can design a site that you take a theme and you can sort of move elements around and expand on it relatively easy, but without breaking the site, like you'd find frequently with WordPress.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, it's a bit different to something like Elementor where they have like prebuilt specific widgets or elements that you can drop. Um, Webflow do have them like packs, but they're not as, what's the word I'm looking for. Um, it's not as easy, I guess. You can't just kind of literally drag and drop it and have it ready. Like there's certain things that you have to play around with and muck around with to get it looking properly.

MICHAEL: And it forces you to use, um, like you can't just take an element and jam it into a page and have the code like Elementor will let you sort of do that and it bloats of code out dealing with it. Whereas in Webflow, everything follows a hierarchy. You've got to work within those confines, but that's fine. That's how most sites are built. It's got themes as well, similar to WordPress. You can find a theme that you like and then tweak it so that the theme might have all the styling and the fonts and the colors, that sort of stuff, and a general design style, and then you can expand on it. Big thing that I like with Webflow is you don't need plugins for everything, like you do with WordPress. So it has forms built in, so you can set your forms up, you don't have to go download Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms or any of the forms that WordPress make you do. And it has things like backups, you know, the backups are really great in Webflow. We've used them a bit. Yeah, you break it and you can read back. Every time you publish it will take it back up as part of you publishing. So you can always just roll it back, which is awesome. That's just out of the box. With WordPress, backups definitely aren't out of the box. It's normally some paid service or hopefully your host has that as a feature. It also has staging environment as default. So these are things that if you listen to us talk in the past about using Kinsta and Other similar types of hosts for WordPress, we always recommend them because they have staging, they have backups. Most hosts don't. With Webflow, it's an all-in-one nice environment that includes that stuff. It has collections. I know you're very taken with collections, aren't you?

ARTHUR: I wouldn't say I'm taken with them. I think they're just pretty cool. You're taken. Well, yeah, collections are good if you've got a lot of pages which have a similar layout. So for example, if you're building out SEO location pages, you can build a collection, build out one specific template, and then within that collection have specific fields that you want to basically change. So like headings, it'll copy images and stuff like that. And it's a good way to, I guess, scale pages, but also make sure that they're all consistent and nothing will break. So anyone can literally go in there, you can brief them into, you know, do whatever you want and you can be confident that they won't mess anything up because it's all kind of built into the collection and you can't, yeah, you can't break it basically.

MICHAEL: And again, it's that stuff that can be done in WordPress, but it's more fiddly and painful.

ARTHUR: The other thing I was going to say as well, the learning curve, like I'm not a coder, I'm not a developer, but you know, having played around with WordPress within, you know, 30 minutes, I was pretty confident using Webflow. Like you have to obviously go in there and play around with it, but I found it pretty easy to use.

MICHAEL: Yeah, their support docs are really good, Webflow University or whatever they, I think that's what they call it. Yeah. So when you're trying to do something and you can't, it's very easy to just turn to their support docs and get it done.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Having said that, you know, I've been using building WordPress sites for a long time, but yeah. You got the skills. I've got the, well, I wouldn't say I have the skills, but I've, I've played around with, I've played enough with around enough WordPress sites in my time, but, Moving and switching over to Word, not WordPress, Webflow wasn't that big of a deal.

MICHAEL: Yeah. What do you think of it from a SEO point of view?

ARTHUR: Good. I mean, it's got everything you need out of the box, so you can modify your metadata, page titles, meta descriptions. You can set up redirects, like basically everything you need from an SEO perspective is built into it. So again, something where you typically… Sorry?

MICHAEL: Not really the stuff like a lot of WordPress SEO plugins are just overloaded with features.

ARTHUR: Exactly. Yeah. You would need, like I was going to say, you would need a plugin for WordPress just to be able to update the pages metadata. Here it's just built into it. So that's really handy.

MICHAEL: You can use variables as well, which is pretty cool. So. If you wanted to put like the year or something into, uh, your, like, let's say your collections, your metadata structure for that. And you wanted to have the year on the end of it, you can use a variable for that out of the box. So it makes, um, scaling up a lot of pages easier. Um, like let's say you have a whole bunch of careers pages or something like that, and you want to put in the year or the location across a whole bunch of them. You just put that variable in and it's all. taken care of for you. You don't have to go write each bit of metadata individually, which is not the sort of stuff that happens out of the box in WordPress. It has indexing rules. So, you know, you can tell search engines no follow, no index, all that sort of stuff per page very easily. So the basics from an SEO point of view are there. And the way like all media and everything is stored on the site is very nice, neat, clean, no sort of weirdness like you might find with any number of different plugins on WordPress that can change the way it might structure, you know, media.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It compresses all the images as well, doesn't it? Out of the box.

MICHAEL: It does. Yep. So again, WordPress plugin, we'll be saying, Hey, go get, um, WP smoosh or, um, what's the one I forgot that short pixel, go get short pixel. This just does it out of the box. We are paying about 85 bucks a month for this because they charge per seat, so person that can go and do stuff in the account. And then they charge, they have different levels for the type of site you have, different levels of access or not access like the CMS itself is priced differently depending on what you're trying to do. That includes hosting as well, doesn't it? Includes hosting all the backups, the service itself. So they host on AWS. Pretty like to use the site is quick. It doesn't do so well on PageSpeed Insights and passing those sort of things, but like using it as a user is quick. So yeah, cause we've actually done a bit of work to try and speed our site up with our developers and there's only so much they could do. But, um, yeah, to give you an idea, I think we pay like 23 bucks a month for our website plan and then maybe the same per seat. So we have two seats at the moment. So it works out as about 85 bucks a month us. So getting up over a hundred bucks in Australia, Kinsta costs that much and you know, Webflow, the advantages of not having update plugins and everything we just spoke about make that well worth it. Any business can afford 85 bucks a month. Well, you would hope so. Any established business, you know, that would be considering something like that.

ARTHUR: Any business that's serious about building a website should be able to afford $100 a month. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So WordPress is great for startup, you know, startups, single, solo, prenuers, that sort of stuff. But once you move beyond that, then Webflow is definitely a good option in terms of value for what you're investing. Agree. All right. Well, now that we've said the good stuff, what don't you like about Webflow?

ARTHUR: Um, what don't I like? One thing I found frustrating was, and I guess it will depend on the different themes that you're using, but most things are assigned a style, right? And you'll find that if you change something on one page and that style is assigned to other things on other pages, it will change everything on the site. So one of the things I found really annoying when I first started using it was I wanted to change maybe the font of a heading or like the size of a heading on one specific page, I do that. And then I find that it's changed everything. So you gotta be very careful. Um, I guess it's both a good thing and a bad thing that you can do it because it means that you can have consistent elements across the whole site. But if you forget and you start playing around and changing font sizes and line heights and stuff like that, you can completely mess up the site like that. Um, that I found frustrating.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I agree. You got to get in the habit of like duplicating the styles and giving it a new name just for the page you're working on. But again, the backups are the big saving grace for that sort of thing because you can just, let's say you get to an end of a good web flow session, you've totally destroyed your site by not updating styles properly. You can just reverse back a few hours and your site doesn't look any different. You've just wasted time.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think obviously that's, it's a con because it's something, it's just a bit, it's something you just need to learn once you've picked up on it. And once you start using it, it's no longer a con. But I think, I guess moving from WordPress to Webflow, it's definitely something you need to think about. The UI can be fiddly at times. One thing I actually found really annoying was when we would both work on the site, only one person can edit the design at once. So, we would find that, you know, I'd be changing something that you can't go on, or you'd be changing something that I can't go on. And I find that frustrating, especially if it's just something small that you want it to change. Um, but I guess I understand the reasoning as to why they don't let you do that. I mean, it's probably for the best because you don't want to be saving over people's work, but in WordPress you can do that.

MICHAEL: And see in WordPress, Like Webflow don't let you really do much to the code of the pages. Like there's a little bit of customizing going on and you can embed other bits of code and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Whereas in WordPress you have free reign to do what you want and multiple people can be doing it at the same time. Whereas in Webflow you can't and there's not that much you can really be doing to the code. It's mainly working on the look, the feel, the look and feel.

ARTHUR: I mean, it's not so much a con, it's just something I don't like, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Especially like I said, if I wanted to change something small and then you'd be working on it and then you might be on there for an hour doing whatever I might forget or it's just, you know, it becomes a little bit of a bottleneck sometimes. Yep. But I guess how often do you have multiple people working on one site? Not very. Exactly.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I would say I'm speed optimization, like the speed to use the site, as we said, to me, it feels fine. But if you throw it in a tool, you know, core web vitals, Google page speed, If our site fails Core Web Vitals at the moment, so does the Webflow.com site, which is annoying. There's not really much we can do to fix that. I think our page speed we're getting like in the 60s or something. Let me just pull up. I'm going to tell you exactly what we're getting for that because we did a bit of work with our devs to try and fix things. So we get 54 for performance, 89 for accessibility, 93 for best practices, 100 for SEO, That's what you want to hear on the SEO show. And our core web vitals have failed because largest contentful paint takes a bit too long. First contentful paint takes a bit too long. And that's due to like stuff outside our control with JavaScript and all sorts of stuff loading on the site that is just part of web flow. We can't do anything about it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I'm quickly running it through GT metrics. I know you like looking at Google because obviously we're trying to rank on Google, but I don't think the scores were that bad on GTmetrix.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And like the user test, just actually using it yourself, the site's perfectly fast. Like in our case, we call a whole bunch of external YouTube videos that load in the site and that can slow it down. But like to actually use the site, it's fine. Everything loads quickly. And yeah, it's only SEN nerds like us that are going to be obsessed with Core Web Vitals and performance scores in PageSpeed Insights. The actual people using the site, it's totally fine at the moment.

ARTHUR: So it scores C. I just ran a mobile test. Performance, 66%, which isn't too bad. Server response time, 1.8 seconds. That's very, very slow.

MICHAEL: And it's hosted on AWS. Like it's, you know. That's weird. Because when you go use a site, it's loading quicker than that. Like we're not sitting around. No. Yeah. I know.

ARTHUR: I know. I just did a, I did a test from Sydney. Do you get to choose, like I know with like Kinsta, you choose the closest location server to wherever you are, right?

MICHAEL: No. Yeah. You don't, but there's a, it's like a CDN. Right.

ARTHUR: Who knows. That's the only thing that's really slowing it down. If it wasn't for that, it'd be, you know, an A. Yep.

MICHAEL: Anyway. Yep. So, and PageSpeed Insights is saying that, same thing essentially for like first content, full paint, three seconds. Not too hard. It's hard, hard enough saying it once for me. Um, whatever. I don't really think like, there's not really anything else that's been annoying with it for me.

ARTHUR: So I guess it's just like WordPress powers most of the internet, right? So there's just so many WordPress developers that you can find on Upwork or wherever, um, finding a web flow developer, not as easy. So, Yeah. I think that's just because it's a smaller CMS, not as many people use it, but I guess having WordPress opens up a lot more developer options. Yeah. More and cheaper. Cheaper. Yeah, definitely cheaper. And I don't know how well it does for e-com Webflow.

MICHAEL: Right. Yeah. I know it's got the functionality, but I haven't used it.

ARTHUR: I haven't seen that I know of a Webflow e-com site yet.

MICHAEL: Why would you bother? Why bother? There's Shopify. I know. Go use that. or WooCommerce or Shopify, really. I would say like the devs on Webflow generally are more expensive. Like we use people based in Eastern Europe so far for Webflow. Whereas with WordPress, you could find developers in Pakistan, India, Philippines. It's going to be very cheap to get work done. So again, if that matters to you, then WordPress is probably going to be the better option. Again, it's like the Apple, World versus Windows. A lot of parallels. A lot. Let's talk about the SEO that we're up to because we're doing a little bit of search engine optimization for our new Webflow site.

ARTHUR: Are you sure you want to give away our secrets?

MICHAEL: Well, I won't do that. I'll give away a little bit. We've done a bit of SEO over the years, link building here and there, but I haven't been really concerned effort and plan behind it. It's been very ad hoc and sporadic. Um, this year we thought with the switch to Webflow 2024 is the year that we get a lot more SEO traffic for our insight. Why not? We're an agency that do SEO for people. We get great results, but we want our insight to rank. We don't want it sitting in the doldrums, like just for, I guess, um, bragging rights, right? So that's what we're doing. Guess what, Arthur? Mm-hmm. We created a parameter SEO parameter page. Mm-hmm. We're in the top three Wow Well done well done so you guys search for SEO parameter we're in the top three right now That page shows probably an example of what we're up to on-site. So we've just been really set We've got a few key pages. We're focusing on where we're building out the on-site content We're doing FAQs, we're making sure that we're going super in-depth, we're looking at other sites that rank and making sure that we're addressing it just as well so that Google likes what it sees when it lands on our site. As we said before, we've been working on improving load speed as much as we could within the limits of Webflow. Your favorite link building? I love link building. We're doing link building, which is something we haven't been doing for years. It's not going to be overnight, but over the rest of this year, as we link build, you'll start to see our traffic improve.

ARTHUR: Hopefully it has really been a long time, hasn't it? It's been years.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Maybe longer. Um, the other area that we're doing a lot more of is blog content. So we're really building out topical maps for each of the main service lines that we offer as a business. And, publishing that content, you know, consistently, and then really doing a lot of internal linking within the service line silos. And there's a lot of strategy behind what we're doing there. But the idea is that, you know, if we try to go out there and be relevant for SEO services or email marketing, we can't just have one service page on the site. We need to have all of that supporting content so that when Google lands on our site, it sees that we are topical authorities. So, that combined with the link building is really where the bulk of the efforts, not the efforts, but results are going to come from for us this year. For those following along at home, you can go to Ahrefs, just see how we're going. Shuffles up.

ARTHUR: Hopefully, we did it. Touch wood, we'll be ranked well and our visibility will be good.

MICHAEL: If anything happens, it's Arthur's fault, but if it goes well, it was all me.

ARTHUR: Just keep that in mind. You can throw me under the bus, I don't care.

MICHAEL: But we migrated in right at the end of last year, so right before Christmas break. And since then, according to Ahrefs, which isn't analytics, but it gives you an idea, our traffic has doubled, admittedly coming off a low base, but we've doubled. So let's keep doubling every quarter and revisit this maybe at the end of the year, because yeah, we put it out there in the world now, so we've got to get results.

ARTHUR: Well, now we're going to be held accountable, so we have to We have to rank. We have to rank.

MICHAEL: Hold us accountable. Go to the SEOshow.co. Send us a speech pipe. Tell us any holes in our SEO strategy, what you do to improve. And if you tell us something good, we'll put you on the show. What do you say?

ARTHUR: I reckon it's a good idea. Hopefully we won't be migrating back to WordPress anytime soon.

MICHAEL: I got to say, we were a little bit worried that all our keywords were just sitting on page two, page three. Not pushing onto page one, a little bit concerned that we'd done something to torch the site or Google just didn't like us.

ARTHUR: I kept telling you what we'd tell any client. It's only been a couple of weeks. Don't have to hit the panic button just yet. We've only just migrated. Imagine what you would be telling a client that would be saying this to you.

MICHAEL: Exactly. And I said, I don't want to hear it. Where's my rankings?

ARTHUR: It's still early days, a lot of changes, brand new CMS, new code for Google to crawl, content removed, content added, content changed.

MICHAEL: We've done a disavow as well because we saw some random exact match crappy links coming to our site that we definitely didn't build. So done a bit of a cleanup there. So I'll tell you what will be interesting is when a big algorithm update happens because that's when things really shake out. Is all the work we're doing now going to be rewarded or hurt by that? Only time will tell.

ARTHUR: Well, hopefully rewarded. When was the last big core update? There's been a few small ones.

MICHAEL: The helpful content at the end of last year or whenever it was. Okay. When Reddit started ranking. So would you, would you, would you a big whopper?

ARTHUR: I would do an episode about our conspiracy theory about why Reddit ranks.

MICHAEL: Oh, let's do that and talk about, um, Gemini AI and all that's going on with that in the next episode. That's a good episode. Yeah. Stay tuned. That's a banger. That's next week's episode, but until then, happy SEOing.

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