In 2018., there were 30.2 million small businesses registered in the United States alone. As most of them are aware that it is hard to build a sustainable business without having an online presence, more than 60% of small businesses use a website as one of the ways to connect with their customers.

If you are a marketer and that percentage seems somewhat low to you, keep in mind that still leaves you with over 19 million small business pages that compete for their space on top of search results.

And that number will only continue to grow. Why? Because of two very simple reasons:

1. The abundance of proof that having a website helps your business succeed
2. The increased availability of quality website builders that are fairly cheap and simple to use means that most entrepreneurs and small business owners have all the tools they need to quickly create a decent website

While having the ability to quickly create a good looking website is great, if no one gets to see it, what is the purpose of creating it? One big concern many business owners and marketers have when it comes to website builders is that these tools will limit their chances of ranking high in search engines.

These concerns didn’t just randomly fall from the sky. In their beginning, many website builders did miss some important on-page SEO options like:

• Limiting your ability to customize headings
• 301 redirects were not available
• You couldn’t customize URL the way you wanted

Even though the majority of website builder platforms fixed these problems, many marketers and website designers will still first recommend WordPress and self-coded websites over builders like Wix, Jimdo, Weebly or GoDaddy Website Builder.

To illustrate how polarizing this question is, we are a team dedicated to reviewing website builders and even our office wasn’t able to reach a consensus on the question if Google prefers WordPress and self-coded websites over website builders.

The Great Website Builder SEO Experiment – The Infographic

We decided to put this to the test. We ran a 6-month long SEO experiment designed to answer the following questions:

1. Will website builder sites get indexed in a reasonable amount of time?
2. Will WordPress and self-coded websites have a higher ranking on average?

We tested the following platforms…

1. WordPress
2. Self-coded
3. Wix
4. Weebly
5. Jimdo

…and the results show that website builders are much better than people give them credit.

You can find a detailed summary of the experiment on the infographic below. For the full report, check out our website builders SEO experiment post.

 

Robert Brandl’s passion has always been web tools that make your life easier. That’s why he founded the WebsiteToolTester, where you can find reviews and tutorials for the world’s best website builders and e-commerce platforms. You can connect with or tweet Robert @webtooltester

 

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