Revealed: Which CMS Is Best For SEO in 2024? – Seobility

Revealed: Which CMS Is Best For SEO in 2024?

David McSweeney

Last updated: April 14, 2025 Published: October 21, 2024

During the past few months, we’ve been testing the SEO capabilities of the world’s most popular CMS systems in 2024.

We’ve been revealing the results of our individual tests as we go. And it’s safe to say that some CMS systems performed better than others.

This post is an update of a similar test we did 3 years ago, where we also answered the question of which CMS is best for SEO.

Back then, WordPress was the clear winner. But is this still the case?

Now it’s time to get to the nitty gritty, as we:

If you want to know why we came to our conclusions, then we’ve got all the info you need coming up…

Quick answers

The best CMS for SEO right now

The best CMS for SEO in 2024 is also the world’s most popular: WordPress. This was the case when we tested them three years ago too, so it’s not really a surprise.

However, Joomla (particularly version 5) runs it close. And although Joomla already did very well in our last test, it seems to have improved quite a bit since then.

But when combined with the YOAST SEO plugin, WordPress’s out-of-the-box speed, full control over all on-page SEO fundamentals, and huge community support still give it the edge.

The best website-building platform for SEO

While WordPress and Joomla can be classified as fully-fledged CMS systems, the other three platforms we tested (Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy) are better classified into the subcategory “website building platforms”. Wix was still the clear winner in this subcategory, offering much greater control over SEO fundamentals than its peers.

Wix has actually improved quite a bit since our last test, which wasn’t the case for the other website-building platforms. So, as well as awarding it the title of “best website building platform for SEO” we also feel it’s the fastest improving CMS when it comes to SEO basics.

How we selected the CMS systems to test

There are a ton of CMS systems out there.

But we decided to focus our testing on the most popular content-focused CMS systems by market share (with one exception).

Why do we say content-focused?

Well, technically Shopify is a CMS. Indeed, according to w3techs it’s currently the second most popular CMS on the planet. But we’re sure most would agree that Shopify is better classed as an eCommerce platform.

So we skipped Shopify and selected the other four most popular CMS systems in w3techs top five:

  1. WordPress (62.6% market share)
  2. Shopify (6.5%)
  3. Wix (4.2%)
  4. Squarespace (3.1%)
  5. Joomla (2.4%)

For our final selection, we decided to deviate from using popularity for selection.

The next most popular content-focused CMS system by market share is currently Drupal (1.3%). But we believe that much of this share is likely to be made up of legacy sites. Google Trends shows that its popularity has been on a serious decline ever since its peak around 2010.

So instead we jumped the list a bit and chose to test GoDaddy’s Website Builder.

Why we included GoDaddy’s Website Builder in our testing

GoDaddy continues to be the world’s largest individual domain registrar.

And while their Website Builder has a low overall market share (0.5%), we feel that it is likely to include a disproportionately high number of small businesses.

Why?

Because anyone who registers a domain on GoDaddy (currently around 15% of monthly domain registrations) is going to get bombarded with upsells to create their site using GoDaddy’s Website Builder.

They’re going to be getting their CMS in front of a lot of small business owners, many of whom will be looking to launch a website quickly, simply, and fuss-free. That’s the perfect customer for their platform, and the more targeted marketing is, the more effective it is.

So with GoDaddy selected for testing, here’s what our final list looked like.

You can click the links if you want to read the newly updated individual reviews.

How we tested the SEO capabilities of each CMS

We’ll start this section by getting something out of the way.

The CMS system you choose is only a part — perhaps even a small one — of whether or not your site will be successful in search.

Because if your content sucks, you disregard SEO fundamentals, and you don’t pull in some high-quality links, then…

…you ain’t going to rank.

In other words:

A site running on the “worst” CMS for SEO could still outrank a site running on the “best” one.

But what we can say is that the CMS you choose will either help or hinder your SEO efforts.

Which is why we decided to focus on measurable, platform-specific metrics. Primarily:

How fast (or slow) was each CMS?

Speed matters for rankings.

It’s one of the few signals that Google has confirmed influences rankings.

We measured the performance of each of our test sites using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Here’s a summary of the results…

It’s not even close.

The self-hosted sites (Joomla and WordPress) significantly outperformed the sites built with platform-hosted CMS systems.

Our WordPress test site was fastest overall. But Joomla ran it close. Both CMS systems were super quick out-the-box and passed Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) tests with flying colors.

Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy on the other hand all suffered speed issues and our test sites would be likely to fail CWV.

So what was slowing our test sites down?

Well, while they all had their own little quirks, there was a common denominator:

Blanket loading of scripts and styles.

Although this seems to have gotten better over the years, the core of the platform-hosted CMS systems is still pretty heavy and bloated, and there’s no simple way to turn things on and off.

Could the speed issues be resolved?

In short: yes (probably).

Whether you’re on Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder, or Squarespace, you should be able to speed up your site with some technical knowledge, time, and (probably) some spare cash for an extension or two.

We should also point out here that this was the out-of-the-box speed of our WordPress and Joomla sites. With some page speed optimization, we’d certainly be able to get them to run even faster and/or continue running fast with more content/features on the site.

Support for On-Page SEO fundamentals

Now let’s turn our attention to control of some of the fundamental on-page SEO factors.

And since a picture tells a thousand words, we’ll start with a visual summary, which includes an overall score (out of 21) for each CMS.

SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions

How did the CMS systems perform?

WordPress (with YOAST) was the only CMS that gave us everything we wanted.

Page slug / URL

Canonical URLs

Index control (robots meta tag)

Heading Tags (h1, h2, h3 etc)

Structured data (aka schema)

Image SEO

HTTPS

Robots.txt file

XML Sitemaps

Mobile friendly

301 Redirects

Extra features and improvements

Although it’s not part of our main tests, this time around, we also looked at some of the extra features and new additions the CMSs offered.

In summary: Self-hosted platforms still lead the SEO way

Let’s finish by summarizing our findings.

There is a clear divide between the SEO capabilities of the self-hosted CMS systems (WordPress and Joomla) and the platform-hosted systems (Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy).

Not only are you getting a running start out-of-the-box in terms of speed and functionality, but you’re also free to tinker to your heart’s content.

Which is why we felt it’s better to subdivide our results into 2 groups:

  1. Self-hosted CMS systems: WordPress and Joomla
  2. Website building platforms: Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy

While WordPress is the overall best CMS for SEO, Wix is the clear winner in the “website building platforms” category

Conclusion

While still suffering from a number of issues, we were impressed by how much Wix has matured in the past couple of years. It’s certainly no longer the SEO horror story it once was.
In fact, it’s the clear SEO winner in the “website building platforms” subcategory and also the CMS that has improved most since our last round of testing.