SEO in Your CMS
The platform you build on is never neutral. Every CMS hands you a different bundle of freedoms and walls, and the real skill is knowing exactly where yours will not bend.
Chapter 1 gave you the craft. Chapter 2 gave you the operating system for running it inside a real organisation. This chapter is about the one decision that quietly shapes how hard or easy every other chapter will feel: which platform you actually built your site on.
Think of choosing a CMS as choosing what kind of property to build your business on. Rent a shopfront inside a well-run shopping mall and you inherit solid infrastructure but not the right to move a wall. Buy an empty plot of land and hire your own contractors and you get total freedom, plus total responsibility for every contractor you hire. Move into a beautifully serviced apartment and you get comfort on day one, in exchange for walls that were never designed to move. Work in a tailor's studio with proper cutting tools and you can shape anything, provided you take your own measurements first. Take over a custom machine shop when you need enterprise-scale manufacturing. Or rent a modern, recently rewired flat that is a long way from its old, dated reputation.
None of these six platforms is simply "good" or "bad" for SEO. Each is a bundle of trade-offs. The owners who struggle are the ones who never learned which walls in their particular property actually move, and spent two years fighting the ones that do not. The six guides below exist to save you that fight.
The six platforms in this chapter
Read the one you are already on first. If you are still choosing a platform, read all six before you sign anything.
Shopify SEO Guidelines
A well-run mall's shopfront: solid plumbing, fixed addressing, and where to focus your window display instead.
Magento SEO Guidelines
The highest ceiling in ecommerce, and the platform that punishes neglect hardest, all through one filter system.
Webflow SEO Guidelines
The best cutting tools in the business, but nobody takes the measurements for you.
Squarespace SEO Guidelines
Move in today, look good immediately, and learn exactly which walls you are allowed to move.
WordPress SEO Guidelines
The most freedom on this list, and the most rope, because every problem here is a contractor-management problem.
Wix SEO Guidelines
Judge the current wiring, not the old horror stories still circulating about it.
How to work through this chapter
If you already run a site, skip straight to your own platform's guide and treat the rest as background for the day a client or employer lands on your desk with a different one. If you are choosing a platform for a new build, read all six in order first, because the deciding factor is rarely features, it is which specific walls you can live with for the next five years.