Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the key factors that allow your website to rank high on various search engines. This enables your brand to grow seeing as a high search engine ranking exposes more people to your unique products and services.
In this article, we expand on why WordPress’s own personal website editor, Gutenberg, is a superior platform compared to the WordPress multi-purpose theme and page builder, Divi, when it comes to boosting SEO rankings.
Gutenberg vs Divi
The Gutenberg block editor was released with the new version of WordPress 5.0 on 6 December 2018. In previous WordPress versions, all of your website’s content lived inside one massive HTML file. Because of this, every enhancement required various customizations in order to be effective. However, with the new Gutenberg editor, you can determine every facet of your content and define the specifications of each content block.
Divi is a multi-purpose WordPress theme and page builder that allows you to design and customize every part of your website from the ground up. It offers a long feature list and functionality that is quite attractive to designers. Essentially, it enables you to build intricate web pages without using code. If you are not a web developer and require lots of options in terms of design, then Divi might seem like a good option.
Even though Gutenberg and Divi may sound similar in terms of what they can offer you, both of them affect the health of your website in different ways. In order to rank high on search engines, the quality, health and perceived usefulness of your website has to be high.
Website Speed
Divi packs quite a punch when it comes to the features and functionality it offers to its customers. While this may not be a bad thing in terms of designing a beautiful website, all of these features and functionality can tend to slow a website down.
This has a direct effect on the time it takes to load a webpage, which affects your SEO. Instead of loading in 1-2 seconds, pages can take 5-10 seconds to load which negatively affects user experience. Google automatically rewards websites that have a fast loading time with higher rankings.
Divi’s codebase size is usually much larger than any other well-coded lightweight theme since the page builder has to load lots of redundant code for features you likely won’t even use.
Gutenberg, on the other hand, doesn’t offer as many features but makes up for it by being compatible with a range of plugins that can help you to build your dream website. This means that the loading time of a Gutenberg website should be quicker than any multi-purpose WordPress theme, which enhances your SEO ranking.
Shortcode
As your website progresses and your online presence grows, you might want to change platforms one day when it comes to your content management system. Well, when using Divi, this might prove difficult.
Multi-purpose WordPress themes usually use shortcodes in their background code to give you the layout and functionality you desire. Shortcodes aren’t visible to the user. But, these codes are the unseen glue that holds your website together.
Not only is it very difficult to transition to any other CMS when your website’s theme incorporates shortcodes, but it can also slow your website down. Shortcode can also cause issues when the plugins connected to them are deactivated.
However, when it comes to using the Gutenberg block editor, no shortcodes are necessary. The content blocks are pure HTML/CSS.
Many page builder plugins and themes, like Divi, are non-semantic and require more server requests to deploy properly. Gutenberg block editor is more SEO-friendly from the get-go.
Features & Functionality
Divi offers tons of features and functionality, which has often been found to be a bit of an overkill. In fact, many website owners do not even use a fraction of them.
However, because you’re tied into Divi’s particular implementation of all its features, you might still have to install extra plugins to achieve your website-building goals anyway. Not only could this lead to an increased chance of plugin incompatibility, but it will also slow down your website.
When using Gutenberg, this won’t be an issue. You can determine the features and functionality you want by only installing plugins that you truly need. This means you can actively determine your website’s speed. As such, you have more control over your overall SEO ranking and website performance.
In Conclusion
Ranking high on search engines doesn’t have to be complicated. Using reliable WordPress editing platforms, like Gutenberg, that can help you to achieve your online goals is only half of the battle. To see success, you need to put in the effort and focus on SEO. With an intuitive editor like Gutenberg, improving your rankings can be made easier.