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Best platform to build an authority website? (18)

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Hi guys,

I am into paid traffic right now, but I want to build an authority website to be covered when my campaigns will fail, and I am not sure what platform is best to use. I don't like WordPress and I would like to know the SEO's experts opinion about platforms like Weebly and Wix.
I plan to build an authority website with 100+ articles.
Please let me know your opinion about this.

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Building authority websites is more about the content, back-links, authorship, social signals ... than the back-end solution. It's true that some people claim google prefers certain solutions, which might be true , but when you look at the most successful websites ... most are running on custom coded CMS so I wouldn't worry to much about this. As long as the code is clean and easy to read for the spiders, you should be fine.

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Thank you for reply.

Yes I know that a lot of things matter to rank on google, but I am interested to use an easy to use platform and in the same time SEO friendly and I am nor sure which one to choose. I've found Weebly and Wix, but I am not sure if it is a good idea to put a lot of content on these platform because is hosted on their servers.
These platforms are html platforms.

I know a lot of people use customized Wordpress, but I don't like to deal with all those plugins.

So I would really appreciate if a SEO expert can give me some advice regarding this.

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WordPress is easily your best pick for such 'ahoturity' site, other open source CMS's are okay as well, but seriously wp is the easiest. Dont use Wix for sure.
100 articles are just a figure, it does not mean authortiy at all, I hope you get that. Some site with 30 articles are more authoritative then 10k+ articles content farms.

Focus on quality (skyscraper) + shitload of OK backlinks and outreached mentions.

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I know people do well with themed restaurants, where owners take the extra step in order to make their customers feel great when visiting their place ... but I don't like messing with stuff like that, so I'm gonna open another cookie cutter burger place and hope for the best ... see where I'm going? All the plugins are there to improve your websites usability, ease of navigation and also readability for SEs along with putting the right stuff where it belongs (SEO plugins).

All those plugins are your friends, not your enemies.

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Use Wordpress, Is the easiest in the long run for an authority website, making a authority website is a lot of Work ( learning Wordpress is the easiest part)

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You really should use Wordpress, but if that was off the table then I’d probably go with squarespace - it’s actually a pretty robust platform with good dev support

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Thank you guys for your advice. I will go with WP. Now I need to find someone which will build a customized theme for my website.

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There is literally a FUCKLOAD of themes for grabs on plenty of theme stores and many of them can get customized directly by the creators, for some fee.

Start looking here for example :

https://www.templatemonster.com/

and

https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress

Both should have some black friday deals still running.

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Avoid Wordpress. It's easy, but Google doesn't give it as much love.

I've found best success with a basic HTML + Bootstrap

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Doesn't managing a big site without a CMS become hard?

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Wordpress is ok

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I have several WP sites ranking well with google's love.
By all means don't use Wix, and as somebody mentioned, Squarespace is a decent choice if you want to go managed, but I'd use WP or other open code CMS if possible.

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If you want to go HTML-only, you'll want to use a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll. They're what I'm using for all my major sites these days: if you set them up right you get great version control, a CMS, super-fast load speeds, and very minimal hosting requirements.

Having said that, WP is still a great choice. The one major pain in the ass with it is server config and caching, but if you've got someone for that or you know the requisite voodoo, you're good to go.

As far as themes go, I'm partial to the themes from Studiopress, but there are indeed tons of them out there. Just be careful that they're not coded really badly and/or really slow.

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Well, that is a big question to ask. If you don't like WordPress, there are many other popular CMS... Like Joomla or Drupal. Mainly, all hosting providers provide a possibility of auto-installation of these web-engines. But as for my opinion - I will choose WordPress above any other options. Why? That is the most simple and convenient CMS, and to start your first simple site - I think - there is no better option than WordPress. It is highly customizable, rich in documentation, and there are a hell lot of plugins, that are easy to install and manage. There are plugins for working with networks by API, for example! A catalogue of themes, that you can install and just enable in a few clicks, a catalogue of plugins with documentation... Wow!

As for the Weebly and Wix... Don't know about first, honestly, but I've tested Wix. Well, you might test it for your implementation. May be it will work for you. It is user-friendly and rather simple. But my advice will be to choose a CMS that fits your taste, and try to know it better. Think of it like an investment, this type of knowledge will definitely be helpful for you if you continue working in this sphere. What if you will want to try SEO optimization or speed tweaking of your site? I think, in that case it will be better to start with something simple like a popular hosted CMS, but multifunctional like a swiss knife, and learn new features step by step rather then launch a site with limited possibilities and then struggle to change smth.

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Yup, it's pretty much impossible to manage a big site without having some kind of a CMS... done that many years ago, but it was a real pain to edit something on many subpages.

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You can use Server-Side Includes to get around some of the problems with no-CMS sites (editing menus on multiple pages, for example), but not all.

You could just use Markdown for your content and then use a Javascript library to convert it into HTML and style it, but honestly at that point you might as well just use Hugo.

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There are actually some systems that operate like a CMS, but will output a statically generated website. Just stumbled on an interesting list of a few here:

https://www.staticgen.com/

Only mildly interesting really though, because I just love WordPress and wouldn't bother with anything else myself.

THAT SAID. I do find adivity claim interesting in a way. I've always wondered how that horrible Text to HTML/CSS Ratio that WordPress has effects rankings.

The only effect I know for certain that large amounts of code can have is that it can cause slower load times; and that in turn actually eats up the budgets allocated to GoogleBot for crawling your site. (They only spend so long on your site. Make the most of their visits and all that.)

But yeah, WordPress is just the way to go these days. It doesn't suck anymore like it did back in '11.

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