Last week, I received a call from a lady who was concerned about the performance of her website. It was an ecommerce website, and she wasn’t receiving as many orders as she would have liked, nor as many as one of her competitors who she believed she was comparable with on price point.
This is a common problem with retail websites. There are so many reasons why a retail website wouldn’t be performing as well as it should, and it would take a full analysis of the website, the traffic, the orders and goals to discover the reasons for the lack of performance.
However, this lady said she has already spoken with someone else who had told her, and I quote:
“Your website is in WordPress. Google hates WordPress. You need a Shopify website.”
I seriously had to bite my tongue as I heard this. Google hates WordPress? That’s a new one. Rather than let my anger at what I’d heard get the better of me, I enquired more as to what this other person had said. It turns out they had an agenda. Can you guess what it was?
That’s right, they wanted to sell them a Shopify website.
Now, let’s start with the sweeping statement here: Google hates WordPress. As of 2015, more than 25% of ALL websites on the internet are built using WordPress.
That’s a ridiculous stat to get your head round, so let’s try and quantify that. The data from W3Techs shows that WordPress has grown in popularity from 13.1% of all websites in 2011, to 25% in 2015.
ManageWP noted in 2014 that more than 74 million websites used WordPress as their CMS (content management system), which is enough for every single person living in Turkey.
WordPress plugins allow the platform to always be at the cutting edge of technology, and it was one of the first platforms to adopt Google AMP, and is the recommended platform for Facebook Instant Articles.
No, the comment that ‘Google hates WordPress’ was total nonsense, and was uttered by someone who either hasn’t a clue what they’re talking about, or was straight-out lying.
How would a website owner know, however? How would they know if someone is telling them the truth, or just fibbing to try and sell them a new website?
Well, one way would be to ask what evidence they have. With the example at hand, the person saying that Google hates WordPress had not looked at the site’s performance in Google Analytics or Google Console at all. How do I know this? Because the website doesn’t have either installed.
How can you gauge a website’s performance, and see where it is going wrong, without any data? You can’t. Yet someone was still trying to sell a new website to an unsuspecting business owner.
Suffice to say, we are able to help this lady and her website. She doesn’t need a new website, and certainly not a Shopify one. Be very wary of people who say you need a new website without even looking through your existing one. They don’t have your best interests at heart, and they may not even know what they’re talking about.
Finally, if someone tells you something outlandish, such as ‘Google hates WordPress’, don’t take them at face value. Do a little research yourself to see if that is true. The best way? Just ask Google.
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