Top 10 Best CMS Options for SEO

If you’re looking to boost your website rankings through SEO, you need to make sure every component of your website is compatible with optimization tactics. And one key website component is your CMS, or your content management system.

A CMS is a platform that helps businesses publish content on their website, like blog posts and landing pages. So you want to find a CMS that makes it easy for search engines to index and crawl your content, find your focus keywords, and more.

To help you find the best option, we’ve put together the top 10 best CMS platforms for SEO. Scroll through our comparison guide until you find one that will work for your business.

How to Choose the Best CMS for SEO

As you browse through different CMS options, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself to help you choose the best one for your business and its needs.

• Is this CMS compatible with your website? Some website builders have a built-in CMS, so you don’t need to keep searching. But if you’ve had a custom built website, you’ll need to be a bit pickier with the CMS you set up to help you publish blog content.
• Does the CMS fit in your budget? Each of the CMS options on our list comes with a monthly subscription cost. Those costs vary depending on features and capabilities. Make sure the monthly rate fits within your website or marketing budget.
• Is the CMS easy to use? If you plan to use the CMS yourself, you’ll want to make sure it’s user-friendly and doesn’t take a ton of time to learn. This way, you can easily jump in and get started publishing content—and make sure it’s optimized for search.
• Does this CMS help with SEO? Of course, the main goal we’re looking for is a CMS that helps your website rank higher in search results. So you need to look into the features that will do just that. Read on in the next section to get an understanding of which features you need to keep an eye out for.

CMS Features That Boost SEO

If you’re looking for the best CMS for SEO capabilities, you need to know which features you should be looking for. These key CMS features will let you optimize your blog posts and landing pages for search results.

• Customizable Meta Data: You need to have the ability to customize meta data like the meta title, description, and other key details. This is what appears in search engine results, so you need to be able to edit this for optimization.
• Technical SEO/Schema Support: Make sure you can make technical SEO changes and optimizations within your CMS, like editing schema, building a sitemap, implementing canonical URLs, and more.
• Mobile Optimization: Having mobile-optimized web pages is a must for SEO (as well as user experience), so make sure your CMS creates mobile responsive web pages and blog posts.
• Fast-Loading: Similarly, you want your website to load quickly, so make sure the CMS doesn’t take too long to load certain elements or pages.
• SEO Plugins/Integrations: There’s likely no CMS that has every single thing you need built in already, so look for options that offer integrations or additional plugins to add even more functionality to your website.

Top 10 Best CMS Options for SEO

Let’s help you find the best CMS for SEO so your website is ready to rank at the top of search engine results pages. Browse these 10 options to see which is the best for your needs.

1. WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS and website builder out there, with 43.5% of all websites using WordPress as their CMS. WordPress can build extremely powerful websites, and its customizability makes it a fantastic option.

Not only that, because WordPress is so popular, there are millions of themes and plugins out there to help customize your design and add on even more functionality—SEO included.

Why it’s great for SEO: WordPress offers a number of external plugins that can let you create the SEO website strategy that works for your business. Yoast SEO is one of the more popular plugins, but you can also easily connect tools like Google Analytics to your WordPress website.

Potential downsides: The more plugins you add, the slower your site can be, causing technical SEO issues. You also need more experience in website management in order to use WordPress for SEO.

2. Drupal

Drupal is a CMS that can be fully customized to fit your business’s needs. However, it requires someone with website development skills to use to design a website or digital experience. This is a great option for businesses who need a complex website to turn to.

Why it’s great for SEO: The Drupal CMS is built for marketers, meaning there are lots of SEO capabilities baked in to make this process as easy as possible. Take advantage of the SEO checklist anytime you publish a new post or page.

Potential downsides: While Drupal has aimed to make its CMS easy for marketers to understand, it still requires some serious training and technical knowledge, unlike many of the other options on our list that are much more intuitive.

3. Webflow

Webflow is a website builder perfect for teams with no coding knowledge. Users can edit and customize the design right on the page. Its CMS capabilities are similar, letting marketers edit content exactly where it’ll appear on the page.

Why it’s great for SEO: Users can easily edit SEO elements right inside the page, while also being able to access additional settings like meta data, schema markup, sitemap navigation, and more.

Potential downsides: Because Webflow was made to be design-first, its SEO capabilities feel almost like an afterthought. They’re not as comprehensive and easy-to-use as other CRMs on our list.

4. Joomla

Joomla is a good middle ground between WordPress and Drupal. It can do more than a WordPress site can, but is easier to use for the layman than Drupal is. However, it still tends to require technical skills to really make the most of the platform.

Why it’s great for SEO: Joomla has some SEO capabilities baked into its platform, like the ability to customize meta data for search engine results displays as well as to input a focus keyword and build a site map.

Potential downsides: Because Joomla is right in the middle of WordPress and Drupal, many businesses tend to opt for one of the other options based on whether they need a more custom website (Drupal) or they want to have more customization options via plugins (WordPress).

5. Wix

Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder and CMS, perfect for smaller businesses looking for a more DIY approach to website management. It’s easy to create webpages and blog content without needing any kind of technical or coding knowledge.

Why it’s great for SEO: Wix comes with several SEO tools that help Wix websites rank in search results, like the ability to customize meta data and URL structure, make technical SEO changes, and select a focus keyword for your webpages.

Potential downsides: Wix is perfect for basic, small business websites, but is not an ideal platform for large businesses looking to scale.

6. Squarespace

Squarespace is another drag-and-drop website builder meant to make it easy for businesses to create and manage their own websites—and that includes SEO. It’s a template and block-based builder, and while its widgets are aesthetically pleasing, it does limit customization greatly compared to other options on our list.

Why it’s great for SEO: Squarespace includes SEO page settings that let you create custom meta titles and descriptions for each page, choose whether or not to index certain pages, and organize your sitemap. You can also see which keywords your content is ranking for.

Potential downsides: Its SEO options are very basic, so while you have the bare minimum of ensuring your pages can rank and appear how you want them to in search results, you don’t have much more control than that.

7. Shopify

Shopify is a go-to CMS for ecommerce businesses, so the platform has put a major emphasis on its SEO capabilities. This is good to see, given that over 5 million businesses use Shopify as their CMS of choice. Some of those are large retailers, as well, with the likes of Gymshark bringing in $500 million in annual revenue through its Shopify site.

Why it’s great for SEO: Shopify offers both built-in and external SEO tools. Built-in options let you customize your meta data while some third-party apps like the GoSEO Product Optimizer lets you optimize your product listings for search.

Potential downsides: Shopify’s SEO tools are product-focused, so content that isn’t product pages (like informational webpages or blog content) are often difficult to optimize using this platform.

8. Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce (previously Magento before it was brought under the Adobe umbrella) is a Shopify competitor, offering another option for ecommerce businesses looking to sell products while also ranking well in search. Because Adobe Commerce is better for large, enterprise retailers, it of course makes sure that those businesses can be found in search.

Why it’s great for SEO: Adobe Commerce offers in-depth SEO tools that help its enterprise clients optimize their product pages for search.

Potential downsides: Because Adobe Commerce tends to partner with businesses with large teams, its SEO options are extremely technical, meaning they’re mostly meant for developers to handle.

9. Prismic

Prismic is a headless CMS for very specific use cases, helping marketing teams quickly build marketing websites and landing pages with an easy-to-use page builder. It supports Next.js, Nuxt, and SvelteKit sites, which are popular JavaScript frameworks.

Why it’s great for SEO: Prismic has both technical and content optimization features, ensuring its users are able to make their content appear in search results.

Potential downsides: Prismic is extremely technical, requiring some level of coding knowledge to really make the most out of its CMS.

10. Optimizely

Optimizely is a CMS catered mostly to enterprise companies looking to create large websites with hundreds or even thousands of webpages. Businesses can edit the content on their landing pages while also getting a preview of what it will look like, but the tool also ensures these pages are SEO-friendly.

Why it’s great for SEO: Optimizely offers SEO tools that can help large businesses ensure all of their thousands of webpages are fully optimized for search.

Potential downsides: Optimizely requires more technical expertise than other CMSes on our list, and is also one of the pricier options, given that it’s meant for larger businesses.

Find the Best CMS for SEO and Your Business

One of the most important parts of creating a website is making sure it has all of the tools it needs to rank in search engine results and help your business get discovered organically. Find the best CMS for your SEO needs—but also make sure to run each page you publish through our SEO checklist.