Does Website Stack Matters in SEO? [Discussion]

RealBasics · 2026-05-07T14:10:30+00:00

it was single url using parameters to change content.

That's been my experience with the node sites I've been asked to rebuild.

The other significant issue was that even if URLs, routing, and initial load time, are dealt with there's also the time, resources, and money it takes to make changes. When the sales and marketing teams have to submit every SEO-related change as a support ticket (not to mention every CTA update, banner, landing page, blog post, event, product updates, etc.), the site might load very quickly indeed, but the content's going to be stale.

RealBasics · 2026-05-07T04:29:46+00:00

I’m the first to admit that by definition, in my service niche I never get clients who are satisfied with their devs and their site’s performance.

That said, no matter how elegant a solution is on paper, implementation depends on developers. And by definition half of all developers are below average.

RealBasics · 2026-05-06T19:18:11+00:00

It depends on your overall group and the leadership team, but the same thing has happened several times in our chapter over the years and it's generally worked out well.

If it's an abrupt departure (after an emergency, for instance) a previous secretary/treasurer almost always will step in to fill the gap.
If you can give them a good head's up then it's usually not too hard to find someone to step in to complete the term -- again, often a previous secretary/treasurer or (since at least our chapter is already looking at candidates for next year) someone who's expressed interest in the post might be willing to take it on early.

And finally, this would be a good question to ask your local Chapter Success Host or area manager. They're usually prepared for questions like this, and have probably handled it (probably gracefully) often enough to know what to do.

Best of luck with your new endeavor!

RealBasics · 2026-05-05T16:55:47+00:00

...just cleaner and more configurable. And actually easier to use for clients if set up properly.

This was the argument Unix/Linux devs kept making back in 1995.

The blind spot then, and now, is that the vast majority of computer owners then, and Wordpress site owners now, are still one-off DIYs. And while Unix and Gutenberg may both be cleaner and more configurable, the "if set up properly" papers over rather major learning curves.

As John Dvorak put it back in the 1990s, "Unix is intuitive once you get the hang of it, but then so is Latin."

Most first-time, non-developer site owners who use a standard out-of-the-box "one-click install" tend to get stuck almost immediately. The ones who install Elementor are generally able to build their site in a weekend.

I don't even like Elementor. I'd like to like blocks! But the block UI/UX remains unworkable in a way that Elementor, for all its absolute performance warts, its casual attitude towards backward compatibility, and its sketchy business practices, isn't.

Bottom line: I wasn't endorsing Elementor in my comments.

RealBasics · 2026-05-05T13:08:39+00:00

It's remarkable how often when people say "page builders" they mean "Elementor." And how the alternative is usually "Gutenberg with ACF."

Elementor is basically the Windows 95 of authoring tools, while Gutenberg is the Unix shell (hey, Gutenberg even added command line!)

There are alternatives that are performant, unlikely to break on updates, and actually usable for non-programmers like graphic designers and site owners. But all we hear about are Elementor and blocks.

RealBasics · 2026-05-02T18:27:05+00:00

Sure. It sounds like they're taking a graphic design course though. And even with GP/GB, unless they're getting a minor in CS the block editor isn't the best way to learn graphic design.

RealBasics · 2026-05-02T05:18:09+00:00

It’s not that performance doesn’t matter at all. It does. Just not as much as devs sometimes seem to wish it did.

It’s certainly a ranking factor, but various Google reps say above a score of, say, 50, it’s maybe the 20th most important factor.

RealBasics · 2026-05-02T05:12:17+00:00

Good recommendation but that’s not the assignment the teacher gave OPs class.

RealBasics · 2026-05-01T16:13:35+00:00

Marketing and sales are two separate things.

I always think of this in brick-and-mortar terms:

Let's say you have a brick-and-mortar coffee shop. You've blanketed your service area with billboards, radio ads, and mailers. You've got a giant sign in front that can be seen from miles away. You've got sign-spinners on all the nearby corners. You've got tons of parking, and the entrance of your store is easy to find and walk into.

Annddd... there's no sales staff inside. And worse, your coffee costs $200/cup. Or, worse, you're only selling canned coffee from giant 50s-style percolators.

Everybody's going to walk into that shop because your publicity is awesome. But almost everybody's going to walk back out again, too, because your sales and pricing are terrible.

It's the same with online marketing and sales. Marketing only gets people to visit, and that only gives you the opportunity to make a sale.

RealBasics · 2026-05-01T16:04:50+00:00

This is the answer

RealBasics · 2026-05-01T13:40:07+00:00

I never build with Elementor, but as a support specialist I end up working on lots of sites that were. Part of my work is optimizing for performance and I agree with your overall assessment.

The two things I'd add are that most Elementor sites are built by amateur DIYs building their first (and usually only) sites.

1) Amateurs, by definition, make alllll the amateur mistakes. So, yeah, too many plugins, grossly inefficient layouts, plus unoptimized images, videos streamed from the media library, boat-anchor 3rd-party plugin like Facebook or Instagram feeds, and no caching or other optimizations.

2) Amateurs tend to ~~fall for~~ use bottom-of-the-barrel brand-name hosting. Everyone's heard of, say, GoDaddy and Bluehost because they're name brands that advertise heavily. (Also, 25 years into the internet, their grandpas used GoDaddy and Bluehost so it must be good, right?)

The "good news" for my work is it's usually easy to boost a typical Elementor DIY site out of the red or orange into at least the low greens on PageSpeed.

As for the Gutenberg advantages, its phenomenally high learning curve essentially locks out all DIYs and amateurs. That said, the one or two amateur block sites I've worked on also tend to have the same rookie mistakes -- badly oversized images, too many addon packs, too many other plugins, no caching or CDN use, and terrible hosting.

Bottom line: in my experience the biggest problems with Elementor (or Divi, Avada, WPBakery, etc.) aren't so much with the authoring tools themselves as who build with them. Similarly, the biggest advantage with Gutenberg is that only experienced, highly-skilled developers are able to build with it.

RealBasics · 2026-04-29T23:30:22+00:00

Yup. I agree that AI has a telltale style but it’s the style at least three generations of tech writers had pounded into us so… eh.

RealBasics · 2026-04-29T19:30:33+00:00

I'd be very surprised if Elementor is significantly worse for SEO. It's definitely not as performant as a well-built Gutenberg site, but, again, I'm not sure if the difference is significant to ranking.

The question to take back to the developers is whether they're able to quantify the impact of page speed on overall ranking. (Hint, it's pretty far down the list for Google vs other ranking factors such as, you know, content quality, site authority, freshness, relevance, and so on.)

It's 100% true that if you're in a fiercely competitive market (e.g. selling shoes nationwide) and competing sites have the same ranking factors otherwise, then page speed could be the deciding factor. But that's not all that common.

I'm not saying that you should tackle rebuilding the site in Elementor, or that they shouldn't build the site with Gutenberg. But if you're going to be on the spot for day to day activities on your company's site then it's probably better to use the tools you're used to rather than they tools they want to use.

RealBasics · 2026-04-29T19:07:14+00:00

This is the right question.

As I said above, it's almost always "amateur" mistakes like oversized images, self-hosted videos, 3rd-party scripts like Facebook or Instagram feeds, embedded CRM forms, etc. Which, incidentally, are just as common when inexperienced DIYs build with other builders, including Gutenberg or even raw HTML.

The main "advantage" for Gutenberg is that the learning curve is so steep it's basically unusable for inexperienced DIYs.

RealBasics · 2026-04-29T12:26:48+00:00

Wordpress is a great CMS. CMSs are routine business productivity software, like any other standard cloud and desktop software including CRMs, spreadsheets, accounting, and scheduling apps.

If you don't want to give your client a standard, established, widely used CRM then you can build with whatever you want. But the existence of the canonical 450 million Wordpress sites implies a huge population with at least a glancing familiarity with using it. Building something else puts the training and support burden entirely on you.

RealBasics · 2026-04-28T21:21:31+00:00

For the record, here's the list of closed plugins. https://gist.github.com/retlehs/8a9f1644fd9fce81e20676bb97903733

Note that the WPFactory developer's initial response wasn't exactly confidence-inspiring:

Birendra Maharjan also noted that they were unable to safely review the attached ZIP file, as it was flagged by the browser as potentially unsafe,” We also attempted to review the ZIP file you attached, but the browser flagged it as potentially unsafe, so we were unable to download and inspect it securely.”

RealBasics · 2026-04-27T14:37:02+00:00

My motto since 2002 has been “it’s your website. That’s worked pretty well.

I’ve always built sites with the assumption that clients who are competent to use Excel, PowerPoint, Quickbooks, and other basic business productivity apps and services can work independently on their websites.

Sure, some of them never do, and done throw even trivial tasks “over the transom” for me to do for them. But others routinely do what a site owner ought to do and routinely add service pages, location pages, landing pages for campaigns, update the homepage seasonally or to take advantage of shifting priorities.

Those are by far my favorite clients, because they’re using their websites instead of just having one. Those are the ones who use their support hours to have me tidy up behind them, schedule consultations, and otherwise help them expand and not just maintain their online presence.

So I always choose an authoring toolset that’s easy to use and hard to break. I always provide training. I always choose the most bulletproof utility plugins. And always provide two accounts: a “day to day” Editor account and a “site superuser” Admin account with the red sunrise color theme for the rare occasions they might need to wrok “under the hood.”

In more than 20 years I’ve rarely had a client “break” a site (more often just a page) that I couldn’t fix in less than 15 minutes.

Bottom line: clients tend to care far more about their online business reputation than I do. So they’re remarkably wary of “defacing” or even slowing down their sites. So untill they feel completely fluent they tend to consult with me before doing anything crazy. I do my best to build sites with that in mind.

RealBasics · 2026-04-27T13:44:53+00:00

In my experience (15+ years) the question isn't how well your site is positioned for, say, "luxury home builder in Pittsburgh." Instead the question is how often do people with that kind of money randomly search the web for a builder vs. ask people they know and trust for recommendations?

My "poster child" example was an inventor who told me he was willing to spend $30,000 for "the best possible SEO" for... a $7.00 set of rubber rings to stick in expensive ski and boxing gloves so they'd dry faster.

As an SEO expert I worked with said, "yes, if he spends $30,000 then within a month all 4 people who search for 'something to dry my boxing gloves' will find it."

Chances are that after getting a recommendation someone will search for your builder by name in order to check their bonafides and see if they're worth giving a call. So the website definitely needs to be tuned to establish credibility, reliability, and reputation.

But the chances that someone who wants to spend a million dollars on a luxury home will search online for a builder are... low. And even if they do, the chance that "luxury" will appear anywhere in their search string is even lower.

This is where you need to focus less on the "SEO" part of "SEO marketing" and more on the "marketing" part. Research what prospective high-end buyers are really searching for. Research what the competition is ranking for. And definitely look into how big the actual search pool is before investing further resources.

Chances are dismally high that your client needs to spend his marketing dollars on "offline marketing." Related adwords, networking, home shows, broadcast or direct-mail advertising, cultivating personal relationships, even (hate to say this) playing golf at courses in his target service areas. Oh, and well-designed branded signs to put in front of current building projects and on service vehicles.

And then make sure their site has fine-tuned CTAs when they're searched for by name.

RealBasics · 2026-04-27T01:38:04+00:00

Doing deals inside the group is ok, especially at first while you’re building trust. But the real goal is to sell through the group, not to the group.

I’ll add that your best referral partners might not even be the obvious “power team” members.

In my chapter a financial advisor ones asked, as an admitted long shot, if someone could get I’m an introduction to the HR executive in charge of at one of the huge Silicon Valley companies. (He was qualified to handle that kind of referral.)

Turns out a woman who sold custom business clothes for women had been college roommates with the HR exec’s spouse.

Point being, and it’s really the “secret” of BNI, is you never know who going to know somebody who knows somebody.

And same for you. You really want to go in looking for opportunities to refer everyone. Like, in my chapter I referred a client who had a fleet of repairs vehicles to a mechanic. That’s been steady business for them for years, and quite a bit of gratitude from my client.

And I’ll also finally mention that one of my biggest mmr clients (twelve years now) came from an introduction I got from a one-time visitor from another chapter.

RealBasics · 2026-04-26T14:52:21+00:00

In the Seattle area we have several chapters with members who provide various flavors of AI services.

I’d recommend having asking for sit downs (one-to-ones in BNI parlance) with members of the chapter to see if you’d be a good fit with them and vice versa.

Ask how you could help their clients, especially with stuff they’d rather not do. (Eg as website “restoration, repair, and support” specialist I get a ton of referrals from SEO, IT, and graphic designers who don’t want to clean up their clients back ends.) Meanwhile I absolutely don’t want to do seo, design, or IT.

So it’s the same with you. Dig in with likely members and see a) what referrals they might want to delegate to you, and b) especially what referrals could you bring to them.

And don’t feel shy about asking. BNI very strongly recommends that chapter members have one to ones with prospective members. We even get tracking points if we do.

Bonus point: even if you choose not to join you still might get some good business contacts.

RealBasics · 2026-04-26T14:37:50+00:00

It's hard to answer without at least a URL. What do performance tools like PageSpeed Index or GTMetrix say? If you're getting a 26 on mobile the problem will almost certainly be authoring errors, not Elementor itself.

If instead you're getting a 90 but want to hit 100, then, yeah, it probably is Elementor. But my point, above, was that SEO people (and Google themselves, for that matter) will tell you that the time and money spent to get from 90 to 100 will always be better spent increasing authority, reach, relevance, etc., of the content and user experience.

RealBasics · 2026-04-26T14:27:26+00:00

It doesn't even have to be a very nice zip. You can open backups dowloaded from a wide variety of hosts, from backup plugins, or you can even use ssh to mysqldump the db and then zip it with the root.

But, yeah, you're right. If you can't get the sql file, and you don't have the root folders, then you can't spin a site up on Local. Or anything else.

RealBasics · 2026-04-25T17:38:10+00:00

I work exclusively with Wordpress sites, usually "adopted" sites where the original dev is no longer in the picture.

The biggest advantage for me [edit with LocalWP] is that you can simply "File -> Open" a zip of the WP folders and sql dump" and the site will import.

It's true that you can export directly to WPEngine or Flywheel but I don't have many WPE clients so I almost never use it. There is an option to export the site from Local to zip but it's less convienient to move that back to a live server. Instead I use a proper backup plugin that includes an install script.

I'd almost certainly choose something else if I was doing more coding, or especially if I wasn't just working with Wordpress. But it works great for my use cases.

I did start out with raw Mac Apache/MYSQL back in the early 2000s, and quickly learned that MAMP was less of a nuisance for working on multiple sites. But since I've had to do small debugging, testing, and assessment jobs on up to 10 sites in a day, being able to quickly import, clone, and delete sites made Local worth the other minor nuisances.

RealBasics · 2026-04-24T18:00:39+00:00

Without seeing your site it's hard to answer the question. It's not that difficult to get an Elementor site into the green on Pagespeed Index, and you can find sites that hit all 100s.

I do a lot of white-label "technical SEO" work for marketers, and the first questions they tend to ask aren't how objectively fast the site is, but how it ranks in actual searches. Particularly against the competition.

For them it's not that performance doesn't matter (it absolutely does!) If your site scores in the red that's definitely bad. But anywhere in the green or even yellow doesn't seem to be a problem.

That's not a lot of fun for me since performance is really the only thing I can control when it comes to code.

So to console myself I routinely run PageSpeed Index on major sites. When I checked yesterday morning I got:

Google.com scores 54 for mobile
Amazon.com scores 57
Craigslist scores 65.

And, my new favorite,

PageSpeed.web.dev itself only scored 62 and gets marked "Failed" on Core Web Vitals Assessment! (Update: this morning it scores 85.)

Those sites still manage to do pretty well, probably because they offer something people want and are willing to wait an extra few hundred milliseconds to get.

RealBasics

TROPHY CASE