I completed my site migration from Wordpress around six months ago. The past month or so I have been getting quite a few inquiries via the contact form and I figured this is just because spring is here and it’s “flying season”. Long story short, I entered my ideal keyword into google and my site is ranked #4 now! When it was a wordpress site it was always ranking right around #40. Now it’s #4 and I didn’t even do any SEO to it. I simply copy/pasted all the text and metadata directly from the wordpress database. That’s it! Anyway, I’m sharing this in case any lurkers have been considering trying out GRAV, especially if they’re wanting to escape the bloat of wordpress.
Of course YMMV but the very nature of GRAV had me believing the site would be better optimized and gain a few positions in the SERPs, but the go from page 4 to the top 5 of page 1 is very encouraging.
And FWIW, my wordpress site was running the Thesis theme/framework which is supposedly one of the absolute best available for SEO… and GRAV crushed it!
I looked through the chrome lighthouse stuff and my site is being docked for some things that are simply not worth the effort to fix (such as uploading numerous different image sizes of the same image for the different areas of different pages upon which that image may be displayed) and other things that I have no way of controlling (such as “reduce unused javascript” or “enable text compression”).
The SEO category, which is what I was concerned about when I switched to GRAV, scored a 96 and I did nothing – LITERALLY NOTHING – to achieve that and that is what I wanted anyone curious about experimenting with GRAV to see.
Going from relative obscurity to practically front-and-center by simply changing the CMS is worth some recognition and the devs should be applauded for it.
I found the same - I rebuilt the site in GRAV and am getting much much better results for my site. In the top 10 for loads of useful keywords. I think it’s because the semantic structure is very clear. To be fair, I also use the premium SEO plugin, I don’t know how much that helps. We currently are in the top 10 for around 850 keywords (albeit from Search Console so this includes all the similar variations).
Bravo to you. I’m not using the SEO plugin as I don’t really have much to gain whether or not my blog gets extra attention or not, but top 10 for 850 keywords is no small task. Nice work!
As a web developer I would like to add my congratulations for the good work and I would like to add something else:
With Grav it has been very easy for me to reach 100 in the 4 types of scores (performance, accessibility, Bes practices and SEO), simply because the CMS allows me to create websites with very clean and customised code. So, meeting web standards is easy. Achieving that with other CMSs is possible but much more complicated.
When it was a wordpress site it was always ranking right around #40. Now it’s #4 and I didn’t even do any SEO to it. I simply copy/pasted all the text and metadata directly from the wordpress database. That’s it! Anyway, I’m sharing this in case any lurkers have been considering trying out GRAV, especially if they’re wanting to escape the bloat of wordpress.
