What Website Platform Ranks Best in the Wedding Industry?

When you run an SEO agency for wedding professionals, you hear a lot of questions about how to rank higher and reach more potential clients. From which factors influence a website’s SEO to how to get more backlinks, my team and I answer dozens of questions every week.

One question has consistently popped up, and it’s one we could never definitively answer:

“Sara, should I choose a certain website platform for the best SEO?”

While I have my own conclusions, it’s important to me to make data-backed recommendations.  I decided that it was time to find out once and for all: What website platform ranks best in the wedding industry?

How do we figure it out?  My team and I conducted our own study to answer this question.  We had to dig deep into the data to see if a correlation existed between a certain website platform and top rankings — particularly in the wedding industry. Here’s a look at our findings.

Understanding Website Platforms + SEO

A website platform is software built to allow users (in this case, wedding business owners) to create, manage, and publish a website. Popular website platforms in the wedding industry include Squarespace, Showit, WordPress, Wix, Weebly, and Pixieset, but there are also many others like Webflow, GoDaddy Site Builder, BentoBox, Drupal, Hugo, and platforms made just for certain business types. 

I have found that most wedding business owners choose a website platform based on which templates or design style they like best.  Or which one their friend or industry mentor uses.  But some business owners want to choose for another reason: They want the platform that ranks best for SEO (hoping it will bring them the most traffic).

For more of my thoughts on website platforms, check out our reviews of Showit and Squarespace.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. The goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic to your website by ranking higher for relevant keywords that potential customers might search for during the buying process. There’s more to great SEO than just using the right keywords throughout your website. But how does your website platform of choice affect your SEO? Let’s see what the data has to say.

Need an SEO 101 refresher? Here’s an oldie-but-goodie blog post to fill you in.

Our Research Methodology

First things first: We value transparency and believe in providing clear, data-driven insights. I want to provide a behind-the-scenes look at our data sources and how we conducted our research.

Scope of research 

Our research focuses on wedding and event professionals, who make up the majority of our SEO clientele. We have watched the wedding industry evolve over the past decade and have a deep understanding of its audience, allowing us to identify key trends and opportunities that drive success. By concentrating our research in this space, we can provide valuable, actionable insights that directly benefit our clients and students.

How we collected and analyzed data

We’ve worked with wedding professionals across North America, representing all types of specialties: photographers, planners, venues, officiants, stationers, DJs — the list goes on. For this study, we narrowed our focus to the top three categories that hire us the most: wedding photographers, wedding planners, and wedding venues.

These business categories also reflect the most competitive categories for SEO in the wedding industry. This allows us to get a clearer, more accurate picture of how different website platforms perform for competitive keywords.

For the same reason, we limited our dataset to include 16 major North American cities or states where it is particularly hard to rank:

As with business categories, we wanted to track performance in crowded markets to study results where it’s hardest to rank. It’s easier to rank for smaller cities—like Kalamazoo, MI or Cheyenne, WY—than for the bigger areas listed above, so we wanted to look at those that successfully broke through in these more competitive markets.

Using these parameters, we combined geographical regions with business types for a list of keywords to search on Google (e.g. “Detroit wedding photographer,” “Portland wedding planner,” etc.). That resulted in 48 highly competitive searches for our study. From there, we identified the top three websites that ranked from each category in each region. We excluded media and listing sites like The Knot, WeddingWire, Brides, etc., as well as other vendors that showed up (e.g. a photographer’s venue list blog post ranking for a venue search).  Said another way, we looked for the top 3 photographers’ websites that ranked for the “photographer” keyword, for example.

We know we are not research experts! We are a team of SEO nerds with enough curiosity to answer a frequently asked question. (Have questions or concerns about our research? Let us know!)

Please note that we only used data from the wedding industry. Industry-specific trends may not apply universally, so this information likely isn’t as relevant if you’re in other industries.

Lastly, I want to be clear that SEO rankings cannot be boiled down solely to a website platform. While we can evaluate a website’s search engine performance, we cannot control for external variables that impact rankings, such as content quality, backlinks, and domain authority.

Key Findings: Which Website Platforms Ranked the Best?

Alright, let’s crunch some numbers! First off, let’s take a look at the overall breakdown of website platforms across the 144 websites we studied:

At first glance, it appears WordPress websites offer the most advantage for search rankings in the wedding industry. But before jumping to conclusions, let’s dig a little deeper.

Top Ranking Website Platforms by Category

This is where it gets interesting. Though WordPress showed up the most across all markets and categories in the aggregate, it did not rank highest when we broke it down by category. 

Here’s a look at top-ranking websites broken down by category:

A note about wedding venues: In our research, we found that it was especially difficult for venues to break into the first-page results in major cities because that involves outranking the Marriotts and the Hiltons of the world. Many of the venues we found on the first page were major global chains that likely use an in-house website system.

The big takeaway here? Category matters.

When you zoom in, the common statement of “WordPress is the best website platform for SEO” becomes a lot less certain.  Many wedding businesses are crushing their competition on other platforms.

WordPress is clearly a strong platform choice as it ranked second-best for photographers, planners, and venues. However, the data reflects that photographers might rank better with Showit and planners can rank better with Squarespace. 

Which Website Platform Ranks the Highest?

I also found it interesting that, of these websites, Showit actually ranked the highest on the first page, earning the most top 5 rankings across all categories. We found that 76 of the 144 websites we studied ranked in the top 5 — here’s the breakdown:

And of them, only 15 websites ranked #1 overall.

To me, that says that WordPress might rank well most consistently, but Showit will more likely earn you the top spot. (Note: That’s a tall order, so manage your expectations!) 

This contradictory information leads me to conclude that website platform choice does play a minor role in SEO, but it isn’t everything.

Our Final Takeaways from Our Study of Top-Ranking Wedding Websites

• WordPress was the most common platform overall among wedding planners, photographers, and venues that rank best on Google for competitive keywords.
• WordPress, Showit, and Squarespace make up 75% of the top-ranking websites across the aggregate of categories and markets.
• Of the sites that ranked #1 on Google, nearly half were on Showit (47%). Looking at those that ranked in the top 5, Showit still came in first (38%).
• For wedding photographers, Showit was the top-ranking platform (46%) with WordPress coming in second place 15 percentage points behind.
• For wedding planners, Squarespace was the top-ranking platform (35%) with WordPress coming in second place just 6 percentage points behind.
• While over half of top-ranking venue websites were global brands with unclassified website platforms, WordPress came in strong as second-best for wedding venues (33%).

And Some Caveats

• Correlation does not mean causation!  Just because a certain platform showed up a lot here doesn’t mean it’s because the platform is the difference maker.  For example, WordPress sites may rank higher because they are legacy businesses that have been around longer and have more authority.  We can’t say for sure.
• WordPress, Showit, Squarespace, and Wix can all rank in top spots on Google (you see all of them in our results above!). Based on our experience doing SEO for clients, the right SEO practices are the biggest influence in rankings improvement, no matter the platform.
• Just putting your website on a certain platform is not a fast-forward button to Page 1.  You must also incorporate good SEO practices and work to build your online reputation and authority.

How to Use This Information as a Wedding Professional

My final and ultimate recommendation based on our study: 

WordPress, Showit, Squarespace, and Wix can all rank in top spots on Google (you see all of them in our results above!). 

Since any of them can rank, you should never choose a website platform you don’t like just because someone tells you it’s “best” for SEO.

I don’t want you to read these notes above and conclude “Sara says I have to be on [x platform] to rank on Google!”

I want you to test out the platforms and see which one feels easiest for you to use.  They all can rank.  The most important thing is that you feel comfortable creating and updating content on your website (and that you’re actually doing it).

Let me be clear: Changing platforms just for SEO reasons is not worth your valuable time.

Instead of questioning your platform’s ability to rank, question your current SEO strategy. Are you dedicating time to these practical SEO techniques that work regardless of your platform of choice?

• Doing keyword research to know what your couples are searching for;
• Writing monthly educational blog posts using keywords your local couples are searching for;

• Publishing real wedding blog posts that highlight your work at favorite venues;
• Updating your Google Business Profile with new photos every month;
• Submitting real weddings and guest submissions to media outlets for backlinks;
• Requesting Google reviews from clients after each event or session;
• Tracking your rankings after SEO updates to see what works.

The key is to focus on consistent optimization efforts instead of switching platforms for minimal (and fleeting) SEO gains.

You’ll get so much more out of your time and energy by focusing on optimization — I promise. 

To sum this up, some platforms show up more often at the top of search rankings, but there is no “one” perfect platform for best SEO. What we know for certain is that SEO strategy, content quality, and ongoing optimization DO make a difference.

Take the next step

Invest in learning and applying SEO with our signature course, Wedding SEO Bootcamp. Or, let us take care of it for you with our flagship service, the SEO Fix.

Are you a marketing service provider? Check out Rank for Revenue, a program I designed for web designers, copywriters, and other creatives who want to level up their offerings and get better results for their clients with SEO.

If you’re not ready for that just yet, we still have plenty of free resources to help you level up your SEO and start attracting the clients you love.

Questions?  Comments?  Takeaways?  Feel free to comment below!