Am I hurting myself by using a React (NextJS) Implementation over Wordpress?

joemost

Joined
Sep 4, 2021
Messages
32
Likes
11
Degree
0
Aside from the many benefits of Wordpress, I've seen people say that Google loves Wordpress sites, and it can help with rankings.

I've always been more of a fan of NextJS (I'm not a huge PHP fan and love react) and having so much control over how my websites work (I guess not that you don't have that in Wordpress). Static Rendering is also a big benefit for me (Supposedly it helps with google ranking and overall experience as well).

Is there any truth to that with Wordpress? Wordpress can be beneficial for your ranking? I know theres lots of plugins for everything with wordpress, theres also plenty of open source code for JS as well.
 
joemost said:
I've seen people say that Google loves Wordpress sites, and it can help with rankings.
Click to expand...
This is utter nonsense (not you saying it, but people saying it in general). Wordpress is SEO-agnostic. What matters is the themes you use and who made them, or if you made your own. A lot of people use Wordpress, so Wordpress appears in the SERPs a lot. But that doesn't mean Google likes it. It means a lot of people use it. Zillions more websites that use Wordpress get zero traffic than do.

What really matters is the on-page SEO, the page speed, and other technical SEO concerns, and all of that is coming out of the theme, not the core CMS. Choose wisely!

joemost said:
I've always been more of a fan of NextJS (I'm not a huge PHP fan and love react)
Click to expand...
You'll be pleased to know that Wordpress is continuing to break its long-held oath to its developers. It once promised to remain a PHP CMS, but with Gutenberg it's slowly but surely becoming more and more React-based. If you want to tweak or extend Gutenberg, you need to know how to do that or use something like Advanced Custom Fields that has made it possible to achieve the same results in PHP.

Beyond that, the templates and core files remain in PHP. How long that will last, I don't know. I'd imagine forever but at the same time Wordpress' supporters seem to be gluttons for punishment and wasting time on dumb stuff.

joemost said:
the many benefits of Wordpress
Click to expand...
I think the main benefit of Wordpress is that you have an army of people constantly maintaining it. If you use it as it is supplied and don't try to get cute about things, you're essentially outsourcing and offloading a ton of effort and responsibility to a bunch of people doing it for free.

Most technical SEO problems arise from situations like you're talking about possibly embarking on. "Getting cutesy" about things. I've screwed myself more than once doing that. Complexity for the sake of complexity.

Like static generation. Wordpress provides WP Super Cache which does the same thing, and they support it and design it specifically for Wordpress. Anything else is recreating the wheel and spending time on things that aren't making you money.

Anyways, these are my opinions. I don't have the luxury of tinkering any more. I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible as I scale. That's where the money is at.
 
Makes sense. Maybe I should just be taking a Wordpress theme instead and tinkering with it. Not a huge fan of PHP...

Are there technicals to look for in a Wordpress theme which improve SEO? I'm sure there are..
 
Next.js is way better when it comes to DX and performance in general. I have several sites built with NextJS and it’s a joy to work on them.
However, when it comes to building sites for ranking it’s different. I’ve read posts where people is having issues integrating AdSense/eZoic/MediaVine, or at least, the integration is not that great.

That’s the only thing that keeps me from using Next to build money sites.
 
Also what about hiring? It's pretty easy to find virtual asistants that will perform several task on WordPress (uploading articles, adding images, seo descriptions, adding internal links, etc).

Is your NextJs build newbie friendly? Do you have a visual GUI?

I know wordpress can be a pain, but if you keep it lean, you can get great speeds and the front end could be just an static website in practice (cached from CDNs).

I don't see the point (I was thinking about it too a while ago) unless you really need something that can't be build on Wordpress.

For the theme, since you are a developer I would just grab this one and build from there.

Another option would be to run a headless wordpress. You will have the backend on wordpress with all of it benefits and you can just run the frontend with something like Gatsby since you like react. I think this may be the best option for you
 
If you're building a content site you can still use Wordpress as a backend. That way you'll still have the benefit of familiarity for hiring assistants or writers, but the fast front-end of NextJS. And you'd still be able to build custom sections of the site (e.g. tools) as you normally would in NextJS.

Check out WPGraphQL, or the recently released FaustJS, which make using Wordpress as a backend with NextJS really convenient.
 
LiamGallagher said:
Next.js is way better when it comes to DX and performance in general. I have several sites built with NextJS and it’s a joy to work on them.
However, when it comes to building sites for ranking it’s different. I’ve read posts where people is having issues integrating AdSense/eZoic/MediaVine, or at least, the integration is not that great.

That’s the only thing that keeps me from using Next to build money sites.
Click to expand...
So what has kept you away is purely ad integation? Makes sense.
Love NextJS

city17 said:
If you're building a content site you can still use Wordpress as a backend. That way you'll still have the benefit of familiarity for hiring assistants or writers, but the fast front-end of NextJS. And you'd still be able to build custom sections of the site (e.g. tools) as you normally would in NextJS.

Check out WPGraphQL, or the recently released FaustJS, which make using Wordpress as a backend with NextJS really convenient.
Click to expand...
This is awesome! Hell yeah!
Yeah plus then I have all the advantages of having a wordpress backend panel like you said. This is the way to go.
 
react is hot garbage.
If you succeed in getting somewhere with it you will be hostage to it.

Wordpress is templated supported garbage. If you get somewhere with it you will be hostage to it and have weird security issues due to being the it target.

Both are trash traps I wish I had never wasted my time on.
 
secretagentdad said:
react is hot garbage.
If you succeed in getting somewhere with it you will be hostage to it.

Wordpress is templated supported garbage. If you get somewhere with it you will be hostage to it and have weird security issues due to being the it target.

Both are trash traps I wish I had never wasted my time on.
Click to expand...
Haha I do think there are people on the web that would argue different.

Is there any other tech you'd prefer over that?
 
I think those people are silly try hards that get off to doing extra steps.

I like static html with minimal anything else added ever. A content site should work until I forget to pay the hosting bill. If it needs updates to stay online you messed up.
 
You can say that about any scripting language....
 
joemost said:
So what has kept you away is purely ad integation? Makes sense.
Love NextJS


This is awesome! Hell yeah!
Yeah plus then I have all the advantages of having a wordpress backend panel like you said. This is the way to go.
Click to expand...

Yeah, pretty much the integration part. I don't want to go too deep into Next just to find out that integration is not supported. I'm using headless WP to power a site of mine and it works wonders. If you go the SSG path, hosting is pretty cheap, performance is awesome, and security is awesome. Let me know what you end up choosing, I'm really interested
 
React has it's time and place. For example I used react to build my single page app..similar to "calculator" for a certain niche. For this project react worked best because there's a lot going of calculations going on with the fields.. field1*field2(field3)/field1+field2^2..React was made for this type of stuff. I could have written this in PHP and jQuery but it it would of _sucked_. Also I chose react because of how easy it is to pull data from a database. What I mean by all this is pick what you know best, react/nextjs is literally a buzz word. Yeah it's nice but what is your goal? Are you building an AdSense site/affiliate site? Will your users (and revenue) increase because your site is in react? I don't have these answers.
 
I will be blunt here, stop wasting time go with Wordpress. For 90% of the cases it's good and instead of having to hire a developer or mess around with code, you can just install a free plugin for anything.
This cuts down time/money by a lot.

It's like gaming on a Mac. Sure you can install some games. You can try Crossover, some will maybe work but you will have to mess around with wine configs and stuff. But most of the time it will just be annoying. If you like tinkering go for it. But if you want to play CS GO just get a windows :smile:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back