Looks like GRAV has better SEO than Wordpress :-)

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!

Nice work, team! 👍

@Alpha, And yet there is still room for improvement on other areas...

<details>
<summary>According to Lighthouse</summary>

</details>

Yes, I may be a party pooper... but it wasn't me saying that, that's what Lighthouse in Google Chrome is saying.

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! 👍

Hi,

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.

A couple more features and bye-bye wp.

Roger that - for small/mid specialiced niche-sites nothing beats GRAV.
The SEO-flexibility and ease of dynamic content types is unparalleled.

I often run into competitors who offer WordPress for the project...

• They need way (!) longer for unique designs (most of them struggle anyway to go past reusing existing templates) - hence more expensive.
• If they create unique content types, it's often a horrible mixture between a plugin and native Gutenberg blocks.
• Multilanguage sucks imo.
• Just installing Yoast is not enough.
• Security...

I don't want to bash WP all around as i have clients with a one-language blog using the enormous amounts of plugins to monetize > perfect usage!

I noticed faster page loads and cleaner URLs, which seemed to help my pages show up quicker in search results. Also, the built-in SEO settings are pretty easy to tweak.

Just out of curiosity, and to see if the work I did with the Quark clone was focused on accessibility, could you upload a copy of the same site to a domain on your web server using the https://github.com/pmoreno-rodriguez/grav-theme-quark-a11y theme, or simply install the theme and switch from Quark to this clone?

The theme hasn't been added to the Grav repository yet, but it's on the request list for it.

I'd like to see a real site with this modified Quark.

Many of the accessibility issues the Quark theme has revolve around link colors, which are inherited from the Spectre CSS framework. Perhaps with some adjustments to the color contrast of links, breadcrumbs, etc., it will be almost 100% accessible.

What helped me was figuring out that speed and clean URLs make a difference, but results don’t appear overnight. This article breaks down how long you usually have to wait before seeing results: https://crowdo.net/blog/how-long-to-rank-in-google-2025/. It gave me a better idea of what to expect and how long each stage can take, especially when tweaking things like content structure or backlinks.