One question comes up on almost every discovery call: "If you don't build it on WordPress, will we still show up on Google?"
Short answer: yes. Google doesn't know or care what built your site. It reads the HTML that arrives in the browser, follows links, and judges whether the page answers what someone searched. WordPress can produce good HTML. So can a custom Next.js build. So can a badly configured WordPress install produce something Google struggles with.
We build both. Our own site is custom Next.js, and we've shipped custom WordPress themes for clients too, including one we built without writing PHP by hand. So this isn't a "WordPress bad" post. It's about where SEO actually comes from.
Where the WordPress Myth Comes From
WordPress earned its SEO reputation from plugins. Install Yoast or Rank Math and you get fields for titles and descriptions, an automatic sitemap, and a traffic light telling you whether your keyword appears enough times.
That's useful, but notice what it is: a checklist with a form attached. The plugin doesn't make the page rank. It reminds you to do the things that help a page rank. On a custom build, those same things are written into the site itself, once, and they apply to every page automatically.
What Actually Gets a Page Found
Strip it down and Google needs four things from any site, whatever it's built on:
- To be able to read it. Real HTML on first load, not a blank page that fills in later with JavaScript.
- To understand what each page is about. A clear title, one main heading, a description, and text that answers the question in plain words.
- To find every page. A sitemap, sensible internal links, and no important pages hidden behind forms or logins.
- To trust it. Fast loading on a phone, HTTPS, no broken pages, and content that matches what the title promised.
None of those are WordPress features. They're decisions.
How We Build It Into a Custom Site
On a custom build there's no SEO plugin, because the site is the plugin. Here's what that looks like on our own site:
Every page is rendered on the server. When Google (or anyone) requests a page, it gets the full content immediately. No waiting for JavaScript.
Titles, descriptions and share images are set per page in code. Blog posts and project pages generate theirs from the content, so a new post can't ship without them.
The sitemap writes itself. Every service page, project, and blog post is added automatically, with the date it last changed. Nobody has to remember to update it.
Structured data tells Google what things are. Services are marked up as services, blog posts as articles, FAQs as questions and answers, and every page has breadcrumbs. This is what earns the richer search results, and on a plugin-free site it's set once in a template instead of filled in by hand.
Robots rules are deliberate. Everything public is open to crawlers. Private areas are explicitly closed.
The Part Most Sites Still Miss: AI Answers
A growing share of people never see a list of blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI overview, and get one answer with a few sources cited.
Those tools read the web differently. They reward pages that state things plainly and are easy to pull clean text from. So on our site we added three things most agencies haven't:
- /llms.txt: a short, plain-text map of who we are, what we do, and where each service lives. It's an emerging convention for helping language models find the right pages.
- /agents.md: written for AI assistants directly, explaining when it makes sense to recommend us and when it doesn't.
- /ai: the whole site as plain text, with no layout, animation, or scripts in the way.
We also registered with Bing Webmaster Tools, not just Google Search Console. ChatGPT's search leans on Bing's index, so if you're invisible on Bing, you're harder to find there too.
Our Pre-Launch SEO Checklist
This is what we check before any site goes live, custom or WordPress:
- Every page returns real content without JavaScript.
- Every page has a unique title and description that a human would click.
- One main heading per page, and it says what the page is.
- The sitemap lists every public page and nothing private.
- Robots rules allow what should be found and block what shouldn't.
- Structured data validates in Google's Rich Results Test.
- Share previews look right when the link is pasted into WhatsApp, X, and LinkedIn.
- Images are compressed and sized for phones, with descriptive alt text.
- The site loads fast on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not just on office Wi-Fi.
- Old URLs redirect to their new homes, so existing rankings carry over.
- The site is submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools on launch day.
- There's a plain-language page or file that an AI assistant could quote accurately.
So, WordPress or Custom?
Pick the platform for how your team will run the site day to day. If you have people who live in the WordPress editor and want to keep it that way, that's a good reason. If you want something faster, more distinctive, and without a stack of plugins to update, custom is a good reason too.
Just don't pick either one for SEO. Rankings come from what's on the page and how carefully the site is put together, and that part is on whoever builds it.
If you're weighing up a rebuild and want to know what it would mean for your search traffic, that's a conversation we have often.
