Divi and SEO: Is Divi Bad for SEO?
Are you thinking about using Divi to build your site? Have you seen some demos and you are wondering if this platform is good for SEO or not? Well, even though Divi (apparently) offers a user-friendly experience for building visually appealing websites, its technical limitations make it a poor choice for SEO. So, if ranking high on search engines is your priority, you may want to reconsider using Divi.
In this article, we will explain why Divi is not SEO-friendly and what the alternatives are to make a website that ranks as well as has a nice visual appearance.
Is Divi SEO friendly?
After a couple of years of using this website-building platform, we can confirm that Divi is not SEO-friendly. In fact, Divi wasn’t designed for SEO at all and it shows. The platform was invented primarily to help people make more visually appealing sites without considering the technical aspects that impact search engine rankings. While Divi offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, the excessive use of shortcodes, bloated code, and reliance on heavy JavaScript significantly affect performance. So, no, Divi is not SEO-friendly.
Why is Divi Bad for SEO?
There are plenty of reasons that make Divi bad for SEO and we are going to tell you the worst of all so you don’t put that builder on your site.
Slows down your website
One of the most important things to consider when working on a good SEO strategy is having a quick website and Divi makes it the slowest. Search engines, particularly Google, prioritize fast-loading websites, and Divi’s complex structure often results in slow load times. This is especially problematic for mobile users, where speed is a critical ranking factor.
Confuses crawlers
Another issue is the way Divi structures its content. Unlike traditional page builders that rely on clean HTML and CSS, Divi generates a shortcode-based system that makes it difficult for search engines to properly index and understand the page content. This can negatively impact organic search visibility and make it harder to optimize for specific keywords. Furthermore, Divi’s default heading structure is not always optimized for SEO best practices. Proper use of heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) is crucial for both search engines and accessibility, but Divi’s builder sometimes overrides logical structures, leading to inconsistencies that can confuse crawlers.
Bloats your site
Divi adds without a significant amount of unnecessary code to your website. This extra code makes pages heavier, increasing load times and making the site harder to maintain. When a page builder adds excess code, it reduces efficiency and can cause rendering issues, leading to poor user experience and lower rankings in search engines.
All but responsive
One of the biggest drawbacks of Divi from an SEO perspective is its impact on responsiveness. While Divi does offer mobile-friendly design options, they are often not as efficient as they should be. The platform sometimes struggles with breakpoints, meaning your site might not display correctly on all screen sizes. This highly affects user experience, impacting your SEO rankings too.
Lots of bugs
Divi updates frequently, but with each update, new bugs appear. These bugs can interfere with website functionality, sometimes breaking essential features, and plugins or even causing crashes. From an SEO perspective, broken pages, rendering issues, or sudden layout shifts can hurt rankings and drive users away.
Is There a Way to Make Divi and SEO Work?
Even though it’s difficult to make Divi and SEO work, there are some ways to, at least, prevent some of the issues created by the builder.
Using plugins
We don’t like this option at all, but we understand that if you still want to work with Divi, using SEO and optimization plugins is one of the best ways to mitigate its problems. Caching plugins, image optimization plugins, and minification tools can help reduce page load times and improve performance. However, you might end up experiencing other issues and these plugins won’t mitigate all the problems caused by the website builder.
Working on the CSS
This implies a lot of work, and when we say a lot, we mean A LOT. It’s actually not worth the time spent to fix the bugs and issues created by the platform, but if you are an experienced developer, you can make Divi SEO-friendly in a way by working on the code. You may need to manually optimize styles, scripts, and layouts to ensure faster load times and better responsiveness.
What We Actually Recommend…
As you have seen, we don’t really like Divi at all, so even though you use the alternatives listed in the previous section, you will still find lots of issues. Then, what to do? Well, we recommend you these options:
Work with other page builders
This is not the best, but if you want a page builder to create your site because you are not a website designer, you can use other page builders instead of Divi. We like Elementor Pro as it is the best based on our experience. You will also experience some low speed and the Pro prize is not very nice if you are on a budget, but it’s the best alternative regarding this type of platform.
Don’t work with any page builders
It might seem incoherent with the previous option, but this is truly the best one. We know that creating a site from scratch is not easy at all, but if you want it to be quick, efficient, and truly customizable, this is the way to go. People have hated Gutenberg for a long time, but if you have WordPress, it’s the best you can get. Opt for Gutenberg-based themes, as they are lightweight, efficient, and better optimized for SEO.
By making the right choice, you can ensure your website is not only visually appealing but also optimized for search engines, providing a better user experience and higher rankings in search results.