How good is Divi for SEO?

The theme’s popularity is due to the fact that it contains many advanced features while remaining incredibly simple to use. Divi’s intuitive drag and drop interface makes it possible for non-technical people to make changes to the layout or functionality of their website within minutes.

It’s easy to add social media feeds, videos, photo galleries, and sophisticated functionality to a website. Divi is also supported by some incredible plugins which make it possible to extend its functionality even further.

However, some web developers might suggest that there is a significant drawback to using Divi — a negative impact on a website’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In this post, I’ll take a closer look at how Divi might impact SEO.

What Is SEO?

‘On-page’ SEO refers to the changes that you can make to your website to improve its position in search engines. It includes the optimisation and improvement of page load speeds, keywords, content, site structure, HTML tags (title, headers, meta), and images.

The overall goal of on-page SEO is to make your website fast, well structured, authoritative, and trustworthy.

Why Do Some Developers Claim Divi Is Bad For SEO?

Some web developers claim that Divi is bad for SEO for two reasons:

1. That Divi short codes somehow interfere with SEO
2. That Divi websites are slow, which impacts SEO

But do these claims really stack up? Let’s take a closer look.

Are Divi Shortcodes Bad For SEO?
The Divi theme uses ‘shortcodes’ to draw templates from its library. For example, a newsletter subscription form could be added to any page using a shortcode like [divi_library_layout id=“10266”].

This code can be inserted using the drag-and-drop interface or via code view. Divi will then update the short code with the actual HTML, CSS, and JS code it needs to add a functioning newsletter form.

Some developers would argue that shortcodes can make a website’s code disorganised and cluttered. However, modern search engine spiders can easily process complex website code, without a negative impact on SEO.

The only potential problem occurs in Divi’s meta tags. The way Divi uses shortcodes means that a lot of CSS class calls will be added to the meta section of the website’s code. This may impact a search engine’s ability to understand which meta tags are being used.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this issue. An SEO plugin like SEOpress will give you more control over the meta section of your website and improve site accessibility.

Does Divi Slow Your Website?
The second argument is that Divi creates overly verbose and complex code that can negatively impact website speed, which worsens SEO.

However, this is only true for extremely large and complex Divi websites. The average Divi website is between 2 to 4 megabytes in size, which is very close to the average size of 3 megabytes.

Search engines and modern browsers can process websites of this size very quickly and they load quickly on the average user’s Internet connection. There are also several steps you can take to further improve the speed of a Divi website, including installing the following plugins:

• Fast Velocity Minify
Fast Velocity Minify optimises the CSS, HTML, and Javascript code powering your website.

• Hummingbird
Hummingbird performs several important optimisation tasks to improve the speed of your website. This includes page compression, caching, database improvements, and general optimisation.

• Smush
Smush is an image optimisation plugin. It also provides ‘lazy loading’ where images only load as required.

Wrapping Up
Although the code generated by Divi is different to a hand-built website, it doesn’t have a substantial negative impact on SEO. In fact, many of the world’s highest ranking websites are built using Divi. They have no problem ranking well and neither will you.

Get In Touch

If you have any questions about the capabilities of Divi or how you can improve your SEO, shoot us an email or give us a call on 0203 026 2550.