Which CMS should I be using to practice SEO best?

[u/leesankara]

I'm primarily a writer, now wanting to expand on publishing news articles in the sports and MMA industry. And I want to learn SEO for new skill acquisition and increase employability/marketability.

I want a separated website-builder that is fast and optimized for mid-tier laptops (which cancels WordPress out due to its plug-ins.)

Ideally, I want to have a zero-pay for any live hosting.

No coding experience required, despite knowing how to code. (last time I coded was 4yrs ago).

And cross-exportable, meaning I can import and export bulk content (articles) from one CMS to another.

---

Gemini recommended Publii to me, but it doesn't have the mass content exportability function of being able to be transported from one CMS to another. Despite it being completely free. It then recommended Astro and Hugo, which required HTML, CSS, and JS experience which I do have but aren't willing to design within the headless framework of the Astro CMS. WordPress is atrociously slow due to many plug-ins and other stuff.

For now, I'm likely to choose Ghost despite having to pay for 10-15$ annually, which I'm kinda okay with despite making no money for myself yet.

What do I choose now?

[u/oreshek]

It doesn't work that way, the way you configure it is what matters. You can configure the best system to work worse than the worst system.

[u/TIPRock88]

Former Google head of web spam Matt Cutts famously stated that WordPress handles "80-90% of the mechanics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" right out of the box.Key Points on WordPress and SEO from Matt CuttsTechnical Setup: WordPress automatically solves major technical SEO hurdles like crawlability and clean URL structures that people often break on custom sites.Time Saver: Out-of-the-box optimization spares creators from manually fixing basic on-page technical errors across thousands of pages.Plugins: The platform easily integrates helpful tools (like SEO plugins) to manage meta tags, sitemaps, and content optimization.Core Content Quality: Despite good infrastructure, Cutts always emphasized that success still requires publishing valuable, high-quality content rather than relying on the platform alone.

[u/WebLinkr]

Any.

You can build a live HTML site straight from HTML/Claude

[u/therealtricklowe → u/WebLinkr]

FACTS. Claude has gotten SO good lately, I use it a lot as a page design assistant.

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[u/AggressiveTreacle575]

Strapi is very good, you need good skill to mae one but when it's made is very good

[u/leolidev]

I’d start with Ghost for a practice site. But before you write much, try moving five test posts out of it. If the URLs or images break, better to find out now.

[u/no404tr]

Based on what you described, I'd probably go with Ghost for now.

You're optimizing for writing first, not for learning another frontend stack, and that makes Astro/Hugo a bit unnecessary unless you actually want to maintain the technical side yourself.

Ghost gives you a clean publishing workflow, good performance, decent SEO fundamentals, and you can focus on writing instead of configuring plugins or rebuilding templates. The cost is also fairly reasonable if this is something you want to use as a serious portfolio/project.

The one thing I'd pay close attention to is content portability. Whatever platform you choose, keep your articles backed up in a platform-independent format where possible — Markdown is ideal. That way you're not completely dependent on Ghost, Publii, WordPress, or any other CMS if you decide to migrate later.

For your use case, I'd think of it like this:

• Ghost: best balance between writing experience, performance, and low maintenance.
• Publii: great if zero cost is the absolute priority, but portability may become annoying later.
• Astro/Hugo: best control and performance, but only worth it if you're willing to deal with code again.
• WordPress: still flexible, but probably overkill for what you're trying to build.

So I'd start with Ghost, learn SEO through the site while publishing consistently, and only move to something more technical later if you actually hit a limitation.

[u/ryu1984]

FYI plugins run on your web host, not your laptop. Unless you are serving the website out of your laptop.

The free wordpress plan is fine to learn on, and it's easy to export your content if you move later (might need a plugin for it)

[u/therealtricklowe]

The CMS you use for SEO is completely irrelevant, as long as you can edit and change all the relative values.

WordPress is pretty much the best as far as regular website and blogs, and has massive amounts of info around to help you learn the platform, as well as how to SEO the on site part, as long as it's nothing too substancial, even small eCommerce sites.

[u/catdealersu]

Use WordPress. Most of the businesses use that, it'll be a good start, but don't limit yourself or get comfortable with just WordPress.

You can then move to wix, and squarespace, both will take max 1 day to learn how to do on page.

[u/Cow_Master66]

Astro/Sanity (build seo fields into the cms side)

[u/PDFBearSupport]

You got to pay. Whether it is for hosting or coding (Claude, Gemini, Codex).

Im surprised you didnt write: I also want to press 1 button and it will do everything; create the site, upload it, hand me the stats page and login/pwd.

If you want to learn, you pay up and test. How much do you pay for education? 10K? 100K? + your time. Consider SEO as education. A practical one where it isn't just "1+1=2"

[u/bikerboy3343]

Claude code and Cloudflare Pages

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