SEO agency migrates to Wix for major improvement in CWV
“Wix is the fastest loading CMS I've ever seen. I can't even fathom going back to WordPress. Why would you put yourself through that agony when there’s a platform that's better and cheaper, and does everything you could want it to and more?”
0%
Loss in traffic during site migration
100%
Good URLs after moving to Wix
264K
Organic traffic over 12 months
When Barry Adams moved his website from WordPress to Wix, he steeled himself for the loss in website traffic that typically occurs in a site migration. It’s safe to say he wasn’t prepared for his website’s rankings to improve overnight.
The business
Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Polemic Digital is an award-winning SEO agency for news publishers. It was founded in 2014 by Barry Adams, an influential search marketer who has been a pioneer in the SEO space since he first began practicing in 1998. Today, Polemic Digital is the agency of choice for the world’s top media brands, having previously worked with the likes of The New York Times, Fox News, and The Guardian. In 2018, Polemic Digital’s work for News UK was recognised as the Best SEO Campaign at the DANI Awards.
The SEO challenge
Barry was getting frustrated with Polemic Digital’s website: constant maintenance, sluggish load times, and a cumbersome UI were all taking up far too much of his time and energy.
“I finally decided I was fed up with WordPress—the plugin bloat, the new interface with the Gutenberg Press, the WYSIWYG editor—everything just got painful,” he recalls. “And I'm a technology guy, so I don't mind playing around under the hood, fiddling with knobs and buttons and tweaking here and there.”
Barry also noticed that his website images would come out subpar. “I tried to minimize it as much as possible, but then you need plugins to do things like smash images and strip out your CSS, and all of that was just excruciating.”
The solution
Barry had seen other businesses move to Wix and found himself admiring how bespoke the builds looked. What finally clinched the decision for him was the lightning-fast speed that Wix promised. With that, Barry decided to take his “blinkers off” and move to a platform that would help his SEO, rather than hinder it.
To take care of the move, Barry enlisted the help of Optix Solutions, a digital marketing agency based in the UK. In a very smooth process, they rebuilt his website on Wix and migrated all his pages over. Barry took this opportunity to clean up his website content, removing old blog posts and editing the categories in his SEO services.
Soon it was time to flip the switch on his new Wix website. “That’s always the most daunting part of any site migration,” Barry admits. “I’ve done a lot of them in my time, and whenever you change URLs, Google has to basically rely on your website. Even with 301 redirects, you tend to lose traffic along the way.”
The results
Despite the fact that Barry cleared out his website content and changed URLs, his new Wix website experienced zero loss in traffic. In fact, his rankings actually improved because his website got significantly faster. The only metric in Google Search Console which indicated that Barry’s website had migrated, was that his Core Web Vitals went from orange and red to entirely green, literally from one day to the next.
“It was an absolute eye opener,” Barry says. “I’ve never had a site migration where the only indicator was that the site got better. There's always a cost, there's always a moment of pain. Except with Wix, there wasn’t any. My theory is that I probably lost a little bit of link value, but the insane improvement in Core Web Vitals perfectly balanced it out.”
Barry is also hugely impressed with the suite of advanced SEO tools that Wix provides. In particular, he loves the level of flexibility they offer SEOs, as they have the option to rely on best-in-class defaults or customize every detail.
“Wix has everything you could ever need in terms of SEO functionality,” Barry says. “It can hold your hand along the way, or you can tweak every single setting yourself. If you want auto-generated titles great, a few clicks and off you go. If you want to manually craft titles on a page level, you can do that too. For a more advanced user, there's nothing holding you back from taking complete control over your sites’ SEO.”
Learn more about Wix’s advanced SEO features and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts.