Seo Experts: Wordpress or Responsive HTML Template?

You could do a test by creating a static homepage with relevant content and creating a blog page where your recent posts will be displayed to see how it would impact your rankings.

It's not because your competition has a static HTML page (whatever that means).

When you say static HTML assuming you mean the content never changes?

The issue isn't about how a page is generated, it's what is being generated, with standard WordPress setup the home page content changes every time you add a new post. Move to a WordPress Static home page and most of the SEO damage is gone.

You can achieve this with WordPress, create a new static Page, add the content you want.

Under Dashboard : Settings >> Reading : A Static Page (tick it) and select the new static Page.

You'll have a static home page like I have at WordPress SEO Packages (runs on WordPress)

This will stop the main content changing on your WordPress sites home page. If you have a recent posts widget, dated archive widget or anything that updates when new posts are published they will still be changing. It's a balance between keeping old content ranked and ranking new content and for both it's about the internal links.

David

There you go, asking people to realize something....

By the way, let me try to sneak in a link to my own site somewhere in the body of this post... ugh ugh ugh ugh.... well, all I could come up with was this quote, of which only some will see the humor...

Yes, I did just Rickroll a thread without a video.

And if they learn about WordPress Custom Page Templates : Page Templates « WordPress Codex gives even more options with any theme.

It's a shame WordPress by default doesn't include a custom Post template facility (there's ways around it, I've created a custom template system for Posts and Categories so every category/post can have a different output) so it's easy for users to modify the output on a post by post basis like you can with WordPress static Pages.

Since the OP is interested in the home page output which can use a custom Page Template they could create one that has static sidebars so the links never change (unless they manually change them).

With even a basic HTML/PHP understanding you can create some interesting Page templates: I've built and use over two dozen page templates.

There's also plugins like the Widget Display Plugin which can set which parts of a site widgets load on, so even without building a custom Page template a user can set what loads on the home page widget areas: basically turn off any widgets that have updating links (recent posts etc...) and use the default WordPress Custom Menu widget or a text widget for manually linking to the most important content.

There's so many ways to achieve what the OP wants there's no reason to drop WordPress just because a competitor has a non-changing home page: I'm assuming that's what the OP meant by static HTML since Google doesn't have to know (and doesn't care) your home page is created by WordPress.

David

It is really easy, having a static home page is built into WordPress by default.

On the Left Dashboard Menu hover over Pages and click Add New

This will start creating a new Static Page.

Put some content on the Page just like you would a WordPress Post, but it's for the home page only.

Publish the Page.

Under Dashboard : Settings >> Reading : A Static Page (tick it) and select the new static Page you just published.

Load your home page and the archived type setup won't be shown anymore, you'll see the main content is static (whatever you added to the new static Page).

As you can see under Dashboard : Settings >> Reading there are options for setting another page as the home page (blog) archives, I don't bother since we have categories for spreading link benefit through a site.

As mentioned before want to make the home page even more static either remove widgets that add changing content or build a custom page template or use a plugin or theme which allows more control over widgets.

The theme I use and develop has a built in way to set which sections of a site widgets load on. For example I use a categories tagcloud (the WordPress tagcloud widget, but set it to show categories) and have the widget set to load on the home page and categories, but not on Posts for silo SEO reasons (only want related links from Posts). I have some affiliate sidebar ads that only make sense to load on a few posts, have those affiliate ad widgets set to only load on specific posts. I achieved this by adding a modified version (I wanted more options) of the https://wordpress.org/plugins/display-widgets/ to the theme.

You can achieve a lot of interesting stuff when you know what you are doing with WordPress.

David