SEO vs. Dev: It’s 2025, Why Are We Still Fighting?

Imagine this: You launch a shiny new website, clean code, beautiful design, everything. A week later, your Google rankings plummet. Your hard-earned traffic? Gone. It’s a gut punch, and it’s happening in 2025 because developers and SEOs are still at odds. Crazy, right? It shouldn’t be this way.

You might be an agency lead who’s fed up with dev teams ignoring SEO tweaks, or a business owner baffled that a fancy redesign tanked your search visibility. In many cases, the culprit is a needless tug-of-war between web development and SEO. Devs want a slick, speedy build; SEOs want content and structure that search engines can read. When they don’t work in tandem, everyone loses. One wrong move and years of SEO effort can go up in smoke overnight [2]. Rankings tank, conversions slip, and the site’s owner is left wondering what went wrong.

Why SEO and Dev Still Clash (Even Now)

By 2025, you’d think we’d all be on the same page. Yet old habits die hard. Developers often focus on the site’s appearance and stability for users, not its search performance. They care about clean design and smooth functionality – sometimes at the expense of technical SEO. As a result, devs might resist making “extra” changes for SEO, or they unknowingly make choices that hurt it [1]. On the flip side, SEO pros get frustrated when their recommendations are treated as low priority or implemented too late. It’s a classic standoff: developer convenience vs. search engine needs.

The irony? Both sides actually share the same end goal – a website that delights users and drives business. The conflict comes from perspective. Here are a few common battles between SEO and dev, and why they’re totally avoidable:

• Site Speed vs. Fancy Features: Designers/Developers love adding high-res images, videos, and snappy scripts. But if these additions make the site slow, SEO suffers. Users won’t wait (93% of visitors will leave a website that loads too slowly, and even a 1-second delay can hurt conversions) – plus Google now rewards fast-loading, smooth sites in its rankings [3]. The easy fix: Optimize from the start. Compress images, use clean code, and test performance. You can have a gorgeous site that also loads lightning fast.
• Design Minimalism vs. Content: Modern designers often favor minimal text for a clean look. Unfortunately, “zero content” is an SEO nightmare – if there’s little for Google to read, your site’s practically invisible. A new design that strips out text or headings can kill rankings. The fix: Incorporate content in a user-friendly way. Use clear <h1> and <h2> headings, tuck FAQs or extra text into accordion sections, and always fill in image alt tags. You can maintain a minimalist aesthetic and still feed Google enough information to rank you.
• URL Overhauls vs. SEO History: Developers might reorganize URLs or site structure for logic or aesthetics, not realizing they’re wiping out years of SEO equity. Change a URL without a redirect, and all the backlinks and authority that page earned vanish. The fix: Plan for redirects. If you rename or move a page, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new. It’s a one-time task that preserves your hard-won rankings and traffic.
• Launch First, SEO Later: Some teams still launch sites with SEO as an afterthought. The result: missing meta tags, no schema markup, or a stray noindex tag left from the staging site – effectively telling Google to ignore the site. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. The fix: Use a pre-launch SEO checklist (see below). Double-check that every page has a title and meta description, important pages have schema where needed, analytics are in place, and nothing is accidentally blocking search engines. An hour of checking saves months of regret.

See the pattern? None of these issues are unsolvable or even difficult – if you catch them early. In fact, they’re pretty easy to prevent when SEO is treated as a fundamental part of the project, not an add-on. As the saying goes, if people can’t find your website in search, that beautiful design doesn’t matter one bit. It’s time to bridge the gap.

Build with SEO from Day One (The Checklist)

So how do we end this feud? By building bridges between teams and baking SEO best practices into the development process from day one. Whether you run an agency or a solo web project, here’s a simple checklist to ensure SEO and dev stay aligned from the start:

1. Bring SEO into the kickoff: Involve your SEO (or someone who understands search) in the early planning meetings. Align on goals together. When everyone; devs, designers, and marketers plan the site collectively, SEO requirements won’t be a surprise later on.
2. Audit the current site (if redesigning): Before a rebuild, take stock of what’s already working. Identify the pages that get the most traffic and the keywords they rank for. This audit prevents accidentally cutting or changing something that’s crucial for your rankings [2]. Preserve what works, and plan improvements where the current site is weak.
3. Set performance goals (Core Web Vitals): Agree on concrete speed and usability targets. For example, aim for your pages to load in under 2-3 seconds and for smooth interaction. Core Web Vitals (Google’s user experience metrics) are a must-have benchmark now – and yet fewer than a quarter of websites meet all CWV standards [4]. If you can hit those metrics, you’re already ahead of 80% of sites. Make performance non-negotiable in your requirements, not a “nice to have.”
4. Plan a crawlable site structure: Design your site architecture for clarity. Keep URLs simple and descriptive (e.g. /services/web-design instead of random query strings). Map out your URL changes and set up 301 redirects before launch, so you don’t orphan old links or confuse search engines. A logical, shallow site structure (where any page is just a few clicks from the homepage) helps both users and Google find everything.
5. Build with proper HTML and tags: During development, use semantic HTML and follow basic on-page SEO best practices. That means one clear <h1> per page, descriptive subheaders, and structured content. Ensure the CMS or codebase lets you add unique titles and meta descriptions for each page. If you’re adding structured data (schema), integrate it as you code – don’t wait until after launch.
6. Optimize assets and scripts: Large images and bloated scripts are common SEO killers. Optimize them from the get-go. Use next-gen image formats (like WebP), compress files, and only load the scripts you truly need. Set up lazy-loading for images or videos below the fold. These steps will keep your site lean and fast, delighting users and search algorithms alike.
7. Think mobile-first and accessibility: Google primarily indexes the mobile version of sites, so design with mobile in mind from the start. Ensure your content is just as accessible on a phone as on desktop. Also, implement accessibility best practices ( ALT text on images, proper contrast, etc.); not only does this broaden your audience, but accessible, well-structured content is exactly what search engines reward.
8. Pre-launch SEO checklist: Before you go live, do a final run-through: Remove any noindex or test passwords from the site, verify your XML sitemap and robots.txt are correct, and install analytics and Google Search Console. Test page speed on a tool like PageSpeed Insights. Click around for any broken links. It’s much easier to catch and fix these issues on a staging server than after your site’s live and losing traffic.

Following this checklist transforms SEO from a tug-of-war into a team effort. Your developers won’t have to retrofit fixes later (no more “Oops, we launched without meta tags, now we scramble”), and your SEO folks won’t be pulling their hair out because the site is basically invisible to Google. Instead, you launch with confidence that you’ll at least maintain your SEO standings, if not improve them, from day one.

Bottom line:

SEO and dev are two sides of the same coin. In 2025, there’s no excuse for them to be working against each other. The best agencies know that a website’s success hinges on collaboration: the devs ensure the site is fast, functional, and beautiful; the SEOs ensure it’s structured, relevant, and visible. When those efforts combine, you get the best of both worlds – a site that users and Google love.

If this perspective clicks with you, try it on your next project. Steal this checklist and use it in your upcoming build. See what happens when you address these issues upfront – chances are, you’ll save your clients (and yourself) from nasty surprises down the line. No more hard-earned rankings face-planting after launch.

If you’re struggling with this, you’re not alone. Many teams wrestle with the SEO vs. dev divide. We help businesses and agencies fix this every day. So test these ideas, and if you want an extra pair of hands (or eyes) to make sure your next website is both gorgeous and Google-friendly, let’s talk.

1. Wright, T. (2023). SEO Vs. Web Developers: Who Should Lead Implementation? Search Engine Journal. Available at: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-vs-web-developers/480866/
2. Ali, A. (2024). How to Prevent (and Recover) Website Redesign Traffic Loss. HawkSEM Blog. Available at: https://hawksem.com/blog/website-redesign-traffic-loss/
3. Carlson, E. (2021). Website Redesign and SEO: Avoid These 8 Common Mistakes. Siteimprove Blog. Available at: https://www.siteimprove.com/blog/eight-common-seo-errors-during-a-website-redesign/
4. Hostingstep (2024). 25+ Interesting Core Web Vitals Statistics in 2024. Hostingstep. Available at: https://hostingstep.com/core-web-vitals-stats/