Is WordPress or Shopify better for SEO?
Many e-commerce businesses start using one of the two popular platforms: WordPress or Shopify. Unfortunately, each has its strengths and weaknesses in e-commerce, and knowing which will be best for your business can be difficult. To make it easy, let’s explore the pros and cons of each platform to help you determine if one will work better than the other. In this article, we will discuss: Is WordPress or Shopify better for SEO?
WordPress SEO overview
WordPress SEO and Shopify SEO can be used for the same purpose, but the way that WordPress does not have plugins created specifically to increase your website’s ranking. This can concern business owners who need to rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. To combat this issue, you will want to take advantage of a specific plugin called Yoast, specially designed with an optimization module to provide better WordPress SEO features.
Wordpress has very powerful formatting capabilities, which are useful if you plan on building your themes, but they don’t create a significant boost in your website’s rankings on search engines. With Shopify, users are restricted by their available templates, which hinders creative freedom but helps users streamline the process of designing and updating their site.
Shopify SEO overview
Shopify is a fast and simple e-commerce platform that integrates seamlessly with social media. It offers different plans, including the basic Shopify plan (for only $9/month) and the Advanced plan (for $29/month). In addition, all Shopify plans come with free templates so that you can customize your website’s design quickly and easily.
Additionally, Shopify comes integrated with a Google Chrome extension which makes marketing campaigns easier to execute and provides quick analytics about traffic sources, page views, conversion rates, time on site, click-through rate (CTR), unique visitors, new vs. returning visitors, etc.
Key things to watch out for when choosing an SEO-friendly platform
Shopify and WordPress are great platforms, but you’ll want to pay attention to certain things before settling on one. For example, WordPress has the best content management system, so it’s easier to customize your site. With Shopify, however, you can easily connect your products and marketing channels to automate your process. In addition, if you’re starting with no existing audience, Shopify offers a convenient way to start small and grow over time.
1. Ability to customize Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, URLs, Header Tags
Shopify is a Canadian company that offers various services, including e-commerce. Shopify SEO, WordPress SEO, and choosing to use one over the other depends on your specific needs and objectives.
2. Mobile customization
If you want to grow your e-commerce store and gain more customers, optimizing the site for mobile browsing is very important. Mobile searches have increased by over 300% in the last two years, so neglecting your site’s mobile optimization could lead to major losses.
According to research done by Shopify, 68% of shoppers will abandon a purchase if the website doesn’t display well on their phones. Therefore, mobile pages need special attention to ensure they load quickly and work seamlessly with page elements when the user starts scrolling.
Make sure you are using a mobile-first approach when designing your site because this will allow it to be even more visible on small screens like phones and tablets and larger screens like laptops and TVs.
3. Powerful internal search feature and proper indexation of internal search results pages
Shopify has more understanding of SEO, specifically its internal search features and indexed pages. A Shopify SEO strategy can be a game changer, not just because of what you can do with it on the platform but also because of the wide audience it will attract. Shopify doesn’t use a traditional site map, so you’ll need to work with Shopify to create one for them. However, they offer webmaster tools that are robust and similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Using subdomains rather than redirects may be a good idea if your content is static.
4. Good customer support and a savvy technical team
Shopify is hands down the best platform to use if you’re looking for a rock-solid and robust eCommerce solution with an awesome customer support team, built-in social sharing, blog posts with related links, image hosting, tools for customizing your content…I could go on! On top of all that, it’s SUPER fast, which makes it perfect for high-traffic websites. Shopify is so easy to use that it limits your creativity as opposed to WordPress. With that said, I’m currently a Shopify SEO consultant, which means I work with my clients to design their shops within the best-performing platform on the market today. Shopify my stores over two years ago were one of my best decisions!
Shopify SEO Pros
Shopify’s customer service department is known to be very helpful and knowledgeable. This can come in handy when sorting out any technical issues you might have. In addition, many template sites have been built using Shopify, meaning there is a huge selection of themes, many of which are responsive and work on different devices. It also has great SEO functionality and email marketing software to make the most of your marketing campaigns. But, of course, all this functionality comes at a reasonable price too!
Shopify SEO Cons
Shopify’s website states that Shopify is not an ideal platform if you’re interested in search engine optimization. This is because the platform only allows certain tools, especially Google Adwords and Analytics. If you implement a third-party plugin to increase your site’s indexing on search engines, you’ll want to ensure that they are compatible with the Shopify system. A study published by Ecommerce Insiders shows that the average conversion rate through e-commerce sites using WordPress will be 24% higher than with Shopify. However, remember that this is data from 2016, and things may have changed since then.
WordPress SEO Pros
WordPress is one of the most popular website builders, and there are many reasons behind this. First, WordPress’s unparalleled search engine optimization capabilities keep your site ranking at the top of the list with every update to Google’s algorithm. Secondly, WordPress is an open-source platform with more than 400 million websites. It’s also extremely well-tested and secure. So you won’t have to worry about downtime. Lastly, WordPress allows you to make content updates without coding knowledge. This convenience makes it a great option for those who are less tech-savvy!
WordPress SEO Cons
WordPress is great for SEO in many ways. But if you plan on using this as your primary blogging platform, it will affect your search engine optimization efforts and could be a big problem. WordPress provides a lot of plugins that are not mobile-friendly and can negatively impact your ranking on Google.
If the primary goal of your blog is to help people find you, WordPress might not be the best platform for the job.
