How does Shopify compare to WooCommerce in terms of SEO performance?

As an ecommerce business, SEO must be an intrinsic part of your strategy. Organic traffic, visibility, conversion rates; these are vital metrics for ecommerce. And the way your site’s structured, optimised and populated will affect this greatly.

Two of the most popular ecommerce platforms are Shopify and WooCommerce. So which has better SEO capabilities? It’s not really as binary as that. The truth is that both platforms rank well. Both have pros and cons. So, you need to weigh up these factors to decide which platform would be better for your business.

This guide walks you through SEO areas that really affect your organic performance. It’ll equip you with the questions to consider when choosing the right ecommerce platform for your business.

URL structure

When it comes to URL structure, one platform’s much less customisable than the other. Why does that matter? URLs show search engines and users what your site or page is about. A clear URL containing your target keyword is great for SEO.

Shopify has fixed paths. So fixed that they can’t be removed, even by a developer. You’re stuck with the likes of /products/, /blogs/, and /collections/. The only aspect you can customise, is to edit the slug after each of these prefixes. Other than that, the structure itself is locked in.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, has fully customisable slugs and URL structure. You get to decide the whole path, not just the final segment. This is a real advantage if you feel strongly about your URL or have specific requirements from your wider SEO strategy.

Website performance

Poor site speed and performance are detrimental to both your SEO and user experience. That means higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates and SEO rankings. You want your site to load quickly and perform efficiently, so a decent page speed is vital.

Shopify’s a hosted ecommerce platform. Your site speed’s largely handled for you. Shopify’s infrastructure tends to be fast by default as you’re not relying on a load of third-party plugins to run the basics. Shopify’s often praised for its superior Core Web Vitals and the assurance of an SSL certificate out of the box. That said, a poor quality build will be detrimental to your site speed too, so it’s worth ensuring the theme’s developed well from the outset.

Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce is self-hosted and relies on your hosting provider. WooCommerce is an open-source platform. Essentially, it’s a plugin for WordPress. As such, your Core Web Vitals depend on your quality of hosting provider and the way it’s developed. Plugin bloat can also be an issue on your WordPress build. And that bloat results in a slower site speed, weaker Core Web Vitals scores and lower SEO rankings. Keep your WooCommerce store lean and debloated to maximise site speed and performance.

Page structure

Getting your on-page SEO elements right makes a big difference to your search visibility. It’s how search engines read your page and work out its relevance.

With Shopify, you can easily edit titles and meta descriptions on products, collections, pages and blog posts. That’s Shopify out of the box too. It’s built in and it works. The same applies to headings. Whatever you write as the product/ collection title field usually becomes the H1 automatically.

WooCommerce needs an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math to manage metadata, sitemaps and so on. And that needs to be updated and properly configured. Once installed, it performs similarly to the Shopify experience though. When it comes to headings, WooCommerce generally has the same pattern as Shopify, but it’s theme-dependent.

Structured data

Structured data (or schema markup) helps search engines to understand and display your rich content like star ratings, pricing or FAQ dropdowns in the search results.

Most Shopify themes include basic product and organisation schema. That covers elements like price, brand and availability. But if you want to include more advanced schema like Review, FAQ or Breadcrumb markup, you usually need a dedicated app (from Shopify app store) or custom development. You won’t get it as standard. It’s down to your developer to create these elements.

WooCommerce also relies on third party apps like Yoast SEO or RankMath for schema markup. You’ll get more granular control over what’s marked up, but it does mean the apps need to be installed and configured properly.

Content marketing and blogging

Content marketing plays a key part in your organic growth. Producing keyword-rich, high-quality blog content regularly is a successful way to attract people, AI and search engines to your site.

Shopify’s native blog features are fairly basic. It sits under /blogs/news/ and that /blogs/ part is fixed. Your developer can build on this though to create more sophisticated content structures, categorisation or design flexibility.

In contrast, WooCommerce is brilliant for blogging. It’s built on the content management system (CMS), WordPress, which is a powerful content and blogging platform. So you get far more flexibility. Plus, if you add SEO tools like Yoast or RankMath, you’ll have help with keyword optimisation, metatag control, internal linking suggestions and readability ratings.

International SEO

If scalability to new markets overseas is in your sights, you need an ecommerce platform that can grow with your business.

Shopify needs Shopify Markets or expansion stores for more complex international SEO. It manages subfolder or subdomain structures and generates hreflang tags automatically. You can look into this in more detail in our guide to Shopify international SEO.

WooCommerce opts for multilingual plugins like WPML. This gives you granular, page-by-page SEO control over translations, hreflang and market-specific content. But adding a hefty plugin like WPML to the WooCommerce plugin can cause page speed issues.

Admin

How simple are the platforms to use on a day-to-day basis? It’s an important factor for your team and resources.

Shopify admin’s relatively simple, with fewer moving parts. Its SEO settings are intuitive to apply. There’s minimal configuration needed to get it set up correctly. The admin dashboard’s designed for people without much technical knowledge. Regular tasks like adding products, tracking inventory or processing orders are simple to perform.

WooCommerce’s admin relies more heavily on getting your plugin configuration right from the start. You need to put time and technical effort in to get that initial setup right. It really helps if you understand WordPress too. It’s more of a learning curve to get to grips with admin tasks on WooCommerce than the more user-friendly Shopify platform.

Payments

Whilst ecommerce payments don’t directly affect SEO rankings, friction at checkout has implications for bounce and conversion rates. Payment plugins can be a site speed factor too.

Shopify payments come in the form of Shop Pay, its own accelerated checkout. It also supports PayPal and other major payment methods natively – no additional plugins needed. There are more advanced checkout customisations available, but only with Shopify Plus.

WooCommerce relies on WooPayments, its own payments plugin. You’ll also get PayPal and a wide range of third-party gateway plugins. That means you can offer a range of payment options. But remember that each one’s an additional plugin to support and impact your site’s performance.

Shopify or WooCommerce for SEO?

Ultimately, the choice depends on your business priorities and resources. Neither’s a bad option as both rank well generally. Overall, Shopify’s easier to manage out of the box. WooCommerce offers greater flexibility, but needs more technical upkeep.

Shopify’s a popular choice amongst ecommerce business owners for good reason. It’s developed to make your online store run smoothly and to make your team’s life easier. It’s reliable and intuitive to use. You don’t need to worry about web hosting, hosting providers or infrastructure. It deals with core SEO tasks automatically, including XML sitemaps, canonical tags and basic structured data markup. It’s effective and easy to use out of the box. And a developer can create further customisations to suit your needs. It’s an ecommerce-first solution.

WooCommerce may give you a few more options to play with, but fundamentally it’s an open-source plugin built for WordPress. It’s an add-on to a content management system. You get a bit more technical SEO control over aspects like URL and page structure, templates, schema, redirects, metadata and content management. But it’s advantages are more around content than ecommerce.

Want to talk it through with someone who really gets ecommerce SEO? Contact us and we’ll share our insights and thoughts.