If you’re here, it’s because you’re looking for a reason to migrate from WordPress to Shopify for SEO reasons, either because you’ve been recommended to switch to Shopify or you’re not satisfied with WordPress.
At my SEO agency in Venezuela this happens often, clients who were previously on WordPress come and now want an SEO plan adapted to their site on Shopify because they were told it was better for SEO.
I’ll share my experience as an SEO consultant for 8 years, and I’ll guide you from my point of view on why I think that Shopify, despite having improved its CMS compared to previous years, still has limitations for its users.
Do you want to migrate from WordPress to Shopify to improve SEO?
I don’t want you to waste your time, this content will only be useful to you if:
- Your focus is on getting organic traffic through SEO
- We don’t know if Shopify is better for SEO
- You want to increase your level of knowledge in the sector
- If you are looking for an answer regarding development or efficiency, this is not your article, this is purely about SEO and its branches.
Is there a better CMS for SEO? Is Shopify better than WordPress for SEO?
This question is very common, but it has an incorrect approach to answer. Why? Because SEO is SEO regardless of the CMS.
What is SEO? We could summarize it as the practice of optimizations on our website to improve its appearance in Google according to the keywords or topics of our interest, and this can be applied to any type of site.
The difference is in the level of customization, settings, comfort and experience that Shopify or WordPress require to implement them.
Shopify’s vision for SEO
In my experience, Shopify has many advantages at the level of product development and management, its application with SEM goes hand in hand, the management of orders, catalogs, and the simplicity of its visual builder, but very limited, or rather not at all friendly to businesses that are starting and want to apply SEO.
Let’s look at some details, in which Shopify seems to me to be a less friendly option for SEO.
1- Difficult to structure for SEO
If you are very methodical and like to categorize your products through URLs, creating categories and subcategories, this is not possible at the moment. Shopify calls its categories collections by default, and these cannot be removed from URLs, and as a result you must have:
- collections/category-name
Instead of:
- domain.com/category-name
In this same approach, if your category can be subdivided to create a more understandable and logical SEO architecture, Shopify does not let you, in theory you should create more collections without creating a hierarchy
If you don’t know much about SEO you may not understand, but your website architecture is important for Google to understand your SEO.
2- Custom Hreflang implementation problems
International SEO should always be an option for SEO, maybe at some point your store gets bigger and you want to expand to other countries, but if you didn’t think about how to do it and you didn’t prepare, your path may become complicated.
The basis of international SEO is in the implementation of hreflang tags, usually this is not a problem since Shopify implements it automatically according to its documentation, I leave you a link here.
The problem is that this tag is dynamic, and only works when the other site has the same URL but with a different domain name, or it is implemented in subfolders or subdomains.
When you have independent domains, you only have to do it manually, however it is still very difficult to implement it if you do not have the knowledge. If this problem identifies you, I have created a solution to implement hreflang in Shopify easily and for free, follow the link to read more.
3- Do not index only with modules or by creating meta fields
There is content that is not valuable for Google, this type of content at the SEO level prefers to be omitted from the search engine, a practice that is very correct according to the quality standards according to Google, to read more I recommend you click here.
But in Shopify we generally need a paid module, it is true that there are also free modules, but they generally come with a limited number of URLs per month, or only with free options to modify the meta title and meta description.
On the other hand, you can also do it through custom meta fields, doing a little research on Youtube or spending time reading and developing it on your own.
In a survey carried out in an SEO group, it was determined that 80% of CMS users like Shopify or WordPress should have this option by default, although there are already very complete plugins for WordPress.
4- You can’t modify canonicals without modules or without touching the code
As with the previous point, we may find a module with a free plan that allows us to do it, but most are paid, and if it weren’t for the high costs of Shopify, it may be a solution.
The only free way to do it is through meta fields, and touching the code, if you know how to do it yourself or want to learn, there are YouTube tutorials, if not you may have to shell out a few dollars to add that function for SEO, although it is a simple tag that tells Google not to crawl it, it is very important.
5 – Clone products with different routes (URLs)
Oh yes, the ease of generating duplicate content for SEO is really a problem and if you don’t have experience, you may never notice it. In most cases with my clients, they had the same product with different URLs, 1 URL was created for each category where the product belonged, and it didn’t have a canonical.
This problem is solved by touching the code, from what I have seen in my experience this is the default, and it can change depending on the implemented theme.
My SEO vision for WordPress
Why don’t I talk so much about errors or SEO problems in WordPress? It doesn’t mean that there are no problems in WordPress at the SEO level, but in most cases they can be solved with its large library of plugins with excellent free functions.
For me, WordPress’ biggest weakness is at the level of load optimization, security, and UX, that’s another topic, but focusing on SEO, it’s one of the most user-friendly and customizable that I’ve worked with, and I know that it won’t give me a headache to work on, or at least in most cases.
When is it worth using Shopify in SEO?
I think when money is not a problem for you or that you have the knowledge to do it. For me it doesn’t mean that the CMS is bad, but I know that sometimes we are short of money, we want to start and save, however Shopify doesn’t help much, its monthly hosting costs are also somewhat high in comparison, but that’s another topic.
Conclusion
Of course you can work on SEO in Shopify, don’t let that stop you at all, after all an SEO expert is capable of mastering a large number of CMS, but as a professional, if you ask me if you should migrate from WordPress to Shopify to implement SEO as the main traffic channel, I wouldn’t recommend it.
There are very occasional cases where yes, but this is not about which one is better, but about choosing which one is easier to solve SEO problems, and for me WordPress has a slight advantage.
