Shopify and WordPress (Woocommerce) are two of the most popular ecommerce solutions for a large number of Australian businesses looking to start selling their products or services online.

Both Shopify and WordPress are easy to use, very much scalable but when it comes to SEO, which platform offers better functions? This question or comparison is important because a lot of eCommerce website heavily relies on SEO to get their customers down the road.

In this article, we’ll compare Shopify vs WordPress to find out which one comes out on top in this highly debated question.

The Similarities between Shopify SEO and WordPress SEO

Shopify and WordPress can both provide the basic SEO optimization framework you need when you are starting out on your SEO journey. These basic functions include:

• Change Page URL
• Edit page title tag, meta tag,
• Edit Image Alt Tag
• Create sitemap.xml file
• Create Robots.txt file
• Install Google search console
• Install Google analytics
• Edit basic schema tag
• Edit category page SEO information

SEO benefits of Shopify

1. Faster page load / site load

Shopify websites load faster than WordPress or WooCommerce websites, and we know that faster loading websites rank better these days.

Why are Shopify websites faster? There are two main reasons:

• Shopify website structure are well controlled within their own eco system, that means they don’t rely on many plugins that WordPress does.
• Shopify websites are hosted on the Shopify platform, whereas WordPress sites are hosted on all kinds of hosting sites which is where a lot of people get things wrong and cause the websites to load slowly.

We are not saying that Shopify websites definitely loads faster than WordPress sites, but it’s easier to mess up with WordPress page load speed which then impacts SEO negatively.

2. Shopify sites are quite mobile optimized

Shopify websites are a bit more mobile optimized in both front end and back end of the website. WordPress or WooCommerce however needs to be optimized extensively for mobile experience and page load speed.

Since 2020, mobile experience and page load speed are taking high priority as Google’s SEO ranking factors. So getting a website mobile optimized is super important for Search engine optimisation.

SEO benefits of WordPress / WooCommerce

WordPress is more customizable with its code. People often say that you can change whatever you want to change on a WordPress site. It means if you want to optimize the URL structure, page CSS or Rich snippet, you can do that either via code or via a plugin. So it’s very flexible if you need to optimize things from SEO point of view. This flexibility cannot be matched by Shopify.

And Talking about the WordPress SEO plugins, you can find a plugin for every single function in the SEO word. Some of the plugins are free, while others need to be paid for. But always be careful because some plugins could crash with your website or other plugins on your site.

Other Considerations when Choosing a Platform

Choosing between Shopify and WordPress can be a tough decision. Both of these e-commerce platforms have their own pros and cons from the SEO point of view. But there are other things you should also take into consideration.

If you are starting out with no knowledge about e-commerce websites, it’s a good idea to go with something like Shopify as it will get you up and running faster than WordPress would. More things will come off the shelf when you build a Shopify website. WordPress is more flexible but a bit more time consuming and require more experience with it.

Another important thing is the design and layout of the website that’s required. Let’s not forget that a website need to have the design and layout to serve its purpose as an eCommerce site. In our experience, certain function cannot be done with Shopify, Vice Versa.

Also, certain products or services cannot be sold on Shopify, but WordPress doesn’t have any limitation on products or services offered on the website. Find out more about Shopify’s restrictions here.

Shopify vs WordPress SEO Quick Summary

If your web design and functional requirements are straight forward, you can then choose between Shopify and WordPress purely from the SEO point of view.

Shopify and WordPress both provide all the basic SEO functions or framework on the same level. However, if you think your SEO game is going super advanced one day, or your website is going to rely on SEO to a large degree, we would probably recommend WordPress slightly more for its flexibility around the website backend and SEO functions down the road.

WordPress vs Wix for SEO

We have also written a detailed articled comparing WordPress with Wix for SEO as well. Read it here.