WooCommerce and Shopify are both robust and powerful eCommerce website development platforms. Choosing an SEO-friendly platform for your eCommerce store is very significant for your online success. Both platforms provide software and plugins to improve your store’s SEO performance.
You can use SEO from the beginning by choosing the platform that best suits your store. The use of the website depends on your authority on the site.
To have complete control and support of SEO activities, choosing a supported e-commerce platform is necessary. The article compares two commonly used eCommerce platforms – WooCommerce and Shopify – to help you choose the best platform to launch your new SEO-optimized store.
Why Is SEO Optimization Matter?
As you already know, SEO can help a brand build a solid foundation for a website with clean and practical search engine usage. And in today’s competitive marketplace, SEO marketing is more important than ever.
In detail, I will give you an example of when you have a website, blog, or online store. To traffic on your site or store you have to optimize your site for SEO. Meanwhile, as a general rule, most search engine users frequently click on one of the top 5 offers on the search engine results pages they have seen. This tool drives more visitors to your website and buyers to your online store.
Also, SEO is not only about search engines, but sometimes good SEO practices can help improve a website’s user experience and usability. The trust system can build trust and loyalty among users as your brand can rank highly for the keywords the user is searching for, which can quickly increase website authenticity.
SEO also takes care of your website’s overall visibility. In particular, when people search for your website on Google or Yahoo, they may post it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks.
Again, SEO is considered essential to the success of a website, especially a large one. When more than one author can benefit from SEO directly and indirectly from the website. As a result, they can increase search engine traffic and have a permanent base (list) to use Content not published on the site.
Woocommerce SEO Vs. Shopify SEO
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an e-commerce platform built for WordPress. It is also a flexible and highly expandable WordPress plugin that allows users to start and grow their eCommerce business at any scale. With WooCommerce, you can set up a new store in minutes and customize the features you need with easy-to-use tools like the WooCommerce stock manager. If you want to expand the functionality of your store, WooCommerce has a set of extensions to help you do that.
Pros Of Woocommerce SEO
Customizable
WooCommerce has become SEO from the ground up with success. Unlike Shopify, you will enjoy faster and easier access to the website structure and the same SEO level better than Shopify’s limited partners.
Search Engine-friendly URLs
With WordPress, you can easily change your URL permalink structure to suit Google’s requirements. For example, while Shopify requires all secondary pages to fall under a domain name/page link structure, WooCommerce stores can use a pure top-level domain structure.
Wide Range Of SEO Plugins
Running an eCommerce store on the WordPress platform gives you a powerful Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast is one of the most popular SEO tools, and for a good reason. With the ability to customize everything from META information, titles, and images through WooCommerce Banner Images, server usage, and database management, WooCommerce plugins are unmatched by other tools.
Robust Blogging Support
WordPress started as a blogging platform and has only improved over the years. Running an online store on WooCommerce allows you to get the upper hand in the SEO game and blogging capabilities that Shopify users can only dream of.
Cons Of Woocommerce SEO
More Manual SEO Expertise Required
If you’re not tech-savvy, you’ll know that the learning curve is higher with WooCommerce than with Shopify. Since Shopify’s model makes it easy to launch an online store, you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed if you don’t have a basic understanding of how to work on the web. WordPress.
Themes Not Automatically Optimized CSS And Mobile
While the theme structure is highly optimized for SEO, many WooCommerce-compatible themes are not mobile-friendly. You have to find a great theme (usually with the highest license) or use it yourself – this might not be possible if the theme doesn’t allow it.
Slower-Site Speed
The main advantage of Shopify is the fast-processing speed due to the simplified code and the best back-end model. On the other hand, a typical WooCommerce store is affected by advertising campaigns, site layout, image installation, database management, and many other things that may affect the loading speed. Therefore, in the site speed ratio between Shopify and WooCommerce, Shopify has an advantage.
Shopify
With over a million users worldwide, Shopify has positioned itself as the powerhouse of e-commerce. Shopify is primarily aimed at the professional marketer, offering an easy-to-use and integrated online platform designed to work out of the box with minimal configuration.
Pros Of Shopify SEO
Fast Load Time
Site loading time is a significant factor for Google, and 53% of users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. This is one area where Shopify shines because online stores on this platform have much faster page load times compared to WordPress/WooCommerce or other specialized options.
Includes SSL Certificates
Whether you register your domain through them or not, Shopify automatically provides SSL certificates as part of the monthly fee. This ensures that all of their stores are using the best SSL certificate, the absence of which will result in severe SEO penalties.
SEO-Readiness
In line with its ease-of-use structure, Shopify aims to eliminate the average user from some of the more specialized aspects of SEO. The platform creates custom XML sitemaps and provides the ability to customize important SEO data such as META and title information.
SEO Apps Available
The Shopify app store offers many SEO programs to help improve the SEO performance of your online store. These programs include the popular Plug-in SEO, which provides a wide range of features, and Ultra SEO, which adds a wide range of META tag options. Unfortunately, no one comes close to the powerful Yoast SEO available only for WordPress/WooCommerce sites.
Cons Of Shopify SEO
App Reliant
There are many doubts that we have about app stores. We appreciate the exciting and rich applications, but the more Content, the better. As a small company, Shopify relies heavily on software to fulfill SEO needs.
Many Valuable But Pricey Apps
The Lite version on Shopify only has the lowest price, which is $9. You are not allowed to create a full-fledged online store. However, without these programs, you will have to add information to your computer, which takes time manually. Or you can hire someone, but the cost is between $50 and $300 per month. It won’t be too expensive.
Support is unavailable outside North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. If you live outside of these regions, getting direct help from General Support may be difficult when you encounter specific problems. So, in these cases, you may need to post your question to the forum to get an answer from the developer instead.
Last Words
So, Shopify and WooCommerce, which will win this SEO battle?
Let’s say you want to start an online business and have to choose between Shopify and WooCommerce. Which one is better? The answer to this general question depends on several factors, such as your business needs, scale, budget, and more. If you are a beginner, Shopify is the best choice because it is simple and easy to use.
Meanwhile, WooCommerce gives you many SEO-specific options when creating a WordPress plugin, which is helpful for content optimization. If you want to run a big store and use SEO, WooCommerce is the best choice.