Shopify – how does it compare with WordPress?

We have recently been asked about Shopify websites for ecommerce, and how they compare with WordPress.

Both are similar.  Both have admin logins and screens, and both have theme options and settings.  This is about our opinion, based on information from companies who offer migration software, and our time with Shopify, and its SEO abilities.

Why WordPress is better…

WordPress allows us to easily change CSS styling in a website (for colours, and borders etc) that the Theme Options just don’t allow you to alter.  Theme Options only allow you to alter things, that they can give you a nice WYSIWYG screen to mess around with.

WordPress has a brilliant structure that:

a) enforces all URLs to be lowercase

b) enforces all pages to have just one URL – i.e.. a product has just one URL (more on this further down)

c) very easy to use admin menus.  Things are mostly where you might expect to find them.

Issues we have found with Shopify

It’s relatively cheap, but you do still pay at least $45 a month for a commerce site.

a) it does not enforce lowercase URLs.  In our experience, you can put in www.mysite.co.uk/ThisProductName – or;
www.mysite.co.uk/thisproductname –
And both will take you to the same page.  This is duplication, and Google despises.

b) All categories appear to be only available in a /collections page.  So if you want to promote a particular TYPE of product, like a set of manufacturers, you cannot push that as /manufacturer/levis.  It has to be /collections/levis.

c) The URLs of results found in a search results page have different URLs from those found in the ‘collections’ page, for the same product!  Google despises this too, as it sees it as a duplicate page of the same content.

Go to a department store, and look for the Timberland products.
Then walk further around and find that exact same store with the same products elsewhere.  You’d be rather confused too.  So Google will ‘punish’ you for having this.

We do we do – keep where we are?

The plan on whether to use WordPress or Shopify is entirely up to you.  If you are throwing money at Adwords, and that’s making you appear at the top in the Ads, that’s fine and could turn over money for you.  But if you want to ‘climb Google’s organic ranking’, the natural list of pages in a search, then from what we know of these structures, WordPress is 100% the way to go!

I already have Shopify – can I change?

Yes you can.  We have tools that migrates your site to our hosting, including photos, categories, products, details, stock, sales prices the lot.

We then Theme the site to your liking, with a theme, and your colours, and get it all setup for you.

We are NOT here to slate Shopify.  If it works for you, and processes sales, wonderful.  But it does have these flaws.  Try it yourself.  Change the casing of any URL on your page, and see it shows this same page – this is seen by Google as a duplicate.

We can help.  Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and steadily we can resolve this for you, by moving to a system we feel is far better handled for SEO, and frankly, a little easier we found to operate too.

If yours is a new site, and you want to do your best to ensure it climbs the ranking of Google in a nice steady way, and not be hindered, you need to avoid duplicate URLs, and have an easy to use setup.

Shopify is pretty easy to add stuff, but from what we have found, the duplicate flaws in it’s SEO, will also steer us in the WordPress direction.

Note – we also do fully custom commerce websites, but this review has been about comparing two CMS systems: Shopify and WordPress.  Here are some details on shop websites, and how we create them.

Our WordPress Support services can assist with this too.  Once a site is with us, we can provide ongoing support to keep everything up to date, and provide a bespoke solution to keep content updated and the SEO to!