A few years ago, there would have been no such questions as to whether Shopify or WordPress would be better for blogging from SEO perspective or not. WordPress had a monopoly, and Shopify was getting started. Even today, some people may be shocked to see the name of Shopify being considered for blogging. It is true that Shopify is the best choice for launching e-commerce site due to its extremely high SEO value. It is also due to SEO parameters that Shopify is increasingly becoming popular as a blogging platform. Now the question arises whether WordPress or Shopify is better for blogging from SEO perspective.
Comparison Between WordPress And Shopify –
Popularity Is Invalid –
There is no doubt that WordPress has more popularity than WordPress in the blogging world. The reason is not necessarily because it is better considering all the parameters. But it is due to that fact that WordPress captured the market first and there has been no viable competitor until recently in the name of Shopify. To justify this fact, we can take the example of WordPress as an e-commerce platform. During its glory day, no one could think of e-commerce site other than WordPress. But over the time, so many better platforms have come up, and now, Shopify is leading the pack. Therefore, popularity should not be a parameter to consider which platform is better for blogging in the current scenario considering the SEO factor.
Base SEO Value –
It is important to understand the base SEO value of a platform. If you create a blog in WordPress, your blog will automatically get certain SEO value as you are creating it on a very popular platform. So, the base SEO value represents the inbuilt SEO value that the platform embeds in the blog you create. In the current scenario, the base value imparted by Shopify for a blog is more than WordPress. Shopify has worked a lot on its platform to make the blogs of the e-commerce sites created on it.
In general, Shopify has better SEO value than WordPress as it is self-hosted. WordPress blogs are mostly hosted in third-party websites, and the SEO suffers tremendously. Moreover, any search engine values better value to an e-commerce site than a regular blog. Due to the self-hosted nature of Shopify, the SEO parameters are better optimized. Even WordPress self-hosted facility does not have that more optimized SEO parameters as they know that most of the people third-party hosts. The reason why search engines give better preference to Shopify blogs than WordPress blogs can be due to the fact that Shopify has better hardware to handle extremely high traffic, unlike WordPress self-hosting.
Creating SEO Value –
Themes – Apart from imparting base SEO value, it is what you can do with your blog decides the rank of your blog on the search engine result pages. Starting with the theme, there are extremely popular themes available on both the platforms but the free themes of Shopify are better in SEO value than WordPress. On the other hand, the premium WordPress themes have extremely high SEO value than Shopify’s paid themes. As a matter of fact, there are SEO based premium WordPress themes available. Everything you design will be best from the SEO perspective.
Extensions – Coming to the plugins or extensions, Shopify has amazing inbuilt extension even though WordPress had more plugins to choose from. This is exactly why you will find people migrating from WordPress to Shopify blog. Not just the on-page SEO value, the off-page SEO value will increase tremendously. WordPress does not actually have any integrated or inbuilt SEO tool to optimize every aspect for betterment. There are different SEO plugins for different purposes and using too many third-party extensions slow down the performance of the blog. This slowing down affect the SEO value as the loading time is one of the basic parameters considered by all searching engines to offer better user experience.
Miscellaneous – Coming to other technical items, Shopify adds more relevant meta data than WordPress for better ranking of individual blogs. Shopify is more secure than WordPress as it is privately managed and WordPress is more open. Shopify is basically a SAAS platform where software as a service is delivered. It is more like comparing between iOS and Android. Even in Shopify, the XML sitemap is generated automatically for which you have to install a plugin in WordPress. But in terms of customization, WordPress is better for blogging as there are so many more features and functionalities available to apply on your blog and take it to the next level.
Final Verdict –
If the blog is a part of an e-commerce or business website, Shopify is a better option due to its sheer base SEO value. If it is a standalone blog, it is better to go for WordPress due to more functionalities and come to Shopify SEO value. SO, there will be a perfect balance of better user experience, creativity, and ranking on search engines.