Choosing an eCommerce platform is one of the most important choices you’ll make as a retail business, whether you’re 100% online or just augmenting your brick and mortar store with an online option. And if you want your business to stand out and be noticed, SEO is vital.
That’s why you’ll need to know if WooCommerce is a viable option when it comes to optimising your site. Here’s why we think you can rest assured that your SEO will be handled well enough by the platform.
WooCommerce: a popular choice
One of the reasons WooCommerce is so widely used is that it’s based on the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world: WordPress. It’s difficult to drill down an exact figure, but it’s likely that between 10% and 20% of the world’s eCommerce stores are powered by WooCommerce. That might not sound much, but it’s a crowded market: Shopify and Magento take similar proportions, and multiple other systems including Wix and Squarespace are ever-present.
How WooCommerce differs is that it isn’t a standalone eCommerce platform – it’s essentially a WordPress plugin, like the thousands of others in use on millions of websites. So if WordPress is good for SEO, it follows that WooCommerce is too.
With its army of developers, open-source ethos and global support network, it’s fair to say WordPress is on the ball when it comes to wringing the most out of a website. And that includes optimisation.
WordPress was very early to the responsive website party, and with mobile-friendliness being a key factor in search ranking, that’s just one example of how a WordPress/Woo site can shine. But it’s also been a great platform for keeping page loading speeds quick. There are plugins to help speed such as caching, image compression and lazy loading, which are all of particular benefit to large eCommerce stores.
WordPress also integrates perfectly with Google Analytics, so you can keep on top of your site’s performance and tweak it to perfection. Alongside top tools like Yoast and SEMrush, you have the complete package when it comes to making sure your content and metadata are all optimised to provide better visibility in search.
Finally, good hosting providers are set up to support WordPress, from one-click installation to ongoing server optimisation and support, so you can be assured that your site’s uptime and overall performance will be optimised.
Choose your platform
This article isn’t about whether WooCommerce is the most appropriate platform for your particular needs – we’ve already written about comparisons between it and Magento, for example. But when it comes to SEO, WooCommerce benefits from all the advantages of having a WordPress site.
The usual caveats apply, of course. No matter how good a performer WordPress is, you can easily break it by using too many high-demand plugins, leaving out metadata and posting unoptimised images, for example. But if you look after your WooCommerce website, it should look after you, and will modify itself as the standards of the web change. Find out more about WordPress development here
