Shopify and WordPress FAQ – Epic Platforms Team Up

On the topic of integrating Shopify and WordPress, it is somewhat common to come across clients with one of these dilemmas below.

1. Do you have a shopping website on Shopify but you don’t like the Shopify blog and want to move the blog only to WordPress?
2. Do you have a shopping website on Shopify with a WordPress content site already but you have SEO questions or concerns about this?
3. Do you have a WordPress content-only website and want to add a Shopify shopping store on a separate subdomain? (As in shop.examplesite.com)

1. Does it matter that my blog is on one subdomain (www.example.com) for WordPress and my shopping site is on a separate domain for Shopify (shop.example.com)?
2. Is this okay for SEO as long as these two separate subdomains for Shopify and WordPress share the same navigation menu and template design?
3. Should I move to one platform or the other?
4. Is it a problem if my Shopify and WordPress platforms have different sitemaps?
5. Should I replace Shopify with WooCommece or BigCommerce?
6. Should I move my WordPress blog to the Shopify site?

It is fine for you to keep your store as Shopify with WordPress as your blog, on two separate platforms, if that works for you organizationally, and as long as it works well for customers functionally. And yes, it’s best if the two parts of the site (the shop and the blog) have the same overall design and navigation menu.

But I would strongly advise against splitting your website among two separate subdomains – one subdomain for the shop (shop.example.com) and one for the content (www.example.com). Google will see these different subdomains as entirely distinct websites. This is extremely detrimental for building up the authority of your website. As a result, all of the content built on the main www domain won’t benefit your shopping website at all in terms of site authority. And that site authority is the critical foundation that Google rankings are built on. This really hurts your website’s rankings on your shop subdomain where the money is made!

While you can keep using Shopify with WordPress on both platforms, it’s extremely important to put the shopping site into a subfolder on the www domain, as in: www.example.com/shop/first-category and so on. Do accomplish this, you can install Shopify as a subfolder for WordPres using a reverse proxy.

If your server is managed by a hosting company, and you don’t have root access to that server, then the hosting company would need to set up the reverse proxy for you.

But if you have a dedicated server for your website, then you can set up the reverse proxy.

First you would need a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate – which gives you a secure https domain. Any shopping site really should have this nowadays anyway for client trust and as ranking signal.

Then follow the 7 steps listed down below in this article.

If your website is on Shopify and WordPress and has different sitemaps, I would recommend that you set up one single XML Sitemap index file. In that XML Sitemap Index, you can list the two separate XML Sitemap links.

You can certainly consider moving onto one platform as well. I would just keep these things in mind: Many clients really like Shopify for the ecommerce side of things, but I’ve heard and read numerous complaints about Shopify’s blog experience. The Shopify blog is notoriously simplistic without a lot of features. Until that is improved, I generally advise against moving content to Shopify. I had numerous clients who started as strictly Shopify stores and later added a blog via WordPress in a subdomain – but again, I always advise that the blog be within the same subdomain as the store.

As for moving a Shopify store to WooCommerce or BigCommerce to be on the same subdomain as their WordPress content, well, that would be a lot of work. If you can make the reverse proxy work, that should be a simpler solution.

“Penalty” is just not technically the correct term for it, though it may feel like a punishment. “Google penalty” usually refers to a manual action taken by Google after a manual review of your website. So, no, you would not receive any formal or manual penalty from Google for your store being on Shopify with Wordpress as your blog hosted on a separate subdomain.

However, more importantly, your website would not receive any of the authority or link equity to your store from all of the great text content on your blog. If you post a lot of great articles on your blog, all of that content should earn you some Google rankings and should drive a limited amount of traffic to your shopping website when people click on the links in your blog to go to your site’s store pages.

On a separate subdomain, all of your articles would gradually raise the authority of your blog… and only your blog. That’s very bad for business. All of that authority earned from the blog content helps Google to respect your website sitewide, including the store, raising rankings to pages sitewide.

But if you have your blog on a separate subdomain, Google will sees your website as two separate websites and all of your content will fail to get your shopping pages ranking better in Google. And that is one of the best returns on your investment in online marketing: free Google organic search results landing directly on category and product shopping pages.

I’m biased – I’m an SEO. So I would almost always argue that the traffic gains from increased Google rankings are far more important than the WordPress benefits, but that’s a personal call and it depends on the site and on your priorities. Again, I do recommend using WordPress, but I’d put the blog into a subfolder rather than on a subdomain. So again, get the SSL certificate and then follow the 7 steps here.

For other questions about setting up your ecommerce shopping website the right way, check out our article on how to conduct an Advanced Ecommerce SEO Audit.