Platform SEO defaults: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce

You chose your platform for its checkout, its apps and its price. Along the way it made a dozen SEO decisions for you: how your URLs are shaped, which pages carry a canonical tag, what your sitemap contains and what crawlers are told to avoid. Most of those defaults are sensible, a few leak rankings quietly once the catalogue is full, and each platform has a short list of settings to check before you spend a minute on keywords.

What every platform does for you

All three generate an XML sitemap, give every product, collection and page fields for its title tag and meta description, add canonical tags, serve the store over HTTPS and ship mobile-ready themes. The basics that used to sink stores are handled. What's left are the defaults that only show their cost when multiplied across a full catalogue and every filter combination, and those differ by platform.

If you're auditing a store you don't run, the free CMS detector tells you whether it's on Shopify or WordPress (WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, so it reports as WordPress).

Shopify

Shopify fixes the URL structure: products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, and you can't change those folders. According to Shopify's help centre it generates sitemap.xml automatically, adds canonical tags, and serves a default robots.txt that blocks the cart, checkout, account and internal search pages plus some sorted and filtered collection URLs; open your store's /robots.txt to see the list. You can edit it through a robots.txt.liquid template, and most stores shouldn't.

The default to understand is the collection-path URL. When a shopper clicks a product from a collection, Shopify links to /collections/<collection>/products/<product>, so the same product exists at that address and at /products/<product>. On a stock theme the collection-path copy carries a canonical pointing to the clean /products/ URL, which is correct. Custom themes and some apps rewrite it, so check rather than assume.

Day-one checks:

1. The store password. Until you remove it in the online store preferences, nothing is crawlable.
2. The Search engine listing section on your main collections. Shopify fills the title with the collection name, which is why so many stores have a collection titled "Skillets" when buyers search "cast iron skillets".
3. Tag-filtered and sorted collection URLs. Open one, read its canonical, and decide whether you want it indexed. Faceted navigation and filters covers the decision.

Product structured data depends on your theme, not Shopify; run a product page through Google's Rich Results Test to see whether it's there and valid.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, so its SEO behaviour is split between WordPress settings, WooCommerce itself and your SEO plugin. WooCommerce's documentation describes the URL bases it sets, /product/ for products and /product-category/ for categories, which you change under the WordPress permalink settings. Decide before launch: changing them later means redirecting every product URL.

WooCommerce adds Product structured data to product pages by default, and WordPress generates a basic sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml, which most SEO plugins replace. Check that exactly one sitemap is live and lists your products, and confirm the structured data with Google's Rich Results Test.

Day-one checks:

1. The WordPress reading setting labelled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". It asks crawlers to skip the whole store and is routinely left on after a private build.
2. The cart, checkout and account pages. WooCommerce marks these noindex by default; confirm your theme hasn't removed it.
3. Category, tag and attribute archives. Product categories are your collections and should be indexable with a short introduction; tags and attribute archives are often thin grids that duplicate them, so decide which should be indexed.
4. Filter and sort parameters. Sorting and price filters add parameters to the category URL, and whether those canonicalise back to the clean category depends on your SEO plugin. Open a sorted category URL and read the canonical.

On a standard setup, variations sit on the parent product's URL, avoiding a duplicate page per size or colour; if a plugin has given each its own page, variants and duplicate content explains what to do.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce lets you choose the URL format for products and categories in its URL structure settings, described in its support documentation. Pick one before you import the catalogue, because switching later means redirects for every page. It generates an XML sitemap, lets you edit robots.txt from the control panel, has a built-in 301 redirect manager, and gives each product and category its own title, meta description and URL fields.

The default to check is faceted search. Product filtering adds parameters to category URLs for brand, price and options, and whether each filtered URL canonicalises back to the unfiltered category depends on your theme, so confirm it: open a category, apply a filter, and read the canonical.

Product structured data comes from the theme, so check a product page in Google's Rich Results Test here too.

One rule for all three

Defaults stay fixed while duplicates and filter URLs multiply, so what suits a store with a handful of products fails somewhere once the catalogue is full. Treat the platform as the first pass, then verify the three things that decide whether Google sees one strong copy of each page: the canonical on duplicate URLs, the indexability of filtered and tagged pages, and a sitemap that lists what you want found and nothing else. Duplicate URLs and canonicals goes deeper on the first.

What to take away

• All three platforms handle sitemaps, title fields, canonicals and HTTPS; the leaks come from defaults multiplied across a full catalogue.
• Shopify's collection-path product URLs should canonicalise to /products/; check it on your theme rather than assuming.
• WooCommerce's SEO behaviour depends on WordPress settings and your SEO plugin, and the "discourage search engines" box is the first thing to check.
• BigCommerce's URL format and faceted-search canonicals are decisions to verify before the catalogue grows.

Next

With the platform defaults checked, start building the keyword list buyers actually use in Product and category keyword research.