E-commerce Technical SEO: Platform-Specific Considerations

The Jobs Every Store Needs Done

Google’s ecommerce guidance on site structure and URL design sets the standard the platform settings should meet; the store-wide plan is in e-commerce site architecture.

Platform Notes From Their Own Documentation

Shopify. robots.txt can be customized. Shopify’s developer documentation says the robots.txt.liquid template “renders the robots.txt file”, and that “Adding this template replaces Shopify’s generated robots.txt output.” Start from the default rule groups Shopify provides and add only what you need, such as rules for filter or search URLs. Hosted platforms fix parts of the URL pattern, so check what yours allows before planning a structure.

WooCommerce. URL bases are set in WordPress. WooCommerce’s permalinks documentation puts the settings under “Settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard”, including product and product category bases (the default category base is product-category). Choose the structure before launch: changing permalinks later means redirecting every existing URL. SEO plugins handle titles, sitemaps and structured data; use one, since two plugins writing the same markup or canonicals can conflict.

Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento). Adobe’s SEO overview describes a URL Rewrite tool that “lets you change any URL that is associated with a product, category, or CMS page.” Layered navigation and multiple store views need deliberate settings for which filter URLs are crawlable, canonical behavior and, for international stores, hreflang.

Other hosted platforms (BigCommerce and similar) document their URL, canonical, robots.txt and redirect options in their help centers; check each job in the table against them.

Structured Data on Platforms

• Check what the theme outputs with the Rich Results Test on a product page before adding more.
• Avoid duplicates: a theme and an app or plugin can both output Product markup; keep one.
• Skip retired types: FAQ and HowTo markup no longer produce rich results in Google Search.
• Don’t import reviews from other sites into markup; Google’s review guidelines say “Don’t aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites.”

See product schema and rich results and schema markup testing and validation tools.

Filters on Platforms

Platform filter features create URLs in their own patterns. Find the pattern (parameters or paths), decide which combinations deserve indexable landing pages, and keep the rest out of crawling with robots.txt where the platform allows it. Search Console’s URL Parameters tool, which older platform guides refer to, was retired in 2022. The method is in faceted navigation SEO.

Speed on Platforms

Themes, apps and plugins can add code to every page. Test the product and category templates in PageSpeed Insights, remove apps or plugins you don’t use, and compare themes on a real product page before switching. See PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse.

Migrating Between Platforms

1. Crawl the current site and export every URL, with its status and canonical.
2. Map every URL to its new equivalent: product to product, category to category, with discontinued pages handled deliberately.
3. Rebuild structured data, sitemaps and robots.txt on the new platform before launch, and test on staging.
4. Launch with 301s in place, updating internal links to the new URLs directly.
5. Watch Search Console (Page indexing, Performance, crawl stats) and crawl again after launch.

Google documents the process in its guide to site moves with URL changes.

A migration is justified only by a job in the table that your platform can’t do and can’t work around; when that’s the case, plan it URL by URL, as in the steps above.