How to Select SEO-Friendly CMS for Your Online Store?

CMS which stands for Content Management System is a properly developed software with an administration panel that allows you to implement necessary content modifications for free, without having to know the IT secrets of your store. Thanks to this panel, you can upload, edit or delete photos, texts, tables, videos, graphics as well as entire subpages without any HTML or PHP expertise. It’s also not necessary to connect via FTP.

Every content management system needs to be properly tailored to the store to ensure that you aren’t deprived of any offered functionalities. Keep in mind that changing the system to another one in the future would probably require a lot of time and money. Moreover, not every CMS is suitable for an online store. Before choosing the right- SEO friendly CMS, you have to answer a few important questions. The basic one is: what products are you going to sell? If your product range makes it necessary for customers to provide additional data such as width and height in the case of window joinery which is tailored to specific user’s requirements, you need to choose a system that enables collecting such information. If you sell products without numerous variables and parameters to choose from, a simple, free system should be enough. Moreover, it’ll also help you avoid any extra costs that wouldn’t actually affect your sales or business development. The SEO factor is also extremely important. Analyze whether the implementation of changes is easy or whether it requires specialist knowledge which may generate extra costs you could avoid by choosing a system suited to your needs. That’s why it’s so important to select a CMS that’s the most appropriate for your e-commerce as thanks to it you’ll avoid unnecessary expenditures and you’ll make sure that the system doesn’t have a negative impact on your sales and business development. If you’re thinking about opening an online store or if you’re just taking your first steps in the industry and you aren’t entirely sure what CMS to choose, keep reading our today’s entry. Hearing a lot of contradictory information may make it hard to decide what’s the best choice. That’s why, in this article, we’ll discuss the eight most popular CMSes, their functionalities, and SEO-friendliness. See available solutions and learn about the most relevant advantages and disadvantages of the systems. Enjoy!

PrestaShop is free and it’s one of the most popular content management systems. It offers extra modules, basic online store functionalities that are both free and paid. PrestaShop makes it possible to create meta descriptions separately for each product, category, and subpage. However, even if you skip or forget about these elements, they are being generated automatically according to specific schemes. Thanks to it, when doing the SEO process for your e-commerce store, you can select keywords that are of interest to you. PrestaShop generates URLs for products, categories, or other subpages. The URLs don’t include any unnecessary characters separated by “&” which makes them SEO-friendly. It’s also possible to customize URLs for your products. These two functionalities are particularly helpful if you want to make sure that your SEO is effective. Additionally, there are a few possibilities of product sorting which is a user-friendly solution. However, it generates extra versions of given subpages which isn’t acceptable for Google robots. Nevertheless, you don’t need to worry – PrestaShop offers a few solutions to the problem, you can always exclude the pages that aren’t supposed to be indexed from the robots.txt file.PrestaShop is a good choice for online store owners starting their adventure with content management systems. The community of PrestaShop users is developing really rapidly, so you’ll be able to easily find answers to your questions or problems.

CMS which stands for Content Management System is a properly developed software with an administration panel that allows you to implement necessary content modifications for free, without having to know the IT secrets of your store. Thanks to this panel, you can upload, edit or delete photos, texts, tables, videos, graphics as well as entire subpages without any HTML or PHP expertise. It’s also not necessary to connect via FTP.

Every content management system needs to be properly tailored to the store to ensure that you aren’t deprived of any offered functionalities. Keep in mind that changing the system to another one in the future would probably require a lot of time and money. Moreover, not every CMS is suitable for an online store. Before choosing the right- SEO friendly CMS, you have to answer a few important questions. The basic one is: what products are you going to sell? If your product range makes it necessary for customers to provide additional data such as width and height in the case of window joinery which is tailored to specific user’s requirements, you need to choose a system that enables collecting such information. If you sell products without numerous variables and parameters to choose from, a simple, free system should be enough. Moreover, it’ll also help you avoid any extra costs that wouldn’t actually affect your sales or business development. The SEO factor is also extremely important. Analyze whether the implementation of changes is easy or whether it requires specialist knowledge which may generate extra costs you could avoid by choosing a system suited to your needs. That’s why it’s so important to select a CMS that’s the most appropriate for your e-commerce as thanks to it you’ll avoid unnecessary expenditures and you’ll make sure that the system doesn’t have a negative impact on your sales and business development. If you’re thinking about opening an online store or if you’re just taking your first steps in the industry and you aren’t entirely sure what CMS to choose, keep reading our today’s entry. Hearing a lot of contradictory information may make it hard to decide what’s the best choice. That’s why, in this article, we’ll discuss the eight most popular CMSes, their functionalities, and SEO-friendliness. See available solutions and learn about the most relevant advantages and disadvantages of the systems. Enjoy!

WooCommerce is an extremely popular e-commerce tool fully integrated with WordPress. This plugin is suitable for both beginners, who have never dealt with anything like that before, and for web developers. So, what’s the reason for its huge popularity, gained thanks to the ease of customization and intuitiveness of the system? WooCommerce is designed in a way that makes it possible to sell almost every product type, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about a physical, digital, downloadable, or affiliate product from another store. With extra paid extensions, you can offer bookings, renewable subscriptions, and membership sites. With WooCommerce you can also provide your customers with discounts on downloadable content. WooCommerce gives you access to numerous payment methods. This e-commerce CMS gives you almost unlimited possibilities to control and customize your store. WooCommerce is being constantly developed, most of the SEO functionalities are implemented by default. WooCommerce is designed in a way that ensures its high search engine-friendliness, URLs are compliant with the search engine principles, website structure is transparent and logical which is particularly relevant during the SEO process. Additionally, the pages are in line with the standards and have a proven breadcrumbs navigation system. WooCommerce offers the Yoast plugin which makes it possible to manage numerous SEO functionalities for free and prevents us from damaging the website. Yoast has a box where you can edit entries and see how they’ll be displayed on Google. Thanks to Yoast, you can monitor keyword density, do SEO for subpages or manage the robots.txt file efficiently, and simply determine which website elements should be indexed. The plugin offers a wide range of titles, breadcrumb navigation, full sitemap support with the possibility to disable certain elements and import settings from other plugins. WooCommerce is a simple, intuitive, and extremely popular system. Thanks to the Yoast plugin, doing SEO is pleasant and approachable, even for users without any experience.

Magento is an open-source content management system that offers numerous possibilities. However, the functionalities supporting SEO require specialist knowledge of web development. That’s why Magento is recommended mainly for professionals experienced in SEO. This system is ideal for users who plan to expand their online stores on a large scale. Magento allows you to customize URLs to be as search-engine-friendly as possible. You can also modify meta tags, titles, and product or category descriptions. Contrary to what you may think, the default settings of Magento enable achieving quite satisfactory SEO results. When it comes to important SEO elements offered by Magento, we need to mention that all photos on product subpages have ALT tags, the sitemap is automatically created, the system offers unique links for each product and makes it possible to submit the site map into Google Search Console. However, apart from all the advantages, you need to remember about costs that are quite high. Magento is an extremely popular CMS with great functionalities that are SEO-friendly. Nevertheless, it’s definitely dedicated to advanced users who aim at building sizable online stores.

IAI Shop is a CMS based on the SaaS (software as a service) model. This means that in return for a monthly subscription fee, your store is modified and configured by the service provider. However, this solution has one important disadvantage – as a store owner you never have full control over your website. The store, managed by the system provider, can’t be freely modified by you. To implement any web development changes, you need to contact IAI which may refuse to perform given modifications. When it comes to IAI, meta tags can be generated manually or automatically, they’re created separately for each subpage so their uniqueness supports SEO. IAI gives users considerable freedom when it comes to the creation of product descriptions. Canonical links are also generated automatically which minimizes the risk of duplicate content. When the store is set up, the created site map is sent to Google, so Google robots automatically see your e-commerce shop right away. IAI offers the Google Analytics module which makes the integration considerably easier. Links are user and SEO-friendly, however, it’s not possible to modify alt tags.

Shoper is also based on the SaaS model which gives you the opportunity to set up a store using one of the five offered packages. Four of them don’t differ in terms of SEO, however, the system has the so-called standalone license which makes it possible to see and modify the code. Thanks to it, you can significantly improve the operation and functionality of your online store. But today we’ll focus on the most popular, basic versions that have a few pros and cons. When it comes to the advantages, we can mention the possibility to set basic SEO parameters for each product and category separately. Titles and descriptions may be created according to the scheme, canonical tags are added automatically, the traffic is redirected to one website address (for example from www to non-www), the system is easily integrated with Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Google Maps and Search Console. The closed source code for three basic system versions is one of the greatest disadvantages of the CMS. It hinders system development and modification implementation. Htaccess (a file that allows you to configure the server) isn’t accessible for users. Therefore, you won’t have the opportunity to set up redirects to specific subpages. Generally, Shoper doesn’t provide access to FTP. To sum up, Shoper makes it possible to create an online store that is Google-friendly, however, it may be problematic to ensure proper SEO parameters and settings, especially for someone without basic SEO and web development knowledge.

Shopify is another popular CMS. In terms of SEO, the system is quite effective as it enables editing meta descriptions, URLs, alt tags or photo descriptions. Moreover, Shopify automatically generates the sitemap, which, as we’ve mentioned above, has a positive impact on website visibility on Google and canonical links which prevent duplicate content from decreasing your positions in the search results. To sum up, this CMS offers a wide range of functionalities which make it one of the most popular solutions appreciated in numerous countries, including the United States of America. Thanks to the possibility to customize SEO elements and parameters you can reach high positions in Google rankings.

For quite some time, Webflow didn’t evoke positive feelings for SEO specialists—to say it caused irritation is an understatement. However, lately, this CMS has gotten much better.

Currently, the code behind webflow is much cleaner than that of most pagebuilders. This translates directly to a better performance. What’s more, it enables you to create complex website layouts without additional plugins, which is a major plus. Yet, this comes with a downside—it’s not a free CMS, so you’ll have to add it to your operating costs.

Why is Wix on our list of the most SEO-friendly CMS, if you’ve probably heard a lot of bad opinions about it? Like Webflow, it was terrible in the past. Now it’s quite decent.

Wix enables you to control the basic SEO-crucial elements, like titles and meta tags, but it’s still difficult to get deeper into the code. Plus, its code is much more bloated than that of Webflow, which impacts performance. On the other hand, it’s one of the easiest CMSs for setting up your website, which makes it a popular choice among small businesses.

Squarespace is also similar to the previous two CMSs, meaning that it was bad in the past but got better. Yet, it still doesn’t offer you full control over your optimization: you won’t access control over canonical URLs, and might have some issues adding a custom schema.

Like Wix, Squarespace isn’t excellent, but rather decent. Again, this stems from the fact that setting up a website in this CMS is straightforward, quick and doesn’t require any technical knowledge. On the bright side, its code is relatively clean, so performance won’t be that much of an issue (in comparison to other page builders). Plus, it’s extremely easy to integrate it with Google Search Console—anyone can do it. Again, we recommend it mostly to small business owners who want an SEO- and user-friendly CMS to set up their website quickly.

These and some other questions may be crucial when selecting the right CMS for your online store. Therefore, it’s worth spending some time answering them accurately. This is an important decision that will have an impact on possible limitations and obstacles related to your online store operation in the future. The chosen CMS might affect your financial results but doesn’t have to, so don’t look just at SEO—analyze the options from a broader perspective.

Shoper: Good if you have a team of developers to help you set more advanced, technical SEO settings.

Wix, Squarespace and Webflow: Ideal for starting businesses that don’t want to make large investments and prioritize intuitiveness.

Magneto: Ideal if you seek deep customization options.

IdoSell and Shopify: Ideal if you want to balance flexibility with a ready product and robust SEO support.

WooCommerce: Ideal if you’re already operating on WordPress.

PrestaShop: Ideal if you prefer a platform with intuitive and helpful SEO support.