The main difference between WordPress and Shopify is that WordPress is self-hosted, while Shopify offers design templates and hosting services in one package.

Generally speaking, WordPress requires more effort on the part of the user and has a bigger learning curve than Shopify.

But in the world of e-commerce, SEO is the most important factor to consider when choosing between WordPress and Shopify.

Now, you might not realize just how much tinkering goes into getting WordPress to behave for SEO. With Shopify, the guardrails are up: things like sitemaps, SSL, and mobile responsiveness are basically handled for you. That said, WordPress is way more open-ended, which brings headaches but lets you chase after hyper-specific tweaks (the sort only web nerds really care about). If you want to disappear into the weeds of XML files and schema markup, WordPress gives you all the rope you could ever want.

One thing that sometimes gets missed is how the ecosystem around each platform can change your results in 2025. Shopify users lean hard on their app store, sure, but the core SEO tools are mostly baked in—updating meta tags or redirects is stupid easy. Meanwhile, WordPress is more like a hardware store: you can bolt on Yoast or Rank Math and fine-tune every edge, but you’ll spend an afternoon patching plugins or catching up on forum drama. Both roads can get your pages ranking, but the journey feels very different.

After all, better SEO means more traffic, and more traffic means more business. So let’s look at a comparison between WordPress and Shopify to find the best fit for you.