For a long time, WordPress has been seen as the ultimate blogging platform. For the most part, that’s always been true and is still true today. However, in recent years, many new blogging platforms have taken the attention off of WordPress. For example, there’s a hot debate over WordPress vs. Shopify, since Shopify offers a pretty decent blogging system.
If you’re a blogger, there are plenty of compelling reasons to use WordPress over other platforms, and here are a handful of those reasons for you to consider.
WordPress is literally designed for blogging
When Matt Mullenweg launched WordPress back in 2003, it was created as a replacement for a blogging platform that had been discontinued (b2/cafelog). Little by little, the platform was improved, but it remained focused on blogging until 2011 when developers started building ecommerce plugins.
Although WordPress has been used for ecommerce since around that time, it’s still fundamentally a blogging platform – ecommerce is simply an option and doesn’t come with the core installation. The blogging features, on the other hand, are built into WordPress are simple, straightforward, and powerful.
In contrast, other website platforms created a blogging feature as an afterthought. For instance, Shopify was created as an ecommerce platform and it’s actually one of the best. However, the blogging feature is lacking in many areas, and that’s because bogging isn’t their area of expertise.
Shopify blogs aren’t inherently SEO-friendly
There are many things you can’t do with a Shopify blog, and that’s bad news when you need to run a serious blog. For starters, the Shopify blog is separate from your main website, which means it’s not optimal for SEO. It’s harder to use categories with Shopify and you can’t get the variety of SEO-boosting plugins that exist for WordPress.
Syndication links are a nightmare with Shopify
If you syndicate your blog posts to other websites, you need automatically-generated attribution links or else Google might view the content as duplicate and issue a penalty to your website. A syndication link looks like this and is placed at the bottom of your syndicated article:
This post [name of post w/link] first appeared on [name of original blog w/link]
These syndication links are difficult with Shopify for two reasons:
· Shopify generates a random number that gets included in the URL for each blog post. You can’t predict this number.
· You need to define the URL that gets included in your syndicated post before you publish your content. To do that, you need to modify your Shopify blog to use SEO-friendly URLs.
· Syndicated content is published nearly instantly, and you won’t always have access to edit your syndicated content to change the URL once you know the random number.
The solution is to make your Shopify blog use SEO-friendly URLs, but again, that’s more work. If you’re a blogger, you probably don’t have time to spend tweaking your blog’s back end just to make it function as it should in the first place.
WordPress takes less work to function as a blog
At the end of the day, you’ll spend less time and energy getting WordPress to function as a blog because it’s already built to be a blog. If you value your time, WordPress is the better option for bloggers. However, if you also sell products, Shopify might be the better option if your blog is just a side project.
Shopify is great if you run an ecommerce store
When you’re running an ecommerce store and a blog, but your store is priority, you’ll probably like Shopify. It’s built for ecommerce, and although you can use WordPress for ecommerce, it takes more effort and time to set up that way.
The solution that marries Shopify and WordPress
If you’re in a position where both your blog and your ecommerce store are equally important, there is a way to use Shopify and WordPress together. It’s not necessarily ideal, but it will work.
Run your ecommerce store on Shopify, and run a WordPress installation on a subdomain, like blog.yoursite.com. They’ll be considered two separate websites for SEO purposes, but you can have your WordPress blog skinned to match your Shopify website so it will look the same. You can also link to each URL from your main menus for a smooth user experience.
Shopify and WordPress are powerful platforms
Shopify or WordPress: which one should you choose? Both of these platforms are powerful, but when it comes to pure blogging, WordPress is the best way to go.