Shopify SEO audit and checklist: what 114 Shopify sites get wrong

The short answer

The study cannot say whether Shopify is good or bad for rankings. It shows which technical SEO problems are common on Shopify sites, and where they differ from sites built with six other platforms.[1]

What is common on Shopify sites

The five most common warning-level problems on the 114 Shopify sites that count. A site has a problem when at least one of its pages does.[1]

• Heading hierarchy skips levels. A page jumps a heading level, for example from an H2 to an H4. On 99.1% of Shopify sites that count (113 of 114; 95% interval 95.2 to 99.8).[1]
• Protocol-relative resource links. A script, stylesheet or image address starts with // and not with https://. On 97.4% of Shopify sites that count (111 of 114; 95% interval 92.5 to 99.1).[1]
• The same social card on every page. Several pages carry the same social title or description, so a shared link shows the same card whichever page was shared. On 96.5% of Shopify sites that count (110 of 114; 95% interval 91.3 to 98.6).[1]
• HSTS max-age under 180 days. The site tells browsers to keep to HTTPS for less than 180 days. On 95.6% of Shopify sites that count (109 of 114; 95% interval 90.1 to 98.1).[1]
• Excessive DOM size (over 1500 nodes). A page has more than 1,500 nodes in its HTML. On 93.9% of Shopify sites that count (107 of 114; 95% interval 87.9 to 97).[1]

Where Shopify sites differ from other builders

The six problems with the widest gap between the seven platforms. Shopify sites had the highest share of the seven for three of them: HSTS max-age under 180 days, protocol-relative resource links and images missing alt attribute, and the lowest share for one: no main landmark.[1]

All seven builders side by side: what 743 sites built with seven website builders get wrong.

A Shopify SEO checklist, from the study

The five problems above, as five things to check on your own site. Some may be platform defaults and some owner choices; the study cannot tell them apart.

• Headings in order. Read each page’s headings from the top: an H2 follows the H1, an H3 follows an H2, and no level is skipped.
• Addresses that start with https://. Find script, stylesheet and image addresses that start with // and write them with https://.
• A social card for each page. Give each page its own social title and description, written from that page’s title and description.
• HTTPS kept for long enough. Read the Strict-Transport-Security header your site sends: its max-age should cover 180 days or more.
• Fewer nodes on long pages. Where a page has more than 1,500 nodes, split long lists over several pages or load them as the reader scrolls.

Which Shopify sites these are

125 Shopify sites were crawled and 114 count. Sites were drawn at random, with a fixed seed, from the Tranco list of popular domains, between rank 1,000 and rank 1,000,000, and the platform was detected from each homepage’s markup. No site is named.[1]

What this does not show

The study’s own limits, word for word:

• Search outcomes. Nothing here says whether these problems cost traffic or rankings.
• Cause. A figure describes sites built on a platform. It mixes platform defaults with owner choices and with the kind of site each platform attracts.
• Sites we could not crawl fully. If sites that refuse or block crawlers differ from the rest, the figures lean toward sites that are easy to crawl. The number left out is published with each version.
• Every page of large sites. Crawls stop at 1,000 pages; the number of sites that hit the cap is published with each version.
• Pages after JavaScript. Figures read the HTML as served. Speed (LCP, CLS) and accessibility need a browser and are not measured.
• Individual sites. No site is named, and the downloads hold totals only, one row per platform and problem.

Run an SEO audit of your own Shopify site

A share of 114 sites does not say what is on yours. Our free SEO audit is a real crawl of up to 25 of your pages, with no account, and lists the issues to fix first. What an SEO audit checks explains what it looks at.