In the previous blog of this series, we dived into the advantages and limitations of WordPress in regards to search engine optimization (SEO), and discussed the highs and lows of plug-ins. We explored how different WordPress plug-ins can be SEO-friendly, while also detrimental to your website if you have too many of them. But now we’re back to explore our next content management system, or ‘CMS’. We are going to take a look at another popular CMS platform that strays away from your traditional type of CMS: BigCommerce.
In this blog, we will be using Shopify as a direct competitor of BigCommerce to compare SEO-friendliness, as they are both paid-for, hosted ecommerce platforms. Similarly to previous blogs within this series, we are going to explore the differences between each CMS platform and how they fare with SEO.
What is BigCommerce?
There are several key similarities between Shopify and BigCommerce. For example, BigCommerce is a paid-for, hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecommerce platform that allows you to host your business online. Similar to Shopify, you can use their service to host your business, as well as sell and market your products using a range of customizable templates.
BigCommerce, like Shopify, also provides some SEO features such as page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and even robots.txt. However, the key difference between the two platforms is that BigCommerce allows you to change and edit these SEO features, whereas Shopify requires you to find workarounds. In the third blog of our series focusing on the SEO limitations of Shopify, we address the importance of being able to optimize your page titles and meta descriptions, as it contributes to your page ranking on the search engine results page (SERPs). Additionally, in our first Shopify blog of the series, we explain why the ability to edit your robots.txt is significant, as this fires signals to search engines on how to crawl and index your site.
Despite some of the similarities that these two platforms share, there is one key difference that gives BigCommerce a leg up on Shopify – BigCommerce is a headless CMS.
What is headless CMS?
What is a headless CMS, you may ask? A headless CMS is any type of back-end CMS where the stored and authored content, or “body”, is separated from the front-end presentation layer, the “head”. The content that is housed in a headless CMS is delivered using application programming interfaces (APIs) across different platforms and devices.
So what does this all mean? Well, traditional CMS platforms like Shopify manage content by putting everything in one place i.e. content, images, hypertext markup language (HTML), cascading style sheets (CSS), etc. This may be okay if you’re just using one platform destination, like your website – but users and the way they browse the web have grown past that in recent years. So if you want to reuse your content across multiple platforms and channels (like desktops, mobile devices, apps, and other digital properties like online accounts), it is impossible for the same content to adapt to other digital platforms because traditional CMS platforms organize content in a webpage oriented framework. On top of that, it is very tedious and time consuming to update and write copy across many sites and accounts. However, by having a headless CMS, your content lives separately from your digital properties. The “head” is the output in which you decide where your content ends up. In this way, it can be structured independently from the rest of your platforms and channels.
With that being said, we are going to explore how being “headless” can support your SEO needs.
The benefits of a headless CMS
From our Shopify blog series, we learned that there are a number of SEO limitations that require workarounds and some that you must simply accept as they cannot be fixed. This is how traditional CMSs typically work. They are set up to function via one platform, which is usually a website – but a headless CMS solves this limitation of a traditional CMS. Let’s take a look at some other examples of its benefits.
Redirects and canonicals
One benefit of a headless CMS like BigCommerce is that it allows you to create your own redirect rules. Let’s take, for example, duplicate content. We spoke about the issue Shopify has with duplicate content in our second Shopify blog. Fortunately, BigCommerce allows you to create and customize product-specific uniform resource locators (URLs) without difficulty, but the platform also has a similar issue as Shopify – you do not have the ability to change or customize the canonical URLs.
However, because BigCommerce is headless, it is possible to set up wildcard redirects with your registrar, which allows you to redirect any page that matches a pattern. Thus, you can redirect directories or sections from an old page to a new page, or as a workaround to avoid duplicate self-referencing canonical pages (regardless of the specified URL page). For example:
Page A: example.com/category/product
- Self-referencing canonical
Page B: example.com/product
- Self-referencing canonical
But the issue lies in the fact that you can’t just update the canonical of example.com/product to example.com/category/product, so you must use a redirect to mitigate the duplicate content.
Page A: example.com/category/product
- Self-referencing canonical
Page B: example.com/product → 301 redirect to example.com/category/product
- Self-referencing canonical
This doesn’t have to be done for every single URL with a headless CMS because you can implement a wildcard redirect that allows you to redirect any /product page to any /category/product page. For example:
Page A: example.com/bags/backpack
- Self-referencing canonical
Page B: example.com/backpack → 301 redirect to example.com/bags/backpack
- Self-referencing canonical
Page A: example.com/shirts/dress-shirt
- Self-referencing canonical
Page B: example.com/dress-shirt → 301 redirect to example.com/shirts/dress-shirts
- Self-referencing canonical
Because headless CMSs allow you to create wildcard redirects, you are able to mitigate duplicate content, unlike a traditional CMS like Shopify.
Accelerated mobile pages
Another benefit to headless CMSs is site speed performance. Since Google has introduced a ‘mobile-first’ approach to indexing content, it is important to make sure your website supports accelerated mobile pages (AMPs). AMP is a web page format for mobile devices that is designed to accelerate page display. This is important as more users opt for mobile devices over desktops when browsing the web. AMP aims to deliver content quickly to mobile users by using a subset of HTML, like AMP HTML, AMP Javascript, and AMP Cache. With that being said, BigCommerce is the first native ecommerce platform to integrate AMP. The platform utilizes AMP by designing its templates to adjust to the devices that the page is being viewed on. This can definitely help boost engagement and potential sales, while reducing bounce rates.
Plug-ins
A third benefit of a headless CMS is that you can use them via their API. For example, BigCommerce created a plug-in for WordPress using its API, and was only able to do so because it is a headless CMS. This API functionality makes BigCommerce extremely compatible and flexible with other popular technologies. We know that WordPress has already established itself as a robust and highly extensible CMS for content management. The beauty of being headless is that these two platforms can be used together by combining the WordPress CMS and BigCommerce plugin, giving you the best of both worlds. You are able to manage content in WordPress by delivering the front-end experience on your website, while also handling the commerce aspects via BigCommerce through their API. This can also serve as a solution for those who do not want to be locked into a SaaS platform and would rather work in an open source platform like WordPress.
Key takeaway
After learning about a headless CMS like BigCommerce, we are able to see that there are so many different types of CMS platforms out there that are rapidly changing the way brands run their businesses. We can also observe the differing SEO capabilities of these different CMSs. Whether you choose a traditional CMS like Shopify, that packages everything you need in one single website platform, or opt for a headless CMS like BigCommerce, where you can run your content across many devices and platforms, each CMS comes with different benefits and downfalls. We will continue to explore more CMSs to help you decide which platform works best for your business needs.
For more on the SEO advantages and limitations of different ecommerce CMS platforms, check back on our blog page for the next part to our series.
