What are the downsides of Shopify for SEO?

Short answer

Five real ones: a fixed URL structure, products reachable at several paths, filters and tags that generate crawlable pages, less control over some technical settings, and an app ecosystem that makes stores slow. Only the last three usually cost rankings, and all three are manageable without leaving the platform.

Shopify gets criticised for SEO more than it deserves, but it does have genuine limitations. The useful thing is to know which of them actually affect rankings, because a lot of time and money gets spent on the ones that do not.

1. The URL structure is fixed

Every Shopify store uses /products/ for products, /collections/ for categories, /pages/ for pages and /blogs/ for posts. You cannot remove those segments or change them. This is the downside people complain about most, and it is the one that matters least. Google does not rank a page lower because its URL contains /collections/. Clean, readable URLs are nice for people; the folder name is not a ranking factor anyone has ever shown to matter.

Anyone offering to “fix” it is describing a workaround with proxies or redirects that costs more than the structure ever did. I explained why in what you cannot change in Shopify URLs.

2. Products live at several URLs

A product in three collections can be reached at its own URL and through each collection path. Shopify adds a canonical tag pointing at the main product URL, which Google treats as a strong signal of which version should be canonical. The weakness is that many themes still link internally to the collection-path versions. Your canonicals say one thing and your internal links say another.

This matters, but it is fixable in the theme: change the product links in collection grids to use the canonical product URL. It is one of the first things I check on any Shopify store.

3. Filters and tags create pages you did not choose

This is the downside that costs the most rankings in my experience. Storefront filtering can generate URLs for every combination of colour, size, price and availability. Tag pages create another set. Left alone, they can multiply into thousands of thin pages that compete with your real collections and spread Google’s attention thin.

On one store I worked on, 659 tag pages were competing with the collections the store actually sold from. Managing this means deciding which filtered views deserve to exist as landing pages and keeping the rest out of the index. I covered the approach in Shopify filters and the crawl paths nobody chose.

4. Less technical control

Shopify now lets you edit robots.txt through a theme template, which removed the biggest old complaint. But some things remain harder than on a self-hosted platform: server-level settings, certain response headers, how some system pages behave, and checkout, which you cannot touch. For most stores none of these matter. For very large catalogues with complex requirements, they can.

5. Apps make stores slow

Shopify’s own infrastructure is fast. The HTTP Archive found 76% of Shopify stores had good Core Web Vitals in 2025. But nearly every store adds apps, and many inject scripts into every page. After a few years a store can carry fifteen or twenty, some of which nobody remembers installing, and some of which left code behind after being removed.

Speed is a modest ranking factor and a large conversion factor, so this downside costs money even when it does not cost rankings.

What is not a downside

Duplicate content penalties. There are none; duplicates are consolidated, not punished.

The blog. Shopify’s blog is basic, but it can rank. It usually does not because posts never link into the catalogue.

Being “bad for SEO” in general. A large share of the stores ranking for competitive retail searches run on Shopify.

How to manage the ones that matter

Fix internal product links to use canonical URLs, in the collection grid and anywhere else products are linked.
Write a filter and tag policy. Which views get indexed, which do not, and stick to it.
Audit apps twice a year. Remove what nobody would miss and check the theme for leftover code.
Put the effort into collections. Titles, introductions and internal links. That is where Shopify stores win.

Should these downsides make you leave?

For a typical store, no. Every platform has its own list, and moving brings real risk of losing traffic during the change. The downsides above are known, predictable and manageable, which is more than can be said for a custom build that nobody fully understands.

Where I would think harder is a very large catalogue with complex faceted navigation and a strong in-house engineering team. There, the control a different setup gives you can be worth the cost.

The honest summary: Shopify’s downsides are real but narrow, and almost all of them are about things the platform does by default rather than things it stops you doing. Change the defaults deliberately and most of the list stops mattering.

If your Shopify store is losing out to filter pages, duplicate paths or app weight, my Shopify SEO service fixes them inside the platform, with theme-level changes that survive the next update.