The Most Common WooCommerce SEO Issues (and Fixes)

WordPress is among the most common site architectures, and WooCommerce is quite possibly the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress. That makes the combination an incredibly common and powerful setup for building a business website.

While powerful, there's a significant drawback: out of the box, they need a lot of work to adhere to modern SEO standards. They're fine as they are, but fine doesn't cut it in today's business environment. You need to excel if you want to have a chance to compete.

Over the years, I've worked with a lot of different e-commerce businesses. While my primary offering is content production and blog management, I usually do a solid once-over for SEO purposes to help my clients succeed. After all, even the best content won't gain traction if the site it's on is full of issues.

That means I've encountered a lot of problems with WordPress and WooCommerce installations. Today, I put together my list of the most common errors, as well as tips on how to fix them, so even without hiring me to do it for you, you can boost your site's SEO and start earning the rankings you deserve.

Then you can hire me for content, and it's a win/win, right? Anyway. Let's get right to it!

Images Aren't Compressed

E-commerce is a heavily visual medium, which means product pages are full of images. But images are usually quite large, often downloaded whole from the product manufacturer and edited to suit the store's needs. If they aren't, they're usually bespoke photography, and modern digital photos are huge.

The problem, of course, is site speed and loading times. When you upload an image to your WordPress/WooCommerce site, it will be lightly processed and shrunk down to fit the space you're putting it in. But, often, that's just scaling, not compression. So, you have massive images 5x the size of your screen's real estate, shrunk down in full resolution to the space of a product photo.

It's a ton of wasted data and bandwidth.

How to fix it:

This one is simple: compress your images. They don't need to be huge, and even if they do, you can still compress them down in ways that remove a ton of excess data without affecting image quality.

Fortunately, you don't need to learn Photoshop to do this. There are a bunch of WordPress plugins and tools you can use, like Imagify, Smush, ShortPixel, and EWWW. I covered them all in a comparative review here, so pick your favorite and get those images crunched down to size.

Caching Isn't Enabled

Caching is another big site speed factor.

WordPress, and by extension the stores built on it, are very dynamic. They use PHP and SQL to generate pages based on content in databases and framing set in your themes and plugins. The problem is, that's slow. It takes a lot of back-and-forth with the server and client, it requires rendering, yadda yadda.

Sure, with modern 5G or high-speed internet, it might only be a matter of a few hundred milliseconds, maybe a second at the longest, but that's still longer than it needs to be. And we know, from user behavior studies, that even an additional second of load time dramatically increases bounce rates and reduces traffic, ranking, conversions, and other metrics.

The easiest way to get around this is to cache your site. Caching renders your site once, and then holds that rendered version, so it's static and loads much more quickly. You can pre-render, or you can let the first visitor render the page and cache it for future visitors. You can also do a lot of optimizations with the cache, but that gets into more technical details.

How to fix it:

Enable caching! There are a lot of different ways to do this, too, but my favorite by far is WP Rocket.

WP Rocket is an incredibly powerful caching and site speed tool, and it's one of the first things I install on any WordPress site, no matter what purpose it's serving or why it was built. It's just too useful. Even with out-of-the-box settings, it's going to give you a boost, and with some optimization, it will be even better.

You're Not Using a CDN

We take it for granted that the modern internet is broadly accessible and widely distributed, but there's still an element of geolocation involved in all of it. Your choice of web host also determines where your servers are located, which data center hosts them.

For a lot of people, that's not a problem. But the further you get, geographically, from the data center, the longer it takes for data to reach you. A data center in Texas is going to be fine for most of the USA, even most of North America, but it's going to be slower for other continents.

Even within the USA, a data center in California is going to be slower to access for someone in New York than a data center in Atlanta. Maybe not by much, but pagespeed is measured in milliseconds, and every one of them counts.

A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, hosts your site (or a cached version of it, generally) on mirrored data centers around the world. Cloudflare, the biggest non-enterprise CDN out there, has hundreds of servers around the world. That way, no matter where in the world a visitor is, they're close to a server and get the fastest possible load times.

CDNs also provide protection against bot attacks, DDoSing, and other problems, so they can be a security feature too.

How to fix it:

Get a CDN account and set it up.

Cloudflare is the biggest and arguably the best, and they have a pretty extensively-featured free plan. You can use a WordPress plugin to help manage it, or just set it up through a Cloudflare dashboard.

Now, Cloudflare has some issues. It seems like every year there's a decent-sized outage that affects large swaths of the internet. But, since they're so huge, they have to be on the ball; a smaller CDN might not be able to resolve issues as quickly, even if they're smaller in scope. And, when an issue is clearly Cloudflare's, it's not going to be held against your SEO, whereas an issue with a smaller CDN might. Despite some misgivings, I still recommend it.

You're Missing a Sitemap

A sitemap is basically just a list of every page on your site, usually with a little bit of accessory information, like the date it was created and the date it was most recently updated. Giving your sitemap to Google ensures that they know how to find every page on your site, and helps guarantee that your site is fully indexed.

This is especially important for a WooCommerce site. Each product page should be listed in your sitemap, so Google has a full view of your product catalog.

You probably aren't going to make this manually, which is fine. Sitemaps can be generated automatically, managed with a plugin, and kept up to date with no overview. All you need to do is check once a year or so to make sure it's still updated, and you're fine.

How to fix it:

This has two parts.

The first is to install a sitemap manager. SEOPress has a reasonably good one that works well with WooCommerce product catalogs. It helps make sure that your whole product catalog is listed, but that you can leave out interstitial pages and system pages you don't want indexed.

The second is to submit the sitemap to Google. You only need to do this once; all you're doing is giving Google the URL of the sitemap so they can check it whenever they want to, not directly uploading a file you need to refresh. Once you've done that, you're good to go.

Your Robots.txt Has Problems

In order to index your site, Google has to crawl it. In order to crawl it, they have to use bots (as well as Chrome data and other sources, but mostly crawling.) In order to control bots crawling your site, you need to use something like your robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file gives directives to bots and crawlers. You can block them entirely, block them from individual pages or categories, and more. It's usually a good idea to block them from system pages and other pages that don't need to be publicly indexed.

The problem is, it's very easy to accidentally block whole URL strings, subfolders, or domains in a way that leaves large chunks of your site inaccessible. Maybe you tried to block bots you don't like and accidentally blocked Google, too. Maybe you tried to block a URL string and blocked more than you intended. Maybe you just misconfigured it, or left a bad file in from a test version of your site.

Fortunately, fixing robots.txt isn't too hard.

How to fix it:

Technically, this is easy. You can use a robots.txt validator tool to control and manage what your directives are doing. The real trick is knowing what to block and what not to block. To an extent, that's a personal decision. Maybe you want to block image system pages, category or tag pages, or search result pages in your storefront. Maybe you want everything open to Google, but to block the AI crawler bots. It's all up to you.

Fortunately, Google has a good guide on how robots.txt works, so do a bit of reading, and you'll be set to configure your file appropriately.

Your Site is Riddled with 404s

One particular challenge that crops up with sites as they get older, and especially ecommerce sites, is that things move and change over time. Every time you create a page, that page exists as a URL indexed in Google and extant in the world. When you move or change the page, if the URL changes, the old URL still exists. Any links or indexation pointing to it will result in a 404: Page Not Found error.

While this is primarily just a problem with blogs when you delete underperforming posts or do a content audit, it's a lot worse with e-commerce sites. Every time you rename, change, or drop a product, that product's listing page lingers as a potential 404.

404s aren't bad on their own. After all, every website has an infinite number of them. I could go to your site and type in /asdf/asft.html and end up on a 404, and that's not your fault.

Where 404s become a problem is if they're still in the index, or if they're still linked to by internal or external links. Any time potential traffic lands on your site but ends up on a 404, it's a strike against you.

How to fix it:

You can't entirely prevent the concept of 404s, but there are two or three things you should do.

The first is to implement redirects. Any time you move or change a page, redirect the old URL to the new URL. If there's ever any potential of a user following an external link and landing on the old URL, they should be smoothly redirected to a relevant new URL.

The second is to scan your site for bad links. Tools like Screaming Frog, Greenflare, or even the WordPress plugin Broken Link Checker can do this for you. Any links that don't resolve properly should be fixed.

The third is to make a good 404 page. You can't completely prevent people from ending up on nonexistent pages, but you can make your 404 page more useful. Including some copy about why pages might be missing, a site search box to help them find more useful content, and even a feed for new blog posts or product listings can all be handy. Turning your 404 page into a pseudo landing page is a great idea.

Your Store is Missing Canonical URLs for Products

One of the modern SEO challenges is the risk of duplicate content. Duplicate content is when two pages are identical or near-enough to identical that Google finds one of them to be unhelpful.

With blogs, this can be a problem, but it's relatively easy to fix. With an e-commerce storefront, you run into a lot more problems with duplicate or near-duplicate product listings. Worse, if you use the wrong kind of permalink structure, you can end up with multiple valid URL strings pointing at the same product page, which easily reads as duplicate content.

How to fix it:

Canonicalization is the word you're looking for. You can tag a URL with rel="canonical" tags, which tells Google which URL of the page is the "real" version of the page. Any alternative URLs are counted as just that: alternatives. Only the real, canonical version is indexed, and anything else doesn't count against you.

This page has a great guide on WooCommerce canonicalization, how it works, and how to implement it. The good news is, it's something you generally only need to do once.

Another thing you can do to help cut down on the issue is to lump products together where possible. Instead of having individual pages for the Small, Medium, and Large versions of a product, have one product page with a drop-down selector for each version. Structuring your site that way helps consolidate pages and reduce your maintenance burden, too.

Your Site Doesn't Have Good Mobile Compatibility

It's been a good few years since Google decided to shift to mobile-first indexation. They did so because the scales were tipping, and the majority of web searches today are done through mobile devices. The field is muddier now than it was (with AI searches, voice searches, visual searches, and other formats taking up some market share), but it's still nearly a 50/50 split, with mobile pulling ahead. Depending on the data source you use, mobile might be anywhere from 51% to 63% today.

All that is to say, you need a site that works well and looks good on mobile devices. That means a mobile-compatible, responsive design theme. Since there are far too many different mobile devices with their own screen sizes and viewports, responsive design is a must-have.

Mobile-first indexing, by the way, simply means that Google looks at your mobile design before looking at your desktop design when it comes to ranking. While both are important, your mobile design has more influence over your search ranking today.

How to fix it:

Make sure your site looks and feels good on mobile.

There are a lot of tools out there that can simulate various mobile devices to see how your site looks on them. You also probably have a smartphone of your own that you can use to test. Make sure your site, your storefront, your product pages, your menus, and all the rest work well on mobile.

This topic could be a whole article of its own, frankly. There are a thousand different ways a mobile site could have issues. If you notice any friction or broken functions, talk to your developer team about it.

Your Products Aren't Using Schema

Schema, found at schema.org, is a collaborative meta code created by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other search organizations. It's basically a huge library of meta tags that can be attached to various kinds of information on a website, so that automatic information retrieval systems like search engine scrapers can know what data is what without needing language parsing or context clues.

If you've ever heard of an issue where one piece of data is misattributed as another and causes problems, Schema helps avoid that. For example, one woman's gift card balance was misattributed as the barcode, making her the world's richest person, in a sense. Online, you might see similar issues if a SKU is misattributed as a price, so Google Shopping thinks your $5 item costs $18573829, or whatever.

Schema also gives you enhanced listings in the search results. Any time you see a recipe result with ingredients listed, a review page with a star rating right there on the SERPs, or any of the data from a product listing, it's pulled from Schema.

How to fix it:

Use schema markup.

Fortunately, product pages are one of the most common uses of Schema, and there are all sorts of plugins specifically for WordPress and for WooCommerce that implement it for you. WooCommerce even has a guide for it themselves, which you can read here.

Product/commerce Schema is obviously the big one, but product pages can also have Review schema (if you accumulate customer reviews on the page), so take that into account as well.

Your Product Pages Aren't Unique

This one is sort of similar to the duplicate content issue above, but instead of being multiple referential URLs to the same page on your site, it's multiple pages on your site being carbon copies of other pages on other sites.

Many e-commerce brands set up their products using the information provided by wholesalers. For some information (SKU, product specifications and technical specs, etc.) that's fine. For others, like plain language descriptions, it's not.

The issue here is that, if Google finds ten pages with the same information, they aren't going to give ten websites with identical pages ranking in the search results. They're more likely to pick two or three, and populate the rest of the results with other kinds of results. It's part of QDD: Query Deserves Diversity.

So, if you're just copying manufacturer information, you're doing yourself a huge disservice.

How to fix it:

Give each bit of information on your product pages a unique spin. Some information is fixed, like product specs, but your ad copy needs to be unique.

Write a little narrative, spin the description, have AI whip something up; it doesn't really matter as long as it's not the same as what everyone else has already done.

Your Issues

What I've covered above are the most common "big picture" issues I encounter with client WooCommerce sites. It's by no means every problem you could have, and it also doesn't account for non-SEO issues like broken checkout pages, lacking security, or customer service problems. Those are important too, of course, but they're outside the scope of this post.

That said, if you've run into a common SEO issue that I didn't cover, why not talk about it in the comments? I'm more than happy to discuss it with you, and if it's particularly noteworthy, I could even add it to the post. Just let me know!