If your e-commerce business runs on Shopify, ask yourself these questions:
- Do I want blogging to be part of my marketing strategy?
- Do I already have a blog? If so, what does that blog run on?
- Do I want my blog to acquire a lot of customers and be net profitable, or do I just want a blog for brand awareness, engagement, retention, etc?
- How much am I willing to spend on my blog?
If the answer to question #1 is yes, the subsequent questions will help you decide whether your blog should — in the long term — run on Shopify or WordPress. There are other options, but Shopify and WordPress are the ones I have the most experience with. I have scaled three different WordPress business blogs from scratch to high customer acquisition and net profitability, and I have worked with Shopify business owners to decide the future of their content marketing programs. Think of this blog post as a free consultation.
For those who want to make a snap decision, the TLDR is that a WordPress subdomain is worth investing in if you want your blog to be a serious customer acquisition channel. Shopify blogs are better for people who want low cost and low maintenance, and are OK with a low return.
For Those Who Already Have a Shopify Blog
If you already have a Shopify blog, there may be a sunk cost effect. Should you stay or migrate to a WordPress subdomain? Another crossroads, another set of questions that will illuminate the best path forward.
- How many monthly website visitors does your Shopify blog drive?
- How many blog posts have you published?
- Do you have effective email acquisition and nurturing infrastructure (email acquisition popups with the ability to decide different triggers, lead magnets where people trade their email for premium content, email drips segmented to different optin sources, etc.)
Let’s say you have more than 50,000 users a month and you’ve published 100+ blog posts. In this case, a migration to WordPress would be disruptive and expensive. Your team would need to implement redirects and perhaps recreate existing blog posts in WordPress. During this process, you would temporarily lose traffic while search engines adjust to technical changes. Regaining that traffic could take months of work on link building, technical fixes and more. If you still want to do the migration, ruminate on whether you have the resources and expertise.
Conversely, it’s an easier decision to mull over if the Shopify blog barely has any traffic and published posts. Any competent freelance SEO and developer team should be able to assist with a small migration.
As for the email issue, I’ve never seen a Shopify blog with that kind of robust system. If you see one, please alert me! When people choose Shopify for their blog, it’s usually because they haven’t been thinking about content as a channel for acquiring and nurturing emails.
Why a WordPress Subdomain is Better for Long-Term Customer Acquisition
There’s a reason why I’ve never seen a Shopify blog with an effective system for acquiring emails and converting email subscribers to purchase. Compared to WordPress, Shopify blogs have limited customization. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to integrate effective email software. There are also limits to how much you can change page templates.
With WordPress, a developer can integrate more plugins and make more consequential changes to designs. These modifications can dramatically increase conversion rate.
When I was working as a full-time employee for a Shopify-based business, implementing this kind of email program on our blog tripled our conversion rate from website visitor to purchase. This result is possible because email programs offer a path for the majority of users who aren’t ready to purchase while they’re on a website. Instead of losing these people forever, they can hang out on an email list that gently pushes them toward purchase.
If You Want a WP Subdomain, Be Serious About Committing Time and Resources
Of course, the aforementioned results require certain skills, resources and time commitments. For three out of four of the major WordPress projects I’ve managed, I hired Strategic Websites to execute development and the technical aspects of email program integration. I also needed a freelancer to help me master the logistical idiosyncrasies of particular email programs. Other costs include writing (if you can’t write everything yourself), design, SEO labor and software, analytics and maintenance.
Does a Subdomain Limit Link Building Effectiveness?
A subdomain has one weakness: Compared to a subdirectory (/blog), search engines don’t view the .blog format as being intimately connected to your main website. When Shopify webmasters get backlinks to their WordPress subdomain, there’s a chance these links won’t boost the Shopify pages’ ranking as much as a subdirectory, and vice versa. To use a SEO term, the “link juice” flows more smoothly with a /blog.
Unfortunately it usually isn’t feasible — or even possible — to have a Shopify mainsite with a WordPress subdirectory. I’m no expert on the technical obstacles, but I can tell you that every tech team I’ve worked with has given up on trying to build this structure.
The good news is that link juice from a subdomain can still flow more than well enough. Even in a worst case scenario where the flow is slow, doing some extra link building isn’t a huge deal.
My most successful project to date was on a WordPress subdomain connected to a Shopify main site. To ensure our link building efforts would succeed, we combined link building campaigns for the Shopify pages and WordPress pages. Before I left the company, we had reached nearly a million pageviews a month and more than 100 customers acquired every week.
Convenience or Customers?
There is absolutely no shame in having a Shopify blog that is primarily for engagement, retention, thought leadership and perhaps a bit of fun. It’s a logical choice to go for low cost and convenience. Maybe your business is already doing great with referrals and ads.
For the folks who are serious about high customer acquisition and low customer acquisition costs in the long term, build a WordPress subdomain with Strategic Websites. You won’t regret it.
Bio: Joseph Rauch is a writer, editor and content marketer with more than a decade of experience. Right now he is working with Strategic Websites to complete The Rauch Review, a brand publication about the intersection of literature and politics.
