WooCommerce SEO audit: where WordPress and a shop collide
Every WordPress problem, plus a catalogue that multiplies them.
WooCommerce inherits everything WordPress does — competing plugins in the head, blocked assets, thin archives — and adds the problems of a shop: attributes that generate URLs, filters that generate more, and products that outlive their stock.
The result is stores where the number of crawlable URLs is an order of magnitude larger than the number of products. Here is what an audit looks for, and which findings are worth the hour on a catalogue of any size.
What goes wrong on WooCommerce sites
Attribute and filter URLs multiplying
?filter_colour=, ?orderby=, ?min_price= and layered-nav combinations generate a practically unlimited set of crawlable URLs, each near-identical to the category page. On a large catalogue this is the single biggest waste of crawl budget we find.
Product pages with supplier copy
Descriptions pasted from the manufacturer appear identically on every store selling the product. Google has to pick one, and it is rarely the smallest store. Rewriting the top sellers is usually the highest-return content work available.
Out-of-stock products left to rot
A discontinued product keeps its URL, its links and its rankings, and offers a visitor nothing. Decide per product: keep it with alternatives shown, redirect it to the category, or let it 410.
Shop pagination canonicalised to page one
Several themes point /page/2/ back at the shop root. Products only reachable from deeper pages then have no crawlable path at all, which is how large catalogues end up with hundreds of orphaned products.
Cart, checkout and account pages being crawled
These should never be indexed and rarely need crawling. Left open they waste budget and occasionally end up in results, which looks careless to anyone who finds them.
Plugin weight on every product page
WooCommerce plus a page builder plus a reviews plugin plus a currency switcher is a lot of JavaScript on a page whose job is to load a photo and a price quickly.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- How many crawlable URLs the catalogue generates versus how many products exist
- Filter, sort and attribute URLs that are indexable
- Duplicate and templated titles and descriptions across products
- Products with no internal links, and products not in the sitemap
- Canonical tags on products, categories and paginated pages
- Mobile Core Web Vitals on a product page rather than just the homepage
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
Canonical tag checker
The tag that decides which URL gets the credit — checked properly.
XML sitemap checker
Find your sitemap, prove it parses, and see what it is actually telling Google.
SEO score checker
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
Duplicate title tags
Several pages share one identical title.
Orphan page
No other page on the site links to it.
Canonical mismatch
The page points at a different URL as the original.
Slow largest contentful paint
The main content takes too long to appear.
Questions
Related
WordPress
The problems WordPress creates for itself, and the ten minutes it takes to find them.
E-commerce
Catalogue sites don't have SEO problems. They have SEO problems multiplied by the catalogue.
Online store
Written for the person who packs the orders and also runs the website.
Crawl the store and see how many URLs your filters are really generating
The free audit crawls the site, groups every finding, and returns the five things worth fixing this month in plain English. No card, no call.
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