WordPress powers 43% of all websites and handles SEO fundamentals exceptionally well. The platform generates clean semantic HTML, creates logical URL structures automatically, and Google crawls WordPress sites efficiently because the codebase is predictable and well-documented. The real SEO performance comes down to three variables: your theme's code quality, your hosting speed, and which plugins you install. A bloated theme with 2+ second load times will torpedo your rankings regardless of how good WordPress core is. We've seen identical content rank 15-20 positions higher just by switching from a pagebuilder-heavy theme to GeneratePress or Kadence with proper caching. For e-commerce specifically, WordPress plus WooCommerce creates some technical debt. You'll need to optimize product schemas, manage faceted navigation properly to avoid duplicate content, and handle image optimization aggressively since product catalogs balloon quickly. Shopify handles these considerations automatically, but you sacrifice customization control. WordPress advantages for SEO include: - Full control over title tags, meta descriptions, and schema markup through Yoast or RankMath - Direct .htaccess and robots.txt access for crawl control - Ability to edit any template file for structured data implementation - Extensive redirect management without third-party dependencies - Complete ownership of your content and hosting environment The platform struggles when clients install 40+ plugins, choose cheap shared hosting at $4/month, or pick themes that load 3MB of resources per page. WordPress doesn't cause SEO problems, but it gives you enough rope to hang yourself. At Ottawa SEO, roughly 60% of our portfolio runs on WordPress because the control-to-maintenance ratio works at scale. For local service businesses and content-driven sites, it's our default recommendation. For pure e-commerce at 5,000+ SKUs, we evaluate whether Shopify's managed infrastructure outweighs WordPress's flexibility based on the client's technical capacity and customization requirements.