WordPress is fundamentally SEO-friendly and powers roughly 43% of all websites globally, including many high-ranking e-commerce sites. The core platform generates clean, semantic HTML5 code, supports custom permalinks (crucial for keyword-rich URLs), and handles mobile responsiveness well with modern themes. Google crawls and indexes WordPress sites without issue. That said, WordPress doesn't magically rank your content. You still need to configure it properly. Out of the box, WordPress lacks schema markup, XML sitemaps, meta description fields, and canonical tag controls. This is where SEO plugins become essential. Yoast SEO and RankMath add these features, plus breadcrumb markup, social graph tags, and redirects. For e-commerce specifically, WooCommerce (the dominant WordPress shop plugin) integrates well with these SEO tools and supports product schema. The real SEO variable is your theme and hosting. Bloated page builders like Elementor or Divi can add 300-500KB of CSS/JS overhead, killing Core Web Vitals scores. We typically see Ottawa e-commerce clients using lightweight themes like Kadence or GeneratePress hitting 1.2-2.5s LCP on managed WordPress hosting, versus 3-5s on shared BlueHost accounts with heavy themes. Page speed directly impacts rankings for competitive product categories. WordPress also gives you full control over your site structure, which matters for e-commerce SEO. You can build proper category hierarchies, control internal linking through menus and widgets, and create custom product taxonomies. The risk is plugin bloat: clients often install 30+ plugins, creating compatibility issues and security holes that tank uptime. At Ottawa SEO, we run WordPress for most of our portfolio domains because it's cost-effective and flexible. For serious e-commerce clients doing over $50K/month, we pair it with WP Rocket for caching, Cloudflare for CDN, and often a headless setup (WordPress backend, Next.js frontend) when performance is make-or-break. WordPress is SEO-friendly, but your implementation determines whether you're competing or just participating.