How well is a shop set up for search engines before anyone optimises a single thing, purely because of the chosen platform? For this report we measured, for 34 common shop systems, how many of their shops ship the technical SEO basics by default: structured data (JSON-LD), a canonical tag, a sitemap declared in robots.txt and Open Graph markup. The basis is the homepage of real shops from HTTP Archive, as of August 2026. The result shows how differently much work a system takes off your hands, and where merchants end up technically better off after a switch.
The key results
- Hosted website builders and SaaS platforms ship technical SEO almost completely by default: Squarespace (99.7%), Wix (99.5%) and Shopify (91.3%) provide structured data, canonical, sitemap and Open Graph on nearly every shop.
- The typical migration sources lag well behind: Magento / Adobe Commerce (47.4%), PrestaShop (49.9%) and OpenCart (51.8%) do not even reach half of what hosted platforms deliver by default.
- Structured data blind spot: Shopware ships JSON-LD on only 15.0% of shops, JTL on just 18.7%. The very machine-readable data that Google needs for rich results and AI systems need for answers is almost entirely missing by default.
- ePages is the weakest of the well-known systems with an SEO setup score of 25.7%: JSON-LD on only 0.5% of shops, canonical on 41.7%.
- Shopify is not the theoretical number one (tiny SaaS providers like Ikas or Big Cartel reach 100%), but it delivers its complete setup reliably across more than 706,000 shops, without merchants doing anything.
- WooCommerce looks strong at 83.5%, but that is down to plugins: without an SEO plugin such as Yoast or RankMath, WordPress does not ship these signals on its own.
SEO setup by shop system
| Shop system | SEO setup score | Structured data (JSON-LD) | Canonical | Sitemap in robots.txt | Open Graph | Shops (n) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ikas | 100.0 % | 100.0 % | 100.0 % | 99.8 % | 100.0 % | 4,547 |
| Big Cartel | 100.0 % | 100.0 % | 100.0 % | 99.9 % | 100.0 % | 2,471 |
| Squarespace | 99.7 % | 99.0 % | 99.9 % | 99.7 % | 100.0 % | 237,340 |
| Wix | 99.5 % | 98.6 % | 99.9 % | 99.7 % | 99.8 % | 281,109 |
| Jumpseller | 99.1 % | 98.3 % | 99.6 % | 99.7 % | 98.8 % | 3,366 |
| plentymarkets | 99.0 % | 99.6 % | 99.6 % | 97.1 % | 99.8 % | 1,034 |
| Shoptet | 91.4 % | 66.4 % | 99.4 % | 99.8 % | 100.0 % | 14,697 |
| Shopify | 91.3 % | 77.1 % | 96.6 % | 95.0 % | 96.7 % | 706,482 |
| Lightspeed | 86.8 % | 47.2 % | 100.0 % | 99.9 % | 100.0 % | 5,425 |
| WooCommerce | 83.5 % | 75.6 % | 97.9 % | 83.3 % | 77.1 % | 986,946 |
| Gambio | 82.1 % | 92.3 % | 98.5 % | 41.5 % | 96.2 % | 3,181 |
| Craft Commerce | 79.1 % | 66.5 % | 85.7 % | 73.2 % | 91.1 % | 847 |
| Ecwid | 75.9 % | 39.4 % | 91.9 % | 92.4 % | 80.0 % | 7,969 |
| Square Online | 75.0 % | 0.9 % | 99.9 % | 99.3 % | 99.9 % | 23,907 |
| Shopware | 73.5 % | 15.0 % | 99.1 % | 80.4 % | 99.5 % | 12,385 |
| VTEX | 73.4 % | 77.9 % | 94.2 % | 39.9 % | 81.7 % | 3,528 |
| JTL | 65.8 % | 18.7 % | 83.1 % | 79.4 % | 82.1 % | 5,227 |
| Salesforce Commerce Cloud | 65.3 % | 57.4 % | 78.7 % | 76.3 % | 48.8 % | 3,981 |
| SAP Commerce | 59.8 % | 40.8 % | 71.6 % | 77.9 % | 48.8 % | 2,249 |
| Webflow | 58.2 % | 32.2 % | 37.8 % | 68.6 % | 94.1 % | 15,377 |
| CS-Cart | 54.2 % | 29.1 % | 93.9 % | 40.7 % | 53.0 % | 4,022 |
| Shift4Shop | 52.5 % | 8.1 % | 99.1 % | 99.9 % | 2.9 % | 1,616 |
| OpenCart | 51.8 % | 48.7 % | 50.1 % | 43.1 % | 65.1 % | 31,945 |
| EKM | 50.5 % | 2.1 % | 100.0 % | 0.0 % | 99.7 % | 1,107 |
| PrestaShop | 49.9 % | 57.0 % | 40.3 % | 44.5 % | 57.9 % | 74,248 |
| Magento / Adobe Commerce | 47.4 % | 48.6 % | 45.5 % | 58.9 % | 36.7 % | 43,964 |
| Drupal Commerce | 41.6 % | 14.6 % | 88.8 % | 20.1 % | 43.1 % | 973 |
| Pimcore | 41.2 % | 28.9 % | 41.9 % | 39.0 % | 55.0 % | 3,345 |
| BigCommerce | 38.3 % | 22.1 % | 98.0 % | 23.0 % | 10.0 % | 16,906 |
| osCommerce | 37.0 % | 23.9 % | 53.8 % | 37.8 % | 32.4 % | 2,536 |
| Zen Cart | 34.5 % | 15.7 % | 76.2 % | 31.1 % | 15.0 % | 952 |
| nopCommerce | 30.0 % | 7.7 % | 12.0 % | 91.0 % | 9.3 % | 5,270 |
| ePages | 25.7 % | 0.5 % | 41.7 % | 49.7 % | 10.8 % | 4,551 |
| Volusion | 23.9 % | 5.9 % | 82.4 % | 4.0 % | 3.4 % | 1,308 |
What this means for your shop
For platform choice this means: a large part of the technical SEO foundation is a question of the system, not the budget. Hosted platforms set structured data, canonical and sitemap by default, while self-hosted systems leave it to the operator, their plugins and their agency.
For the systems most merchants migrate away from, the picture is clear: Magento, PrestaShop and OpenCart leave gaps in canonical and sitemap out of the box, which lead to duplicate content and poorly crawled shops. And the DACH-region favourites Shopware and JTL do ship clean canonical, but barely any structured data, which is increasingly decisive for rich results and AI answers.
After a switch to a hosted platform such as Shopify, these basics are in place from day one. That does not replace an SEO strategy, but it removes the technical problems where visibility is usually lost first.
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Frequently asked questions Which shop system has the best SEO setup out of the box?
Why do Shopware and JTL score so poorly on structured data?
How was this measured?
Sources & methodology
The basis is our own analysis of HTTP Archive data (as of August 2026, mobile crawls, the homepage of each shop). For every captured shop domain we read from the custom metrics whether structured data is present as JSON-LD, whether a canonical tag is set, whether a sitemap is declared in robots.txt and whether Open Graph markup is present. The SEO setup score is the average of these four shares per system. The system attribution comes from HTTP Archive technology detection. We only include systems with at least 300 captured shops; website builders are counted in their eCommerce variant. We measure the homepage, so we assess homepage-typical structured data (e.g. Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList) rather than product markup, which lives on detail pages. All values are a snapshot.
- HTTP Archive – technology detection & custom metrics
- Google: Intro to structured data (JSON-LD)
- Google Search Central: canonical URLs
Conducted by
Richard Roth
SEO & GEO Strategist
Till Täubrich
Shopify Development & Migration
Research and analysis by the team at store2x, specialists in Shopify migration and SEO.