Kristin Singhasemanon said
1 year, 2 months ago: @bloomfields One big thing to consider is that using the blog platform within your shopping platform gives you a lot more integration possibilities. For instance, if you want your most recent blog post(s) to display on your homepage, along with products, slides or ads, that’ll be a lot easier to do if you use the Shopify blog (can be huge for SEO, especially for ecommerce which tends to be content-poor). I’m not sure if they support listing related blog posts on product pages, but that’s also a super way to get more content (and better SEO) on your product pages.
That being said, ecommerce-platform blogs will tend not to be as fully-featured as self-hosted blogs (especially WP). I found one of Shopify’s example sites that uses the Shopify blog, http://www.abookapart.com/ , and it seems like it’s got the most important features. I don’t see tags, but A Book Apart may have opted not to use them (or they may not be supported). The blog does have mulitple catogories, content delivery network, rss feed, archives, etc. For SEO, the url and page Title default to the post title – not sure if you can customize those or not, or if this matters to you. (WP has same defaults, but SEO plugins allow you to customize.) @kristi-hines has a good point about being able to move your blog. I noticed Shopify does allow importing from WP, so they likely support exporting as well, but you could check with them in advance.
I guess my preference for an ecommerce site is, if the integrated platform is seriously lacking in ways that negate its effectiveness, like poor SEO, missing RSS feeds, posts that drop off, or no categories or tagging, then I’d add a WP blog to a sub-folder. If the integrated platform is reasonably functional, and you can integrate posts throughout your site, the benefits of that integration outweigh small features you may be missing out on.
