Can You Have a Blog on Shopify?

Can you have a blog on Shopify?

If yes, then would it be a good idea or not? And are there big or successful brands that used Shopify for blogging?

And how different is it from WordPress to use Shopify to build a blog?

These questions and more, I will be answering in this guide in order to help you start the right way.

Without further ado, let’s begin!

Can You Have a Blog on Shopify?

Yes, you can have a blog on Shopify if you have already built your store with it, or even if you still don’t want to build a store, but you only want to build a blog and you want to use Shopify for that.

Shopify gives you the basic requirements for creating a blog and publishing content on it in order to support your ecom store, and many existing Shopify store owners are creating blog posts on the same ecom website in order to get more traffic and promote their products.

When to Use Shopify for Blogging?

If you have an online store, or want to build one, in order to sell your products and services, then you may use Shopify to build the store, and then use the blog feature to create articles for content marketing purposes.

However, if your main focus is to just build a blog and monetize it through different ways such as: display ads, affiliate marketing, email marketing, …etc., then Shopify might come with some limitations that would decrease your performance, and you might want to use WordPress instead.

3 Successful Shopify Blog Examples

There are many blogs that are built on Shopify, either to support an online store, or to be just a blog, such as:

Odditymall

Oddity is a well-known online store that sells cool and unique products in all sorts of niches and to all segments of people, and their revenue is estimated to be in the range of millions of dollars per year.

The main way Odditymall is monetized is by selling on Shopify without inventory through dropshipping.

And although they get traffic directly to their product pages from social media platforms, but they also create blog posts that talk about the products they sell, or to affiliate products on other marketplaces, and then get traffic to these posts either from social media, or from Google.

Gymshark

Gymshark is a company that made around £268 million (around $358 million) in revenue in 2020 selling sportswear on their website using Shopify.

And Gymshark also uses the blog feature on the Shopify platform in order to create articles that would target certain groups of people and offer them relevant products and deals.

BioLite

BioLite sells green and energy efficient gadgets and appliances on their store that is built on Shopify, and they also have a blog on the same Shopify website where they share ideas and write guides and reviews and promote their own products on in the process.

Pro’s & Con’s of Blogging on Shopify

As you saw above, many successful Shopify stores have their blogs built on Shopify, and they publish articles on regular basis in order to drive people to their products through informational and educational content that links internally to their products.

However, no platform is one-size-fits-all and can be the best in everything, and that applies to Shopify that was mainly built to host ecom stores.

Here are some of the pros and cons of having a blog on Shopify:

Pro’s

• Very reliable platform with a clean design.
• Easy to use dashboard and very beginner-friendly.
• Fast hosting and navigation, which is good for getting SEO rankings and for the overall user experience.

Con’s

• Some limitations on organizing the URL structure.
• A bit harder to organize blog content and different elements such as tables and product cards if you want to monetize it with other ways like affiliate marketing and ads, especially when compared to WordPress.
• It’s a closed source CMS, meaning that if you want to migrate your blog content to another platform like WordPress, it would take some work to download it on a CSV file, upload it to WP, and then re-edit and organize it, but it is doable.

WordPress or Shopify for Blogging?

It’s up to you which platform to use for starting your blog, Shopify or WordPress.

If you have a Shopify store, or you want to build one and your main focus is to sell physical or digital products through any of the ecommerce models, or even sell services, courses, and subscriptions, and you want the blog to be a secondary element for content marketing purposes, then you may use Shopify to build the store, static pages, and blog.

I have created a detailed comparison between Shopify and WP for dropshipping that can show you why Shopify is better in this case.

But if your main focus is actually to build a blog and monetize it in different ways without selling your products or service, such as affiliate marketing or display ads, then you better use WordPress, unless you feel that it is “too hard” to work on WP, then you may use Shopify, keeping in mind that it is not as flexible and expandable as WordPress for pure blogging purposes.

However, if you want to take the advantages of the powerful ecom benefits of Shopify, and the powerful blogging benefits of WordPress, then here’s something for you:

3 Ways to Use Shopify with WordPress for Ecom & Blogging (with Examples)

There are at lest three ways that you can use the powerful blogging features on WordPress with the powerful ecom features on Shopify in order to build a reliable online store and a flexible and expandable blog:

Shopify Store with a WP Blog on a Sub-Domain

With this method, you use the root domain (example.com) to build a Shopify store, and you create a subdomain to create a blog on WordPress.

You do this when your main business monetization method and focus is selling products through different advertising methods, and the blog is a supplementary element to get additional traffic.

Example of this is the InspireUplift dropshipping store that is built on Shopify, and uses the sub-domain (blog.inspireuplift.com) to create blog posts for content marketing purposes.

The downfall of this approach is that you need to pay for both, Shopify, and a WordPress hosting service, and you need to handle two platforms, with two sets of tools like themes, apps and plugins, which might be paid in some cases, which increases your costs and the time you need to maintain them.

WP Blog with a Shopify Store on a Sub-Domain

Here, you do the opposite by creating a blog website on WordPress on the root domain (example.com), and you use a sub-domain to create a Shopify store (shop.example.com).

This might work better if your focus is building a blog or authority website to monetize in different ways. and you want to heavily focus on getting organic traffic from search engine to your blog posts, and you want to add selling products or services as a supplementary income stream.

And example on this approach is Sarah Titus who have a blog-based WP website that is built on the root domain (sarahtitus.com), and she has a Shopify store on a sub-domain (shop.sarahtitus.com) where she sells digital products such as templates, journals and other printables.

The downfall, like in the previous option, is that you need to work with two platforms and pay for two hosting services and two sets of tools.

WP Blog with Shopify Lite

A third way that gives you the power of both: WP blogging and Shopify ecommerce, at a lower cost and less headache, is that you use WordPress to build a blog on the root domain.

And instead of creating a complete Shopify store front, you just use the Shopify Lite plan to add products and set up a payment gateway, and whenever you want to promote a product on your blog, you embed a product card on the blog post or page you want through copying and pasting an HTML code.

And when someone clicks the “Buy” button on that product card, they will get redirected to the cart and checkout pages to continue their purchase and pay you.

You can have all the powerful Shopify features with this plan, and you manage it from a Shopify admin dashboard, except that you don’t have a storefront and product pages like it is with the normal plans.

This is perfect if you have very few products or services to sell, or a service, and you want to heavily focus on the blogging side.

How to Create a Blog Post on Shopify?

From the admin dashboard:

• Click the “Online Store” tab on the left sidebar.
• Click “Blog Posts” option, and then, click the “Add Blog Post” blue button, and the blog content editor will open up.
• Start writing and editing the title and the content, use the formatting options as needed, add images and videos when necessary.
• Edit the meta title and description and the URL in the “Search Engine Listing Preview” box down the page.
• Assign another and a main blog (category) in the right sidebar.
• Click the “Save” button on the right bottom corner, and your blog post will become live.

If you want to add a complete blog or a blog post into one of the navigation menus (header or footer), you can do that from the admin dashboard as follows:

• Click “Online Store” on the left sidebar.
• Choose “Navigation”.
• Select the menu you want to edit.
• In the existing elements of the menu, click the last option “Add Menu Item”, and you will be able to choose which item to add. You can add the whole blog, a category, or one blog post as an item in the menu.
• You can drag the item up and down in order to change its location inside the menu.

Can You Migrate a Shopify Blog to WordPress?

You can migrate a blog from Shopify to WordPress by downloading the content on a CSV file, mainly through a third-party Shopify app or web tool that allows you to do so, and then uploading the content to the WordPress blog.

Note that, depending on which tool you use, you might need to re-upload the images manually, and you need to edit the text, headings, images, and seo-related data like meta titles and descriptions, which might take sometime, but it is doable.

Conclusion – Is Shopify Good or Bad for Blogging?

Shopify is good for blogging as it offers a very reliable, fast-loading, and easy-to-use platform that allows you to create blog posts and use them for content marketing as one of the free ways to get traffic to a Shopify store.

But if your main purpose is to build and grow a big blog and monetize it with different methods, then Shopify might come with some limitations that would be avoided in case you use a WordPress.

Whether you want to have a blog on Shopify or not is up to you, but as I explained earlier, if your main focus is selling products and services, and you consider the blog as a secondary element of your business, then you may be better using Shopify for the store and the blog.

And if your main focus is your blog, and you intend to monetize it with many different ways, and one of them might be ecommerce, then you may explore building a WordPress blog on the root domain, and then build a Shopify store on a sub-domain, or use Shopify Lite with it.

I hope that my article was helpful for you in knowing that you can have a blog on Shopify, and how to decide if you want to do so or not.

If you still need help or have another question, please, tell me in the comments’ section below, and I will do my best to help you out 🙂

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