Technical SEO checklist for Shopify Plus

Short answer

Shopify Plus stores fail SEO in different ways than Basic stores. Plus adds multi-market complexity (hreflang, currency-specific canonicals), heavier catalogues (crawl budget matters), and custom Liquid or Hydrogen builds that break default schema. This checklist covers what actually breaks in the wild.

The checklist

1. Indexation

• Indexed URLs in Search Console within 10% of sitemap URLs.
• No spike in "Discovered - currently not indexed" over the last 90 days.
• Tag pages noindexed via theme conditional.
• Filter parameters blocked in robots.txt.liquid.

2. Canonicals

• Filtered collection URLs canonical to the unfiltered collection.
• Duplicate product URLs (accessed via collection path) canonical to /products/x.
• Market-specific URLs use correct rel-alternate + hreflang, not cross-market canonicals.

3. hreflang (Shopify Markets)

• Every active market emits hreflang for every language pair.
• x-default present and pointing to the primary market.
• hreflang URLs return 200 (not 3xx or 4xx).
• Verify with Screaming Frog's hreflang audit before every launch.

4. Core Web Vitals

• Mobile LCP under 2.5s at the 75th percentile.
• CLS under 0.1.
• INP under 200ms.
• Hero image preloaded with <link rel="preload">.
• All below-fold images lazy-loaded.
• Third-party apps audited quarterly - one heavy chat or review widget can add 800ms to LCP.

5. Structured data

• Product + AggregateRating + Review on every PDP.
• ItemList on every collection.
• Organisation + WebSite on the homepage.
• BreadcrumbList on all deep pages.
• Validate quarterly with Google's Rich Results Test.

6. Sitemaps

• Shopify auto-generates /sitemap.xml - do not disable.
• Above 50,000 URLs, Shopify segments automatically - submit each segment in Search Console.
• Custom pages (case studies, blog articles served outside Shopify content) need a supplementary sitemap.

7. Redirects

• All old URLs from previous rebuilds 301'd to closest match.
• No redirect chains longer than 1 hop.
• Bulk import redirects via Shopify's redirect CSV - do not build redirects one-at-a-time in Admin.

8. Custom themes / headless

• If on Hydrogen or a headless build: schema does not ship by default - inject manually.
• Verify canonical output on every template.
• Verify sitemap generation - Hydrogen requires a custom route.
• Confirm robots.txt is served from the storefront, not the framework default.

How often to run it

Full checklist quarterly. Indexation and Core Web Vitals monthly. Anything touching a theme deploy: canonical, hreflang, schema - verify on staging before every release.