Should I use Shopify or a custom build?

Use Shopify if your catalogue is conventional and you want to be trading next week. Choose a custom build when the catalogue does not fit a product grid or the checkout carries business logic. Any other basis for the decision is preference dressed as advice.

How do I stop Google indexing my filter pages?

Canonicalise filtered views to the clean category URL and stop linking to combinations you do not want crawled. Use robots.txt disallow deliberately and second — it blocks the crawl that would read a noindex, stranding URLs already in the index.

How often should I update WordPress?

Security releases immediately, everything else monthly with a backup taken first. An unpatched WordPress install is the most common route to a hacked small-business site, and the risk grows with every plugin.

E-commerce

Is WooCommerce good for SEO?

It can be, and it is not automatically. WooCommerce gives you full control of URLs, markup and content, which is an advantage over closed platforms. The risks are plugin bloat slowing the site and faceted navigation generating thousands of crawlable URLs.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 154 words 3 sections

What it does well

Full control of URL structure, titles, schema and content
Sits inside WordPress, so content marketing is natural rather than bolted on
No platform restrictions on markup or page structure

What has to be managed deliberately

Performance — a default install with thirty plugins is slow, and it stays slow without ongoing work
Faceted navigation, which generates hundreds of near-identical URLs unless canonicalised
Product duplication from manufacturer descriptions
Update discipline: core, theme and plugins, forever

The honest comparison

A well-built WooCommerce store outranks a poorly built custom one, and the reverse is also true. Platform is a much smaller variable than whether anyone modelled the catalogue and handled the facets.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, The e-commerce SEO checklist, in the order the checks actually matter covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.