This BigCommerce SEO guide follows the admin, not a generic checklist. It covers the settings that change how search engines see a store, in the order you meet them: URL structure, titles and descriptions, the redirect manager, the sitemap and robots.txt. Everything here comes from BigCommerce’s Help Center, read on 12 October 2026. Menus and plan requirements change, so check the current page before acting on a path.
None of this makes a store rank better than one on another platform. It removes technical reasons a store might fail. Catalogue copy, faceted URLs and links are still yours, as they are on Shopify and WooCommerce.
BigCommerce SEO guide: the settings at a glance
The table maps each setting to where it lives and what you still decide. If you are asking which BigCommerce SEO tools you need, this is most of the answer: the core settings are built into the admin.
| Setting | Where it lives | What BigCommerce does | What you decide |
|---|---|---|---|
| URL structure | Settings › URL Structure | Offers Short, Long, Category and Custom formats | Whether to change from Short, and ticking the 301 box if you do |
| Titles and descriptions | Each page’s SEO section; homepage under Settings › Website | Falls back to homepage metadata if blank | Unique copy for categories and best sellers |
| 301 redirects | Settings › 301 Redirect (paid plan) | Creates them when a product, category or page name or URL changes | Manual vs dynamic links, and pruning old ones |
| XML sitemap | yourdomain.com/xmlsitemap.php | Lists visible products, categories, brands, pages and blog posts | What is visible on the storefront |
| robots.txt | Settings › Website, Search Engine Robots section | Ships a default that disallows cart, checkout, account and search paths | Whether to edit it at all |
URL structure: leave it on Short unless you have a reason
“URL structure settings can be accessed in Settings › URL Structure.” Product URLs come in three preset formats: “SEO Optimized (Short)” (yourdomain.com/product-name), “SEO Optimized (Long)” (yourdomain.com/products/product-name) and “SEO Optimized (Category)” (yourdomain.com/category/product-name). There is also “Custom”, built from placeholders such as “%productname%”, “%category%” and “%sku%”.
BigCommerce’s own warning is strong: “Incorrectly modifying your store’s URLs can have a drastic impact on your SEO. If you are at all unsure … we highly recommend leaving them set to SEO Optimized (Short).” If you do change format, there is a box for it: “Check the box if you want to create 301 redirects for the old URLs.” Tick it. The category placeholder also “will only show the first main category the product is listed in”, which matters for products in several categories. Our guide to URL structure covers the general trade-offs.
Titles and descriptions: categories first
“Page titles, descriptions, and keywords can be filled in for content pages, category pages, product pages, blog posts, and brands.” The homepage fields sit under “Settings › Website › Search Engine Optimization section”; product fields under “Edit any product or add a product › SEO”. With more than one storefront, “some metadata can be customized per storefront channel.”
BigCommerce’s advice, as published in its SEO Fields article: “Every page should have a unique title tag, preferably starting with a relevant keyword, and have less than 60 characters.” That length is BigCommerce’s guidance, not a Google rule. It is also candid about descriptions: “Google search results may not use your meta descriptions. In some cases, Google search results may favor your product description over your meta description.”
Blank fields are the trap. “If left blank, the page will use the metadata entered in the homepage SEO fields.” Leave a few hundred products empty and they all share the homepage’s description. Start with category pages, then best sellers. For volume, “For products, you can use CSV import to enter in keywords, page titles, and meta descriptions.” The keywords field itself is “strictly optional, as keywords have been deprecated by all major search engines.” Skip it.
The redirect manager and dynamic links
Two requirements first: “Your store must be on a paid plan”, and “This feature is not available on trial stores.” Redirects live at “Settings › 301 Redirect” and come in two types: “Manual Link (URL)” and “Dynamic Link (Page or Object)”.
The dynamic link is the BigCommerce-specific win. It points an old URL at a product, category or page as an object, not at an address, and “If the URL of the linked object or page ever changes, the redirect will continue to work.” A manual redirect to a URL that later moves becomes a chain; a dynamic one follows the object.
There are limits. “Wildcard 301 redirects cannot be created natively”, so a folder move means mapping URLs one by one, usually by CSV import. Reserved URLs such as “/index.php”, “/admin”, “/manage” and “/graphql” cannot be redirected. And because “301 redirects are automatically created whenever the name or the URL of a product, category, or webpage is changed”, they pile up. BigCommerce advises “reviewing your 301 redirects periodically to remove unnecessary redirects that can lead to issues such as cross-linked products or redirect chains.” Our guide to redirect chains explains how to find them.
Sitemap and robots.txt: mostly leave them alone
The XML sitemap lives at yourdomain.com/xmlsitemap.php. “Each page can contain up to 50,000 URLs and more pages are created if your URLs exceed that total”, and “you only need to provide the main XML sitemap URL”. Submitting it in Search Console helps discovery, though Google does not require a sitemap to index a store. “Links are updated in the sitemap automatically when a page’s URL is changed.” Products, categories, brands, content pages and blog pages are included “as long as they are marked visible on the storefront”, so visibility decides what is in it. Our XML sitemap guide covers what to check.
“BigCommerce stores automatically include a robots.txt file, which provides a default list of pages that should not be crawled”, including lines such as “Disallow: /cart.php” and “Disallow: /search.php”. It also carries “Disallow: /*?_bc_fsnf=1*”, which “prevents search engine robots from crawling storefront listing pages with product filters applied”, and a “Crawl-delay: 10” for “known high-volume and AI crawlers”. So part of the faceted navigation problem is handled by default. If Search Console reports checkout or account URLs as “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”, BigCommerce says “The warnings can be disregarded if you have not altered the robots.txt file.”
BigCommerce’s own Technical SEO guide chapter, dated ©2023 and written in its vendor voice, adds that “Our Cornerstone theme has built-in HTML canonical tags”, that product microdata covers “ratings, pricing, brand and stock levels”, and that “BigCommerce offers a free SSL certificate for stores on any plan”. Check your own theme rather than assuming.
The limitation: this guide reports what BigCommerce documents. It does not assess any SEO app, and it cannot tell you how a given store performs. Category copy and product descriptions, covered in our ecommerce SEO guide, are where stores on the same platform pull apart.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a BigCommerce SEO app?
The core settings are built in: titles and descriptions, URL structure, 301 redirects, an automatic sitemap and an editable robots.txt. This guide did not assess any third-party apps.
Where is the BigCommerce sitemap?
At yourdomain.com/xmlsitemap.php. It updates automatically and includes products, categories, brands, content pages and blog pages that are visible on the storefront.
Can BigCommerce create wildcard redirects?
Not natively, according to its Help Center. You can map redirects individually or by CSV import, and dynamic links keep working when the target’s URL changes.
Should I change BigCommerce’s URL structure?
BigCommerce recommends leaving it on SEO Optimized (Short) if you are unsure. If you change it, tick the box to create 301 redirects for the old URLs.
The takeaway Leave URLs on Short, fill titles and descriptions for categories and best sellers, use dynamic redirects and prune old ones, and let the sitemap and robots.txt defaults do their job. The rest is catalogue work.
