How to fix non iso date on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. In your BigCommerce admin, go to Storefront → Script Manager and check for any custom JSON-LD scripts injected site-wide — update any date strings to YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ format there.
2. Go to Storefront → Themes → click 'Edit Theme Files' (Advanced) on your active theme to open the Stencil theme editor.
3. Search for 'datePublished' or 'dateModified' in template files (commonly in 'templates/pages/product.html', 'blog-post.html', or partials in 'templates/components/').
4. BigCommerce Handlebars templates use helpers like {{format-date}} — replace any non-ISO date helper output with a correctly formatted ISO string: use {{date published format='YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ'}} if your theme/helper supports it, or hard-code a corrected helper.
5. If your theme uses a third-party SEO app from the BigCommerce App Marketplace (e.g. SEO King, Yoast for BigCommerce), check that app's structured data output settings to ensure ISO dates.
6. Validate a product and blog page in Google's Rich Results Test after changes.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebPage",
  "name": "My Product Page",
  "datePublished": "2019-09-23",
  "dateModified": "2024-03-15T09:30:00Z"
}

What is non iso date?

Structured data (the behind-the-scenes code that tells Google what your page is about) includes date fields like `datePublished` and `dateModified`. These dates must be written in a specific international format called ISO-8601 — which looks like `YYYY-MM-DD` (for example, `2019-09-23`) or with a full timestamp like `2019-09-23T00:00:00Z`. When dates are written in a casual format like "09/23/2019 00:00:00" or "September 23, 2019", search engines cannot reliably parse them and may ignore them entirely. Think of it like filling out an official form: the field has a required format, and anything else gets rejected.

Google uses `datePublished` and `dateModified` to understand content freshness — a key signal for ranking pages in news, article, product, and general search results. If Google can't parse your date, it may estimate the wrong publish date or show no date at all in search results, making your listings look outdated or untrustworthy compared to competitors whose dates are formatted correctly. For Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), freshness signals help your content surface in AI-generated answers and featured snippets, where recency is often a deciding factor. A malformed date can also cause your structured data to fail Google's Rich Results Test, disqualifying your pages from rich result enhancements like breadcrumb trails, review stars, and FAQ dropdowns — all of which directly impact click-through rates and organic traffic.

See the complete Non iso date guide for every platform and the full background.