WordPress or Shopify is the question I get asked most by Torbay businesses who want to sell online, usually after they have read two articles that disagreed completely. I build on both, I have moved shops in both directions, and the honest answer is that either can run a successful shop. Which one fits you depends on four things: what you sell, who will run the shop day to day, how much of it you want to own, and what it will cost over five years rather than five weeks.
The two in one paragraph each
Shopify is a hosted platform: you pay a monthly fee and Shopify runs the servers, the security, the updates and the checkout. You design the shop with a theme, extend it with apps, and manage orders in a tidy admin that works well on a phone. It is built for selling and very little else.
WordPress with WooCommerce is software you install on hosting you control. WordPress runs the site; WooCommerce turns it into a shop. It is free to use, extended with plugins, and can do almost anything, because it is yours to change. You, or someone you pay, are responsible for keeping it updated and secure.
What you sell
A straightforward catalogue of physical products with standard shipping is Shopify’s home ground: gifts, clothing, food boxes, crafts. Its checkout is excellent and its payments, shipping and tax handling are set up in an afternoon.
WooCommerce wins when the selling is unusual: products configured to order, quotes rather than fixed prices, trade and retail pricing on the same site, bookings and memberships alongside products, or a shop that is one part of a much larger content site. If you need something no app quite does, a custom plugin can be written for WooCommerce; on Shopify the same thing is possible but constrained by what the platform allows.
Who runs it day to day
This is the question most people underweight. If the shop will be run by someone who is not technical, who wants to add products from their phone between customers and never think about updates, Shopify is the easier life. The admin is clean, nothing breaks on a Tuesday because a plugin updated, and support is there at 2am.
WooCommerce is perfectly manageable, but it is a site you own, and ownership includes maintenance: core, theme and plugin updates, backups, security. Most of my WooCommerce clients put that under a care arrangement and never touch it; if you would rather not pay for one, Shopify’s monthly fee is effectively buying the same peace of mind.
How much you want to own
With WooCommerce, everything is yours: the code, the data, the design, the hosting. You can move it, change it, hand it to another developer, and no monthly fee is attached to its existence. With Shopify you own your products, customers and orders and can export them, but the shop lives on Shopify’s platform and its rules: if the fee rises or a feature changes, you adapt. For most small retailers this is a fair trade. For a business whose shop is its whole operation, it is worth thinking about.
What it costs over five years
Shopify looks cheap and gets dearer: the monthly fee, transaction fees unless you use Shopify Payments, and apps, which add up fast once you need reviews, bundles, subscriptions and better search. WooCommerce looks free and is not: hosting, a care arrangement, a few paid plugins and the occasional developer hour. Over five years a modest shop usually costs similar money either way; a complex shop is usually cheaper on WooCommerce, and a very simple one cheaper on Shopify. Do the sum for your own case before deciding, and include your own time.
Search, speed and the rest
Both can rank well; both can be slow if built badly. Shopify’s structure is more rigid (its URL patterns and limits on blog and page structure can frustrate serious content SEO), while WooCommerce gives complete control but needs discipline to stay fast, because a plugin-heavy WooCommerce site is one of the slowest things on the web. Built properly, either will pass Google’s speed tests. What matters more than the platform is who builds it and whether the search foundations are in from the start; what is SEO? covers what those are.
A rough guide
| If this is you | Start with |
|---|---|
| Standard physical products, a small team, you want the simplest day-to-day | Shopify |
| Configured or quoted products, trade pricing, bookings alongside products | WooCommerce |
| The shop is a part of a bigger content-led site | WooCommerce |
| You want to own and control everything, and will pay for upkeep | WooCommerce |
| You want nothing to do with updates, ever | Shopify |
| Large catalogue, complex rules, integrations with other systems | WooCommerce (or Magento at scale) |
What I would say to you across a table
Tell me what you sell, who will run it and how you feel about ownership, and I will tell you which one in about three minutes, with no preference of my own, because I build and support both. The ecommerce websites page explains how a shop project runs, the WooCommerce and Shopify pages go deeper on each, and custom plugins covers what to do when the platform’s own options run out. WordPress or Shopify is a fair question; the answer is the one that fits the shop you will actually be running.
