Shopify vs WordPress: which is right for your online store?

If you're planning to sell online, you'll quickly meet the two big options: Shopify, and WordPress with WooCommerce. Both power millions of stores. Here's an honest comparison from a team that builds on both.

Shopify: the managed route

Shopify is a hosted platform — hosting, security, checkout, and payments are all handled for you. You pay a monthly fee (from roughly £25/month) and it simply works.

• Strengths: reliability, a best-in-class checkout, easy product and order management, excellent apps for shipping and marketing.
• Trade-offs: monthly fees add up, transaction fees unless you use Shopify Payments, and deep customisation has limits.

WordPress + WooCommerce: the flexible route

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You own everything and can customise anything — but you (or your agency) are responsible for hosting, updates, and security.

• Strengths: total flexibility, no platform fees, brilliant if content and blogging are central to your strategy.
• Trade-offs: more moving parts to maintain, quality depends heavily on how well it's built, and a poorly maintained store becomes slow and vulnerable.

So which should you choose?

• Choose Shopify if selling products is the heart of your business and you want something dependable you can run yourself. This is our recommendation for most retail businesses.
• Choose WooCommerce if your store sits inside a bigger content-driven site, you need unusual customisation, or you want to avoid monthly platform fees and have someone maintaining it properly.

The real answer

The platform matters less than the execution. A well-built store on either platform — fast, clear product pages, trustworthy checkout, good photography — will outsell a badly built store on the “better” platform every time. Tell us what you sell and how you work, and we'll recommend the right fit for you, not for us.