"Shopify or WordPress?" is one of the most common questions we get from prospective clients, and it usually arrives already framed as a fight — as if one platform is simply better and the other is a mistake waiting to happen. It isn't that simple, and any answer that pretends it is should make you suspicious.
The honest answer is that they aren't fully interchangeable options for the same job. Once you understand what each one is actually built for, the right choice for your business becomes a lot more obvious.
They aren't really competing for the same job
Shopify is a dedicated e-commerce platform. Everything about it — the hosting, the checkout, the app ecosystem, the support — is built around one goal: selling products online, reliably, with as little technical overhead as possible for the business owner.
WordPress is a general-purpose content management system. On its own, it has no e-commerce functionality at all. To sell products through WordPress, you add WooCommerce, a free plugin that turns WordPress into a store. This matters because it means WordPress is really two different comparisons depending on what you're building: a content-and-brochure site (WordPress alone) or an online store (WordPress plus WooCommerce).
If you're building a service business website, a portfolio, or a content-led site with no products to sell, you're choosing WordPress against a website builder — not against Shopify at all. Shopify only enters the conversation once selling products is the core function of the site.
The real cost comparison
Headline pricing is misleading on both sides, because neither platform's advertised monthly fee is the real cost of running the site.
A typical small business WordPress or WooCommerce site costs roughly £150–£400 a year in hosting and essential plugins for a content site, or £300–£700 a year for a small WooCommerce store once you include the extensions a real store needs — payment processing, security, backups, and a handful of functional plugins.
Shopify's subscription fees alone typically run £300–£1,200+ a year depending on plan, and that's before apps. Most functioning Shopify stores end up running two, three, or more paid apps for things that come free with WooCommerce — reviews, advanced shipping rules, upsells — which pushes the realistic annual cost for an equivalent setup closer to £600–£1,200+.
Neither number tells the full story on its own. WordPress is cheaper largely because you (or your agency) are doing more of the maintenance yourself. Shopify's higher price buys you a managed platform where hosting, security, PCI compliance, and uptime are someone else's problem entirely.
Ease of use and who maintains it
This is where Shopify has a genuine, unambiguous advantage. You sign up, pick a theme, add products, and you're live — hosting, SSL, security patching, and platform updates are all handled for you in the background. Every plan includes round-the-clock support, which matters more than it sounds like it should when something breaks at 11pm before a launch.
WordPress requires more upfront setup — choosing a host, installing WordPress, selecting a theme, and configuring the plugins your site actually needs — and ongoing maintenance is your responsibility (or your agency's) rather than the platform's. That's not automatically a downside, but it is a real, ongoing cost that gets left out of most comparisons.
If you don't have — and don't want — a technical person involved in running the site day to day, this single factor should carry a lot of weight in your decision.
Flexibility and design control
WordPress wins comfortably here. Because it's open-source and self-hosted, there is effectively no ceiling on what you can build — custom functionality, unusual layouts, integrations with other business systems, membership areas, booking systems, multilingual content, all of it is achievable without fighting the platform.
Shopify is more constrained by design. That constraint is a genuine feature for most stores — fewer decisions, fewer ways to break something — but it becomes a real limitation the moment your business needs something outside Shopify's standard e-commerce model. Complex product configurators, unusual subscription logic, or a site that needs to do more than sell products are all harder, or require expensive third-party apps, on Shopify.
SEO: an underrated difference
This is the factor most comparisons skip, and it's directly relevant if organic search is going to be one of your main sources of traffic. WordPress gives you full control over URL structure, complete schema markup customisation, and deep integration with professional SEO plugins — the technical foundation matters for search visibility, and WordPress puts almost all of it in your hands.
Shopify has narrowed this gap significantly in recent years, but it still imposes URL structure limitations (every product sits under /products/, every collection under /collections/, for example) and offers less granular control over schema and technical SEO than a well-built WordPress site. For a store where organic search is a primary acquisition channel — rather than paid ads or existing brand traffic — this is a real, measurable disadvantage worth weighing against Shopify's ease-of-use benefits.
Our honest recommendation
Choose Shopify if: you're selling physical or digital products as the core of your business, you don't have (or want) a technical person managing the site day to day, you value reliability and support over maximum flexibility, and your growth plans fit within a fairly standard e-commerce model.
Choose WordPress (with WooCommerce if you're selling) if: you need functionality beyond a standard online store, organic search is central to your growth strategy, you want full ownership of your platform without ongoing subscription lock-in, or your site is content-led — a service business, a portfolio, a publication — rather than a store.
Neither platform is universally better. They solve different problems, and the businesses that end up unhappy with their choice are almost always the ones who picked based on what was trendy or what a friend used, rather than what their specific business actually needed.
Get an honest recommendation for your business
We build on both Shopify and WordPress, which means we don't have a platform to sell you — only a recommendation based on what you're actually building. If you're stuck deciding, tell us about your project and we'll give you a straight answer, not a sales pitch for whichever platform we'd rather build on.