WordPress vs Shopify: which should your business use?
They solve different problems. Picking the wrong one costs you either months of plugin maintenance or a store you can't shape.
The honest version: if you sell products, Shopify. If you publish content and take enquiries, WordPress (or something lighter). Everything else is detail.
Side by side
| WordPress | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Best at | Content, brochure sites, blogs | Selling physical products |
| Payments/tax/inventory | Plugins you maintain | Built in |
| Hosting & security | Yours to manage | Handled |
| Monthly cost | Hosting + plugin licences | Plan + apps |
| Design freedom | Total | High, within a theme system |
| Maintenance burden | Real and ongoing | Low |
Where WordPress still wins
- Content-heavy sites with hundreds of articles
- Complex editorial workflows and multiple authors
- Anything needing deep custom post types
- You already have a team who knows it
Where Shopify wins outright
- Real inventory, variants, shipping rules and tax
- Checkout you don't have to secure yourself
- Multi-currency and multi-region selling
- You'd rather sell than patch plugins
The WooCommerce trap
WooCommerce is fine when it's already working. Choosing it fresh means you now own hosting, security, PCI scope, plugin conflicts and performance, for a checkout Shopify gives you for a monthly fee.
The third option nobody mentions
If you're a service business with under fifteen pages, you may need neither. A static, code-built site loads faster than either, has no plugin surface to attack, and costs nothing monthly beyond hosting. That's what most of the sites I build are, see Website Development.
Selling products? Start with Shopify Development.