Shopify vs WordPress: what you are actually choosing between

The comparison is usually framed as ease against flexibility, scored round by round, with a winner declared at the end. That framing hides the thing that matters, which is that the two options do not divide the same work between the same people.

Shopify is a hosted platform. WordPress with WooCommerce is software you install on hosting you rent. Every other difference between them follows from that one, including the price difference, which runs in the opposite direction to what most comparisons say.

What transfers to you with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is free to download and that is where the "cheaper" claim comes from. What the download does not include is the work Shopify’s subscription is paying for. Choosing it moves the following onto your side of the line:

• Hosting, sized correctly. A store is not a brochure site. It runs uncached database queries on every cart and checkout, so shared hosting that was fine for a blog will fall over on a promotion.
• Security patching, on someone else’s schedule. WordPress core, the theme and every plugin publish updates, and the vulnerable window opens when the update is published rather than when you get round to it.
• PCI scope. Using a hosted payment field keeps most of the burden with the gateway. Anything that puts card entry on your own page moves it to you.
• Backups you have restored at least once. A backup nobody has tested is a belief, not a backup.
• Plugin conflicts. Every plugin is code from a different author running in the same process. Four of them and a theme update is a normal way to lose a Friday.
• Support with no single owner. When the checkout breaks, the host blames the plugin, the plugin blames the theme, and none of them is contractually on the hook for your store being down.

None of that makes WooCommerce the wrong answer. It makes the free part conditional. If you have a developer on retainer, that work is already covered and the flexibility is close to free. If you do not, you have taken on a job and the cost shows up as downtime rather than as an invoice.

Where Shopify genuinely constrains you

The trade is real and worth stating precisely rather than as "less customisable".

• URL structure. Shopify enforces its own path prefixes for products and collections. You can set the handle. You cannot remove the prefix. If a migration plan assumes flat URLs, check this first.
• Checkout. On plans below Plus the checkout is Shopify’s. That is a security and conversion asset far more often than it is a limitation, but if the business needs a bespoke checkout flow, only Plus allows it.
• Third-party gateway fees. Using a payment provider other than Shopify Payments adds a per-transaction fee on top of what the gateway itself charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. Checked 17 August 2026.
• Apps as a recurring cost. Functionality WooCommerce would get from a one-off plugin purchase is often a monthly subscription on Shopify. Five apps at £15 a month is £900 a year that no plan comparison shows you.

The bill, with real numbers

Shopify UK, checked 17 August 2026: Basic £25 a month, or £19 billed annually. Grow £65, or £49 annually. Advanced £344, or £259 annually. Plus starts at £1,800 a month. Online card rates are 2% + 25p, 1.7% + 25p and 1.5% + 25p respectively.

A WooCommerce store’s equivalent bill is managed hosting, a premium theme, the plugins that do what Shopify does natively, and either a retainer or your own time. Whether that lands above or below the Shopify number depends almost entirely on the last item, which is the one that never appears in the comparison table.

One arithmetic point that applies to both: card processing dominates once you have volume. At a £45 average order value on Shopify Basic, card fees pass the annual subscription cost at around 17 orders a month. Any comparison that stops at the monthly plan price is comparing the smaller number.

SEO: mostly the same, and not where the difference is

The usual claim is that WordPress wins SEO because of Yoast. Both platforms let you set title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, structured data and redirects. Both can produce a fast site and both can produce a slow one. The real difference is narrower than the claim: WordPress gives you control of URL structure and full control of the head, and Shopify gives you a stack somebody else keeps fast.

What decides rankings on either is the same. Google measures Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, at the 75th percentile of real page loads. Those thresholds do not care which platform served the page. A theme carrying four sliders and six tracking scripts fails them on both.

How to choose

Pick Shopify if nobody at your company wants to own a server, if you want the checkout to be somebody else’s problem, and if the store is a normal store. Pick WooCommerce if you have development capacity, if the site is a content property that also sells, or if you need control of something Shopify holds, and be honest that you are taking on the maintenance. And if the store is not a normal store because your buyers are businesses on contract prices, that is a different question with its own five tests.

We build on both, and the recommendation comes after we know who will be editing the site next year.