This question usually arrives framed as which platform is better, which has no answer. The useful question is what the site is mainly for, and once that is settled the platform choice is close to automatic.

The decision rule, first

If the primary purpose of the site is selling products, use Shopify. If the primary purpose is content, services or custom functionality and a store would be secondary, use WordPress.

That covers most cases correctly. The rest of this article is the reasoning, and the situations where the rule bends.

What each actually costs

Both sides publish misleading numbers. WordPress advocates say free, which ignores hosting, plugins and the labor of running it. Shopify advocates quote the monthly plan and skip transaction fees and paid apps.

A realistic annual picture for a small store:

  • Shopify. Plan fee, plus payment processing, plus an additional transaction fee if you use an external gateway, plus apps, which is where budgets quietly disappear. Three or four apps at 20 to 50 dollars a month each adds up faster than owners expect.
  • WordPress with WooCommerce. Hosting that is actually adequate, a premium theme, several premium plugins, an SSL certificate on cheaper hosts, backups, and either your time or a maintenance retainer for updates.

Once a store is doing real revenue the totals converge. The genuine difference is not money, it is who carries the operational risk. On Shopify, Shopify does. On WordPress, you do.

Selling: where Shopify wins

Shopify handles the parts that are expensive to get wrong. Payments, tax calculation, inventory, fraud screening and above all checkout. Its checkout has been tested against enormous volume and converts better than almost anything you would assemble yourself.

It also removes an entire category of problem: PCI compliance, plugin conflicts breaking the cart, a failed update taking the store offline on a Friday. If your business is selling, that reliability is worth more than the flexibility you give up.

The constraints are real. Checkout customisation is limited below the top plan, URL structure is fixed in ways that occasionally annoy, and complex catalogs with unusual variant logic can be awkward. For most small and mid sized stores none of these bind.

Content and SEO: where WordPress wins

WordPress gives you complete control: URL structure, templates, markup, taxonomies, custom post types. If your growth plan involves a large body of content, service pages, location pages or a knowledge base, that control matters.

The roofing and pressure washing projects I have written about elsewhere were both WordPress, because both needed dozens of interlinked location and service pages with custom structures. That is not something to fight Shopify over.

The catch is that the control is only worth something if it is used. A default WordPress install with a bloated theme and thirty plugins is technically more capable and practically worse than a well configured Shopify store. The platform grants the ceiling. It does not raise the floor.

Maintenance, the hidden cost

This is the factor most comparisons skip and the one that most often decides whether people are happy a year later.

Shopify updates itself. Security is Shopify's problem. Your store does not break because you were on holiday when an update shipped.

WordPress needs core updates, plugin updates, theme updates, backups, security monitoring and someone to notice when a plugin is abandoned. Do it and WordPress is excellent. Ignore it and you get the situation I am called in to fix regularly: a hacked install, three years of missed updates, and a site quietly serving spam links to Google.

Be honest about whether anyone in your business will actually do this. If the answer is no, that is a real argument for Shopify regardless of what the site is for.

Where WooCommerce fits

WooCommerce makes sense in a narrower band than its popularity suggests: a modest catalog, moderate volume, and a business already running on WordPress where the store is a secondary channel rather than the main event.

A gym selling memberships and a few products, a consultancy selling a course alongside its services, a farm shop with twenty items and a lot of content. In those cases splitting across two platforms costs more than it saves.

Where WooCommerce struggles is scale. Hundreds of products, high traffic and complex logistics push the hosting and maintenance burden past the point where the savings justify it.

Should you migrate

Usually no. Migration costs money, carries ranking risk and produces no new customers on its own. It is worth doing when the current platform is genuinely blocking something you need, when maintenance has become a recurring cost or outage source, or when the store has outgrown its foundations.

It is not worth doing because a competitor uses something else, or because an agency prefers what they are fastest at building.

If you do migrate, the redirect map is not optional. Every old URL mapped to its closest new equivalent with a 301, prepared before launch, sitemap resubmitted, Search Console watched for a month. Nearly every horror story about lost rankings after a replatform is a story about skipping that.