In the spring of 2024, Landyachtz, a skateboard maker from Vancouver, left Shopify Plus for WooCommerce. A few months later, CarBahn, a US specialist in BMW tuning parts, made exactly the opposite move, from WooCommerce to Shopify. Both companies say they came out ahead, and each of these stories is told by the platform that won it.
That is why most comparisons between WordPress, Shopify and Webflow are not much use: they are written by one of the three, or by an affiliate earning a commission. The right platform cannot be decreed, it depends on your business, your team and what you are willing to hand over to a provider.
This guide compares the three on what really matters: total cost, who owns your data, SEO control, e-commerce depth and how hard it is to leave. Prices were checked on the official pages in October 2026. We also say clearly when WordPress is not the right answer.
Where the market stands in October 2026
According to W3Techs, read on October 1, 2026, WordPress runs 40.2% of the sites it surveys, or 58.7% of sites using an identifiable CMS. Shopify follows with 5.4% of sites, Wix 4.2%, Squarespace 2.4% and Webflow 0.8%. HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac 2025, which uses a different method, gives the same order: WordPress far ahead, Shopify second, Webflow below 2% of CMS sites.
On the e-commerce side, the same Web Almanac credits WooCommerce with about 36% of detected online stores, flat over a year, against about 21% for Shopify, up from about 20% a year earlier.
What these figures really measure
These shares are not shares of revenue. W3Techs surveys a sample of more than 20 million sites it considers relevant, and counts all subdomains of a service as a single site: free sites hosted on a Webflow, Shopify or Wix subdomain therefore count, together, as a single site per service. The two sources agree on the ranking but differ on the values, and neither says whether a platform fits your project.
The Web Almanac adds a useful nuance: among the 10,000 most visited sites, WordPress accounts for about 58% of detected CMS usage, while Wix and Shopify are almost absent. Lower-traffic sites turn to hosted site builders more often, but WordPress leads at every traffic level, with about 64% of detected CMS usage across all sites.
Three models, three contracts
WordPress: free software you host
WordPress is free software, under the GPL license, that you install with the host of your choice. WooCommerce, Automattic’s e-commerce plugin, is free and has more than 7 million active installs. You own everything, but you are also responsible for everything: updates, security, backups, performance.
Shopify: a rented sales platform
Shopify is an online service: you rent the software, hosting, checkout and security. You have nothing to update, but you accept the platform’s rules, prices and limits, which can change.
Webflow: a hosted visual design tool
Webflow is an online visual building service, with a built-in CMS and an e-commerce module. Design teams like it, because they can build pages without writing code. Like Shopify, it hosts everything and sets its own terms.
What you really pay
Subscriptions and introductory prices
In the United States, Shopify’s pricing page shows in October 2026 the Basic plan at $19 per month billed yearly, $25 monthly, Grow at $49 and $65, Advanced at $299 and $399. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 per month on a three-year term, $2,500 on a one-year term. In France, Shopify France’s blog gave in August 2026 a Basic plan at €25 per month billed yearly, €36 monthly. The $1-a-month welcome offer only lasts three months.
Webflow overhauled its plans on May 13, 2026. For a site with a CMS, the Premium plan costs $25 per month billed yearly, $39 monthly, for 20,000 items. E-commerce plans are separate: Standard at $29 per month billed yearly, Plus at $74, Advanced at $212.
WordPress and WooCommerce are free, but hosting is not. Beware of teaser prices: at SiteGround, the entry plan goes from $2.99 per month in the first year to $17.99 at renewal. Our comparison of WordPress hosting providers covers renewal prices in detail.
Transaction fees and payment fees
Shopify only takes a cut of sales if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. Two recent twists: since May 12, 2025, new stores also pay this fee on amounts paid with store credit and gift cards, even with Shopify Payments alone (except on Plus); and Shopify Payments carries a 1.25% premium when used alongside a direct third-party provider.
Webflow takes 2% on its Standard e-commerce plan, on top of Stripe or PayPal fees. WooCommerce takes nothing, whatever the gateway.
As for card fees themselves, the gap is zero at entry level. In France, Shopify Payments on Basic, WooPayments and Stripe all charge 1.5% plus €0.25 for a standard European card. In the United States, Shopify Basic and WooPayments both list 2.9% plus 30 cents. The difference lies in subscriptions, apps or plugins, hosting and maintenance.
A simple calculation
A 2% fee means $200 per $10,000 of sales, on top of the gateway’s fees. On annual revenue of $300,000, that is $6,000 a year, enough to fund a good part of managed hosting and a WordPress maintenance contract. Conversely, for a small store just starting out, a Shopify subscription often remains cheaper than hosting, plugins and maintenance combined.
In between, WordPress.com offers plans hosted by Automattic: the Business plan, at $25 per month billed yearly, lets you install plugins and WooCommerce; the Commerce plan costs $45, and neither takes a fee on WooCommerce payment features. Careful, though: WordPress.com’s standard payments carry a 10% fee on the free plan, then 8%, 4% and 2% depending on the plan, and 0% on Commerce.
The hidden costs
On Shopify, many features come through paid apps, often billed monthly. On WordPress, premium plugins cost $29 to $299 per year each according to WooCommerce, and maintenance is real work. Patchstack recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across WordPress plugins, themes and core in 2025, 91% of them in plugins. On Webflow, editor seats and workspace plans come on top of the site plan.
Who owns your data
What Shopify lets you take with you
Shopify lets you export products, customers, orders, discount codes, gift cards and financial data as CSV, along with the theme. Blog posts and pages are copied by hand or through an app. Discount codes and issued gift cards cannot be transferred. The result is a set of files to re-import, with no one-click restore.
Webflow: the code without the CMS
Webflow lets you export a site’s code, with a paid workspace plan. But the archive takes neither the CMS content, nor e-commerce, nor user accounts, nor forms, nor search, nor localized content: dynamic lists show up empty. CMS collections, products and user accounts export separately as CSV, but their features have to be rebuilt elsewhere.
WordPress: everything, provided you back it up
With WordPress, you have access to the files and the database: you can copy everything and move everything, to any host. The built-in WXR export takes the content, but neither the settings nor the media files: a real backup combines files and database, and scheduling it is up to you.
Pricing risk
An online service can change its prices and limits. Webflow’s May 2026 overhaul applies to existing sites at renewal from June 29, 2026 (November 16, 2026 for sites in Freelancer or Agency Workspaces), and Business plan customers see their included bandwidth halved at that point, from 100 to 50 GB. At Shopify, the store credit and gift card fee introduced in May 2025, for stores created from then on, follows the same logic. With WordPress, that risk is limited to the host and the plugins, which you can replace.
SEO and content
URL structure
Shopify enforces fixed paths: /products/ for products, /collections/ for categories. They cannot be changed, and redirects only work from broken URLs, up to 100,000 (20 million on Plus). Webflow organizes the CMS on a single level, a collection then an item. WordPress lets you choose the permalink structure, and WooCommerce the product URL base.
This constraint does not penalize SEO: Google asks for readable URLs, not a particular depth, and the Web Almanac 2025 gives Shopify the same Lighthouse SEO score as WordPress. But it is less control, especially during a migration. Our WooCommerce SEO guide shows what that control makes possible.
For the rest, all three platforms cover the essentials. Webflow handles titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, the sitemap, robots.txt, structured data and 301 redirects, except on its free plan. Shopify lets you edit robots.txt through a dedicated template. WordPress generates the sitemap, robots.txt and canonical tags natively, and leaves the rest, such as meta descriptions and structured data, to an SEO plugin, with the most freedom and the greatest risk of misconfiguration.
Performance measured in the field
This is where WordPress loses, and it has to be said. According to the Web Almanac 2025, on mobile, 35% of WooCommerce stores pass the Core Web Vitals thresholds measured with real visitors, against 76% of Shopify stores. The gap is mostly down to build choices and the number of plugins, not to WordPress core: the same report puts WordPress, virtually tied with Joomla, among the lightest median mobile pages of the five platforms it compares.
A WooCommerce store can be fast, but not automatically: it takes a performance budget and someone to hold it.
Content volume
Webflow’s Premium plan caps at 20,000 CMS items and 40 collections, the Team plan at 100 collections. WordPress has no software limit, only that of your hosting. For an editorial site that has been publishing for years, the question always comes up eventually.
E-commerce: how far each platform goes
Shopify
Shopify allows up to 2,048 variants per product, with at most three options, and warns that some third-party themes and apps do not handle more than 100 variants. For a store with a standard catalog and in-store sales, it is the fastest tool to get running. Shopify shows prices in local currencies on every plan, provided you use Shopify Payments; its constraints are felt when several entities, bank accounts or payment providers have to coexist.
Webflow
Webflow caps at 500 e-commerce items on the Standard plan, 5,000 on Plus and 15,000 on Advanced, variants and categories included. It suits a small, polished catalog, not a large store.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce sets no software limit on the catalog. Since version 8.2, in October 2023, orders are stored by default in dedicated tables for new installs, which improves performance. The real limit is hosting and build quality. For business-to-business sales, per-customer pricing or custom checkouts, it is the most flexible platform, as our selection of WooCommerce plugins to boost sales shows.
Plugins, apps and developers
The WordPress.org directory lists more than 74,000 free plugins, the Shopify App Store more than 16,000 apps, and Webflow’s marketplace about 400 listed apps. To find a developer, WordPress offers a very large talent pool; Shopify has a structured partner network; Webflow relies mostly on design agencies.
The sheer number of WordPress plugins is also the main source of vulnerabilities, and every plugin added is one more dependency to watch.
The real case: two migrations in opposite directions
Landyachtz: from Shopify Plus to WooCommerce
Landyachtz was founded in Vancouver in 1997 by two skaters. The company makes skateboards and urban bikes, sells wholesale, for other brands and direct, with a team of 35 people in Canada and the United States and about 1,500 SKUs. It started selling online on Shopify, and its online sales grew eightfold during the pandemic.
As wholesale and multiple markets grew, Shopify Plus became, according to the story published by WooCommerce, more and more expensive and limiting. The company ran two Shopify stores, one for Canada and one for the United States, which doubled app costs, configuration and maintenance. It found the checkout rigid for payments, regional pricing and currency conversion fees.
An e-commerce specialist at the brand, Jacob Lambert, put it this way: “Shopify was taking us to the cleaners with cross-border fees.” In 2024, the company migrated to WooCommerce; Internet Archive snapshots show the public store switching between mid-April and mid-May.
The new single site serves US and Canadian dollars, each currency going to its own bank account, with product bundles, promotions and different suggested retail prices by region. According to WooCommerce, annual platform costs fell from about $45,000 to under $10,000, hosting, plugins and maintenance included, and the workload was halved.
CarBahn: from WooCommerce to Shopify
CarBahn sells BMW tuning parts, led by engineer Steve Dinan. According to the case study published by Shopify, the company had chosen WooCommerce for its low cost and its plugins, but ran three separate sites, store, dealer network and service centers, competing for traffic. Pages took nine seconds to load, partly because of the number of plugins, and it took a team of developers to put a product online.
After a ten-week migration with an agency, the store switched to Shopify in August 2024. According to Shopify, organic traffic tripled within thirty days, load time dropped from nine seconds to one, and returns and cancellations fell by 43%.
What these two stories really teach
Both stories are published by the winning platform, and their figures are the merchants’ own, with no published independent verification. At Landyachtz, the published figure covers platform costs, hosting, plugins and maintenance included, and the end of the duplicate stores; the brand adds that the extra fees on its cross-border sales are gone. The setup assumes an in-house e-commerce team. At CarBahn, merging three sites into one and a complete rebuild happened at the same time as the platform change: the gains cannot be credited to Shopify alone.
The shared lesson: a WooCommerce store overloaded with plugins, with no performance budget, is exactly what the Core Web Vitals gap describes. And a multi-currency, multi-entity business is exactly where the constraints of a rented platform get expensive.
Switching platforms: the real cost of a migration
A migration is prepared like a house move: an inventory of what goes, what does not, and a redirect plan for every URL. Google warns that a small or medium site can take a few weeks to be reindexed, with ranking fluctuations, and recommends keeping redirects for at least a year.
Leaving Shopify, the fixed paths almost always require mass redirects, unless you reproduce the same structure in WooCommerce with its custom URL bases. Leaving Webflow, you have to rebuild everything the code export does not take.
In the other direction, the guide for migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify offers several routes: manual copy, a migration app in early access, CSV import, third-party apps or experts, while warning that some data does not go through CSV. Orders, in particular, cannot be imported from the Shopify admin. Leaving WordPress, the WXR export takes the content, but settings and media files are recovered separately, from the server.
Our guide to migrating a WordPress site without downtime details the method.
When WordPress is not the right answer
WordPress is not the right choice in four situations.
- No one to maintain it: without someone to apply updates and watch security, a WordPress site degrades, as the WordPress vulnerability figures show.
- Selling this week: a merchant with a standard catalog and in-store sales will be up and running faster on Shopify.
- A design team with no developer: for a marketing site with fewer than 20,000 items, Webflow is often more comfortable.
- Performance without a budget: if measured speed matters more than flexibility and no one will hold a performance budget, a hosted platform has a head start.
Which profile for which platform
- An editorial, multilingual or content-rich site: WordPress.
- A store with a standard catalog and no technical team: Shopify.
- A store with complex business rules, multi-currency or business-to-business sales: WooCommerce, with a provider or a team.
- A marketing site designed by designers: Webflow.
- An organization that wants to own its platform and data: WordPress.
Summary table
| Criterion | WordPress and WooCommerce | Shopify | Webflow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Self-hosted free software | Online service | Online service |
| Entry price (Oct. 2026) | Free software, hosting extra | $19 a month billed yearly (US) | $25 a month billed yearly (CMS) |
| Fee on sales | None | 2% to 0.2% outside Shopify Payments | 2% on the Standard plan |
| Data export | Complete, files and database | CSV and theme | Code without the CMS, CSV separately |
| URL control | Full | Fixed paths | One level per collection |
| Catalog limit | No software limit | 2,048 variants per product | 15,000 items at most |
| Plugins and apps | More than 74,000 free plugins | More than 16,000 apps | About 400 apps |
| Ideal profile | Content, custom business logic, ownership | Fast selling, no technical team | Marketing site built by designers |
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify take a cut of sales?
With Shopify Payments as your only provider, you normally pay card fees only. With another payment provider, Shopify takes 2% to 0.2% depending on the plan. For stores created since May 12, 2025, the same fee also applies to amounts paid with store credit or gift cards, even with Shopify Payments alone, except on Plus.
Can I leave Webflow with my content?
Partly. Page code exports with a workspace plan, and collections, products and user accounts as CSV, but CMS, e-commerce, form and user account features do not follow. They have to be rebuilt elsewhere.
Is WooCommerce really free?
The software is, with no fee. But hosting, premium plugins and maintenance have a real cost, often underestimated at the start and revealed at renewal.
Is Shopify bad for SEO?
No. Its fixed URL paths limit control, especially during a migration, but do not penalize rankings. The Web Almanac 2025 gives it the same Lighthouse SEO score as WordPress.
How long does a migration affect SEO?
According to Google, it takes a few weeks for most pages of a small or medium site to be picked up, sometimes longer, with temporary ranking fluctuations. Redirects should stay in place for at least a year.
Do I need a developer for WordPress?
Not to publish content. But for a store or a business site, someone has to handle updates, security and performance, in-house or through a provider.
Conclusion
WordPress, Shopify and Webflow do not answer the same question. Shopify sells fast with no technical worries, at the cost of possible fees, imposed paths and dependency. Webflow gives designers visual freedom, at the cost of a capped CMS and a difficult exit. WordPress gives full ownership and flexibility, at the cost of maintenance that cannot be left to chance.
The stories of Landyachtz and CarBahn show it: each platform has its winners, and each publishes its own. Choose based on your business, your team and what you want to own, and work out the cost over three years, not the first month.
Sources
- W3Techs (October 1, 2026). Usage statistics of content management systems
- HTTP Archive, Vahe Arabian (January 15, 2026). Web Almanac 2025, CMS
- HTTP Archive, Amandeep Singh (January 15, 2026). Web Almanac 2025, Ecommerce
- Shopify (October 2026). Pricing
- Shopify (October 2026). Shopify Plus pricing
- Shopify France (August 21, 2026). Coût d’un système POS : le guide complet 2026
- Shopify (July 17, 2026). Payment Processing for Small Business
- Shopify Help Center. Fees and costs
- Shopify Help Center. Third-party payment providers
- Shopify Help Center. URL redirects
- Shopify Help Center. Adding variants
- Shopify Help Center. Backups and duplication
- Shopify (October 2026). Shopify App Store
- Shopify. How CarBahn Tripled Growth by Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify
- Webflow (October 2026). Pricing
- Webflow (May 13, 2026). We’re updating our pricing and simplifying our plans
- Webflow Help Center. How do I export my Webflow site code?
- Webflow Help Center. Manage CMS Collections
- WooCommerce (October 2026). Pricing
- WooCommerce. WooPayments fees
- WooCommerce, Mahrie Boyle (December 17, 2025). How Landyachtz cut ecommerce costs by more than 75% and gained full control with WooCommerce
- WooCommerce, Mahrie Boyle (January 8, 2026). How Landyachtz built a personalized growth engine with Klaviyo and WooCommerce
- WordPress.org (October 2026). WooCommerce
- WordPress.org. Plugin Directory
- WooCommerce Developer Docs. Enable HPOS
- Patchstack (February 2026). State of WordPress Security in 2026
- Stripe (October 2026). Pricing
- SiteGround (October 2026). WordPress Hosting
- Google Search Central (August 2026). Site moves with URL changes
- Google Search Central (December 2025). URL structure best practices
- Shopify Help Center. Shopify Payments fees
- Shopify Help Center. Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify
- Shopify Help Center. Editing robots.txt.liquid
- W3Techs (October 2026). Web Technology Surveys, methodology
- WordPress.com (October 2026). Pricing
- Webflow (October 2026). Webflow Apps
- WordPress Developer Resources. wp export
- WooCommerce. Permalinks
- Internet Archive (April 16, 2024). landyachtz.com, Shopify version
- Internet Archive (May 17, 2024). landyachtz.com, WooCommerce version
- Internet Archive (August 4, 2024). carbahn.com, WooCommerce version
- Internet Archive (August 25, 2024). carbahn.com, Shopify version
- Make WordPress Core (July 2020). New XML Sitemaps Functionality in WordPress 5.5
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