Shopify, WordPress or a custom build: how to choose

Most platform arguments are really arguments about what the person arguing enjoys building. Here is a more useful frame: the right platform is the one that is cheapest to own for the next three years, given who will be looking after it.

The question that usually settles it

Who edits this site after launch, and how often?

• Daily, by a non-technical team → WordPress, usually.
• You sell products → Shopify, almost always.
• Rarely, and speed or search performance matters a lot → a static build.

Everything below is detail on top of that.

Shopify

Choose it if you sell physical products. Shopify handles the things that are genuinely hard and genuinely boring: payments, tax, inventory, shipping rules, checkout security, PCI compliance. Rebuilding that on another platform is a bad use of money.

Strengths

• Checkout is the most optimised part of the platform, and you cannot easily break it
• Hosting, security and PCI are handled
• A large app ecosystem for the things you have not thought of yet
• Scales through traffic spikes without you doing anything

Trade-offs

• Monthly platform fee plus transaction fees, plus app subscriptions that accumulate quietly
• Content and blogging are weaker than WordPress
• Deep checkout customisation is restricted below Shopify Plus
• URL structure is partly fixed — /products/, /collections/ — which constrains some SEO approaches

Watch out for: app creep. Ten apps at £15 a month is £1,800 a year and a measurable hit to page speed. Audit them twice a year.

WordPress

Choose it if content is the engine and a non-technical team publishes often. It still powers a large share of the web for good reasons: the editing experience is familiar, and you can hire for it anywhere.

Strengths

• Best-in-class content management and editorial workflow
• Enormous plugin ecosystem
• Easy to hire for, which matters when you change supplier
• Mature SEO tooling

Trade-offs

• Security is your responsibility. Most WordPress compromises come through out-of-date plugins rather than core
• Performance needs active management — caching, image optimisation, plugin discipline
• Plugin conflicts are a real maintenance cost
• “WordPress is free” is not true once you add hosting, premium plugins and maintenance

Watch out for: page builders. They speed up the first build and slow down every page afterwards. If you go this route, budget for performance work.

A custom or static build

Modern static frameworks — Astro, Next, and similar — build to HTML at deploy time and ship very little JavaScript. We use Astro for this.

Choose it if the site is primarily marketing, speed matters, and content changes in batches rather than hourly.

Strengths

• Fastest option by a wide margin, which matters for Core Web Vitals and for paid landing pages
• Minimal attack surface — no database, no plugin layer
• Total control over markup, structured data and URL structure
• Hosting is cheap or free on a CDN

Trade-offs

• Editing requires either a developer or a headless CMS on top
• Smaller hiring pool than WordPress
• Dynamic features need a service behind them
• Less “just install a plugin” convenience

Watch out for: shipping it without a CMS when the client needs to edit weekly. That is how a fast site becomes an expensive bottleneck.

Side by side

	Shopify	WordPress	Static build
Best for	Product sales	Content-heavy sites	Marketing sites, landing pages
Non-technical editing	Good	Best	Needs a CMS layer
Speed out of the box	Fair	Needs work	Best
Security burden	Shopify’s	Yours	Minimal
Ongoing cost	Platform + apps	Hosting + plugins + maintenance	Hosting, often minimal
Hiring pool	Large	Largest	Smaller

A few honest notes

“Headless Shopify” is not automatically better. It is a real option for large catalogues with specific needs, and it roughly doubles the complexity. For most UK SMEs a well-built standard Shopify theme outperforms a headless build that nobody can maintain.

Your platform is not why you are not ranking. All three can rank well. If a site is invisible in search, the cause is almost always content, site structure or technical configuration — not the CMS.

Migrating later is normal and survivable, provided the redirects are done properly. Do not over-engineer the first build to avoid a migration you may never need.

How we decide

We ask three questions:

1. Do you sell products online? If yes, Shopify unless there is a strong reason otherwise.
2. Who publishes content, how often, and how technical are they? Frequent non-technical publishing points to WordPress.
3. Is this primarily a marketing site where speed and search performance are the point? That points to a static build.

If the answers conflict, the maintenance question wins. A slightly slower site your team can actually update beats a faster one they cannot touch.

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If you want a straight recommendation for your situation, book a 30-minute call or read how we approach web design and development.