Shopify vs WordPress: Choosing the Best Platform (2024)

For online business, choosing the right platform plays an integral role in building websites. Shopify and WordPress are two popular options. They have different good things about them. In 2024, it’s getting harder to decide between them. This makes many business owners and creators wonder which one is better.

This article compares Shopify vs WordPress. It looks at what makes them different, like their features and how well they work for different needs. Let’s start!

Shopify vs WordPress: An Overview 

About Shopify

Shopify, as a well-known online store platform, was initially launched in 2006. It provides a set of tools and services. These tools help startups and businesses to easily start and run their online shops without coding skill.

Shopify hosts over 5.4 million active websites globally. It is relied upon by numerous prominent brands, such as Tesla, Netflix, and BBC. Shopify is relatively easy-to-use and scalable, and this is probably why the platform enjoys such great popularity under the industry professionals. The software has many useful options to set up an online shop, make business process automation and grow sales.

About WordPress

WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS). It offers the possibility to own and operate websites that belong to users, such as blogs. Initially launched as software in 2003, it featured blogging as its primary function. In the last five years, it has changed from a simple CMS to a feature-rich one. Presently, it is utilized for different categories of websites, such as corporate websites, e-commerce stores, portfolios, academics, and tourism, among other uses.

Due to its adaptability, user-friendliness and a rich range of themes and plugins which it offers, WordPress is very popular among users. Therefore, it is the first option for the organizations and businesses that want to speculate in website development and management.

Shopify vs WordPress: Quick Assessment

While both Shopify and WordPress are the powerhouse of e-commerce sites, the former works with different types of users and so focuses on varying customer groups.

Shopify is a whole-ade eCommerce platform. It certainly is for any businesses that are inclined toward selling products directly to consumers. Shopify lets you design your store exactly how you want (look, features, and brand). 

WordPress is more flexible for all types of websites, but you need extras (plugins) to add an online store. It is most often used by bloggers, small businesses, and content creators—this group of users, for instance, wants to have e-commerce on their sites.

The table below gives an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each platform in several aspects:

Shopify vs WordPress: The Comprehensive Comparison

Shopify and WordPress are both popular platforms for building websites. Their attributes are different and they are supposed to solve different problems. Here are nine key differences of them:

1. Pricing

Shopify

Shopify is a subscription-based platform that mostly covers the range of $19 to $299 per month. Shopify gives a 3-day free trial so you can explore the dashboard and gain practical self-learning experience. Once you’ve made it to the platform, you can continue with their Basic Shopify for just $1 for a 3-month trial period. 

Here’s an overview of their pricing:

Basic Shopify:

• Monthly Cost: $19
• Transaction Fees: 2.9% + 30¢ for online credit card rates or 2.7% + 0¢ for offline
• Features: Online store, unlimited products, 24/7 support, fraud analysis, discount codes, manual order creation, abandoned cart recovery, and more.

Shopify:

• Monthly Cost: $49
• Transaction Fees: 2.6% + 30¢ for online credit card rates or 2.5% + 0¢ for offline
• Features: Everything in Basic Shopify, plus gift cards, professional reports, and abandoned cart recovery.

Advanced Shopify:

• Monthly Cost: $299
• Transaction Fees: 2.4% + 30¢ for online credit card rates or 2.4% + 0¢ for offline
• Features: Everything in Shopify, plus advanced report builder and third-party calculated shipping rates.

Shopify Plus:

• Pricing: Custom pricing based on specific enterprise needs
• Features: Customized solutions for large-scale merchants which consist not only of dedicated account management but also configurable checkout and enhanced safety. 

Moreover, as for the Shopify pricing plans, you should also allocate funds for a domain, which will be $14 per year to begin with. Concerning processing fees, you will have to pay a cost of 30 cents, and the credit card rate is colossal: at least 2.4% to 2.9% per transaction. You have to choose between 5% and 2% if you want a savings plan.

WordPress

Utilizing WordPress is free; however, extra fees can kick off the tab for hosting, domain name registration, and plugins, themes, and add-ons. The starting cost of a WordPress website can be any amount actually, based on your individual needs. 

It will cost you from $100 to $500 for a basic setup on one end to on the other $3000, $30000 or more in case of sophisticated and complex projects that require customization.

Here’s a breakdown of potential costs associated with running a WordPress site:

• Hosting:

• Shared Hosting: Starts at approximately $3 to $10 per month for basic plans. It is fit for small websites.
• Managed WordPress Hosting: The prices span from $20 to $100+ for the optimization and exclusively WordPress support. 
• Dedicated Hosting: The cost of server specifications is another crucial factor. However, these costs may vary from $100 to $500 and even higher (per month).

Verdict: Although a WordPress website itself is free, the overall expenditures can be rather diverse depending on your individual needs and the quality of the services you select. 

2. Ease of Use

Shopify

Shopify is also known for its user-friendly interface, making it accessible to users with various technical skills. Here’s why it’s often considered easy to use:

• Intuitive dashboard: Shopify’s dashboard provides a clear overview of the store’s performance, sales, orders, and customer data. It is easy for you to review your orders and sales from the shop. 
• Setup wizard: Guides through the initial configurations, including adding products, picking themes, and specifying payment, shipping and tax settings. 
• Drag-and-drop interface: users are enabled to individualize their webstore look. 

WordPress

WordPress is renowned for its flexibility and scalability, but its ease of use can vary depending on your familiarity with the platform and your technical skills. Here’s what influences WordPress’s ease of use:

• Installation process: Most web hosting companies offer one-click installation for WordPress, which makes it easy for you. But if you’re not conversant with managing web hosting and domain, this aspect probably may involve guidance.
• Dashboard interface: The WordPress’ dashboard also has a similar user interface to Shopify’s where its sections include posts, pages, media, comments, appearance, plugin, and settings. Although it is simple to use, new learners may still find it a little complicated initially, when they are trying to find the best option among the hundreds of options available.

Verdict: Both platforms are designed to be user-friendly. Shopify is often seen as easier for beginners, while WordPress offers more options for those with some technical knowledge.

3. Theme Design & Customizability

Shopify

Shopify provides 120+ professionally designed themes, both free and paid. It caters to various industries and styles. These themes come from Shopify or other designers, all guaranteed to work well with Shopify.

Users can easily customize aspects such as colors, fonts, images, and layouts through Shopify’s theme editor. Shopify’s theme editor features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. It allows users to rearrange page elements and customize their storefront.

Furthermore, users can access and modify the source code using Liquid coding language. With Liquid, it’s feasible to alter existing Shopify templates or layouts and introduce new ones. Unlike HTML/CSS, Liquid has nuances that may require time to adapt or hiring a Shopify technical expert for assistance.

WordPress

WordPress boasts a vast ecosystem of themes. It offers free options available in the WordPress Theme Directory and premium themes provided by third-party developers. With innumerable themes available for selection, one can find options that suit their style and functionality requirements. 

Using WordPress themes, the user can modify colors, fonts, headers, footers, and sidebars through theme customization settings or custom CSS. Almost every theme on WordPress comes with popular plugins like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or WPBakery Page Builder. These drag-and-drop builders enable users to make custom layouts, integrate multimedia content, and develop visually pleasing pages. 

Also, WordPress provides child themes and frameworks. You won’t need to modify the original theme files to add new features to your website’s theme. This method offers an organized structure for better customization and guarantees smooth updates. 

Verdict: Shopify leads in simplicity and ease of use thanks to an intuitive theme editor, whereas WordPress has an unrivaled theme universe and diverse page builders that offer great flexibility and depth of customization.

4. Content Management

Shopify

• Product-focused content management: Shopify’s primary focus is on managing products and their related content. It offers a straightforward interface for adding, editing, and organizing product listings. Each product can include detailed descriptions, images, variants, pricing, and inventory information.
• Pages and blogging: Users can create pages such as About Us, Contact, and FAQ pages, as well as publish blog posts to engage with their audience and improve SEO.
• Content organization: Shopify allows users to categorize products into collections for easier navigation and browsing. Similarly, blog posts can be organized into categories and tagged for improved content organization and discoverability.
• Content editor: Shopify provides a built-in content editor for creating and formatting page content and blog posts. While it’s not as robust as some dedicated blogging platforms, it offers essential formatting options for text, images, videos, and links.

WordPress

• Versatile content management: WordPress is a feature-rich content management platform that can be applied to other websites, not just e-commerce.It lets website managers easily add, edit, and organize all their content (posts, pages, pictures, etc.).
• Custom post types: WordPress has specific functions that are customizable to a personal type of content, such as e-commerce, testimonials, portfolios, events and others. Flexibility inherent in this approach enables users to customize their website according to their needs.
• Categories and tags: WordPress provides built-in taxonomy, like categories and tags, that can help with sorting and organizing content. Users can set up categories that can go more than one level deep, and tag posts with as many tags as they want for ease of navigation and discovery of content.
• Gutenberg editor: WordPress unveiled the Gutenberg block editor; this novel editor changed the way content creators produced the pages and posts. Users can work with a variety of content blocks like paragraphs, titles, pictures, galleries, videos allowing highly customizable data presentation without any code knowledge background. 

Verdict: WordPress offers more design possibilities which would work with a wider type of sites other than e-commerce. Shopify is excellent at handling product-oriented content as well as providing basic blogging features.

5. SEO Features

Shopify

• Customizable meta tags: Shopify gives an option to users to design the meta tags including the title tags and the meta descriptions for the product pages, collections and other information. This will lead to page optimization for all the search engines and high click through rate on SERPs.
• SEO-friendly URL structures: Shopify dynamically creates search engine optimized URLs for content and product pages based on the page title, which helps search engines to understand the content and as a result, rank the pages accordingly.
• XML sitemap generation: Shopify automatically has a feature which generates XML sitemaps for the stores, that is what helps search engines crawl and index various website pages more effectively. Users can submit their sitemap to search engines like Google via Google Search Console to ensure all pages are discovered and indexed.
• App Integration for SEO: Shopify offers various SEO apps in its App Store, providing additional features and functionalities to enhance SEO efforts. These apps may include features such as structured data markup, keyword optimization, and SEO analysis tools.

Read more: 15 Important Strategies to Improve Shopify SEO for Your Store

WordPress

• SEO plugins: WordPress has many options like: Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and Rank Math, which enhance on-page optimization. These plugins provide features such as XML sitemap generation, meta tag customization, schema markup, and content analysis tools to improve SEO performance.

• Customizable permalinks: It permits users to personalize post links (URLs) for individual pages, posts, and categories, so they can incorporate the keyword in URLs for better search engine visibility. 
• Content management for SEO: We can use it to create and classify our content with SEO goals in mind. Users can create categories, tags, and custom taxonomies to create a hierarchical content structure and internal link structure. 
• Structured data markup: WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO and Rank Math would have features like adding structured data markup (schema. org) to website pages. Therefore, the context of the content is better understood by the search engines, which leads to displaying of the snippets in the search results and increases click-through rates. 

Verdict: Though Shopify contains fundamental SEO features out-of-the-box, WordPress’ plugin ecosystem and highly modifiable nature make it very flexible for implementing advanced SEO tactics.

6. Ecommerce Features

Shopify

Shopify provides a suite of built-in eCommerce tools for store owners, offering comprehensive functionalities like inventory management, secure payment gateways, abandoned cart recovery, and more out-of-the-box.

WordPress

WordPress relies on intermediary plugins, such as those available from rextheme.com, to establish an eCommerce presence. Among these plugins, WooCommerce stands out as the foremost and most widely embraced eCommerce solution for WordPress. It incorporates a plethora of essential features necessary for launching and managing an online store efficiently.

Verdict: Shopify offers eCommerce tools out-of-the-box, while WordPress, through plugins like WooCommerce, provides a flexible but plugin-dependent solution for online stores.

7. Blogging Features

Shopify

For most eCommerce blogs, Shopify’s built-in features offer ample functionality to fulfill your needs. One standout advantage is the ease of managing and configuring settings. Inserting images and videos is straightforward with its visual editor. 

Additionally, it provides automatic SEO optimization for titles and descriptions, along with features like post scheduling, comments, and tags. While not as robust as dedicated blogging platforms like WordPress, Shopify’s simplicity may suffice for many users’ needs.

WordPress

It offers a set of tools to ease performing the task of posting, previewing and publishing content. Users can simply import media from their library, insert different types of content such as images, links, text, video, sound,…. 

Besides, WordPress provides the means to tweak fonts which enhance site appeal visually as well. Normally considered to be by far the most popular blogging platform in the world, WordPress helps both self-hosted installation and managed WordPress sites. And thus, it is the most appropriate solution for bloggers including freelancers.

Verdict: Shopify offers ease of use and built-in SEO for blogs, while WordPress excels with extensive customization and is the top choice for bloggers.

8. Apps & Plugins

Shopify

Shopify boasts an extensive App Store with thousands of free and paid apps covering various aspects of e-commerce, marketing, sales, customer service, inventory management, and more. Shopify apps seamlessly integrate with the platform, allowing users to enhance their store’s functionality without complex coding or technical knowledge.

For users with unique requirements or specific functionality needs, Shopify offers the option of custom app development. Users can hire Shopify experts or developers to create custom apps tailored to their store’s needs, providing a bespoke solution for enhanced functionality.

Read more: Top 15+ Must-have Shopify Apps for 2024 [Free & Paid]

WordPress

WordPress boasts a vast ecosystem of plugins, with over 60,000 free and premium plugins available in the official WordPress Plugin Repository. These plugins cover a wide range of functionalities, including SEO, performance optimization, security, e-commerce, social media integration, and more.

Users can search for plugins directly from the WordPress dashboard, install them with a few clicks, and activate them to add new features or enhance existing ones.

WordPress also offers the option of custom plugin development for users with specific requirements or unique functionality needs. Users can hire WordPress developers or agencies to create custom plugins tailored to their website’s requirements, providing a bespoke solution for enhanced functionality.

Verdict: As a whole, Shopify’s App Store provides a curated selection of apps specifically tailored to e-commerce needs, while WordPress’s Plugin Repository offers a broader range of plugins catering to various website requirements beyond just e-commerce.

9. Help & Support

Shopify

Shopify stands out for its exceptional customer service. Users can access 24-hour support via phone, support ticket, or live chat with a customer care representative. Additionally, self-service options are available, including a knowledge base, video tutorials, and webinars, catering to users who prefer to find answers independently. 

The platform offers an extensive collection of articles and video tutorials to assist beginners in maximizing the potential of this digital eCommerce tool. Furthermore, users can explore Shopify discussion forums for additional insights on common topics.

WordPress

It’s important to note that support for the free version of WordPress.com is self-guided. However, paid plans with WordPress.com offer robust support options, which can serve as a compelling incentive for merchants to opt for these plans. Paid subscribers receive email support and live chat, depending on their plan tier. 

Unfortunately, official support from WordPress.org itself is not available, which may be a drawback for some users. Nonetheless, users can find a wealth of advice and tutorials on WordPress-related topics across the web. 

Additionally, there are numerous texts, video manuals, guidelines, and tutorials compiled by other system users, providing ample resources for those seeking assistance.

Verdict: Shopify offers 24/7 support and many self-help resources, whilst WordPress provides robust support for paid plans but relies on community help for free users.

Shopify vs WordPress: Which is Best for You?

Choosing between Shopify and WordPress involves considering their pros and cons across various factors. Below we will review the key aspects of Shopify and WordPress.
Pros and cons Shopify WordPress

Businesses suitable for Shopify:

• E-commerce-focused businesses of all sizes
• Those prioritizing ease of use and scalability
• Businesses with limited customization needs
• Those seeking integrated payment solutions

Businesses suitable for WordPress:

• Content-centric businesses like bloggers and media companies
• Those with specific design and customization requirements
• Businesses prioritizing SEO
• Budget-conscious businesses
• Those with technical expertise or access to developers

Conclusion

Shopify and WordPress each provide its own type of strength customized to fit different demands. Shopify is an eCommerce-primarily oriented platform, offering an easy-to-use interface, comprehensive characteristics, and dedicated assistance for internet shops. WordPress, which is famous for its flexibility, customizations, and universal settings, is suitable for almost every type of website where users enjoy the freedom of customizations and a high degree of control. 

The choice between the two ultimately depends on individual priorities and requirements, with Shopify ideal for straightforward eCommerce ventures and WordPress offering broader adaptability for diverse online projects.