WordPress, Wix, Shopify or Webflow: How to Choose
5 min read
Anyone researching a new website meets the same four names: WordPress, Wix, Shopify and Webflow. Every comparison article reaches a slightly different conclusion, because the four were built for different problems. Rather than reading feature tables, answer three questions. Most people know which one they want by the end of them.
Question one: are you selling on the site?
This question rules out the most. A site with payments, stock levels and an order process is a different animal from a site that explains what you do, and forcing the wrong tool into that job is painful.
If you sell physical goods, carry a lot of lines and need stock and shipping handled, a dedicated commerce platform such as Shopify is the least work. The pieces are built in, so you are not assembling a basket, a payment gateway and shipping rules yourself. What you save is setup and maintenance time. What you pay is a monthly fee plus a cut of sales.
If you sell a handful of items, or take orders now and then, WordPress with a shop plugin is enough. Paying a commerce platform every month for three or four products does not add up, and the features built for large catalogues would sit unused.
If you are not selling at all and just need a presence with your services and some articles, WordPress, Wix and Webflow can all do it. This question rules nothing out for you, so go to the second one.
Question two: who updates the site afterwards?
A website is not finished when it launches. Who adds the next article, swaps the photos and changes the prices decides whether you should pick the easy tool or the flexible one. Plenty of people get this question wrong and then leave the site untouched for a year, because every small change means finding someone.
If you will update it yourself and want nothing to do with the technical side, Wix has the most direct editing experience: you drag what you can see. The trade is a limited range of movement. When the template cannot do something, it cannot do it, and there is no way around.
If you will update it yourself and the content keeps piling up, the WordPress admin was designed for publishing continuously. Categories, tags, drafts and scheduling start to matter once you have dozens or hundreds of posts. Drag-and-drop editors feel lighter at the start and get harder to manage as the content grows.
If you have a design background and want control over layout detail, Webflow gives you far more of it than Wix, close to laying out the page directly. The learning curve is steeper to match, and people without design training tend to find the number of options paralysing.
If an agency or a contractor does the updates, the platform matters much less. The question becomes whether you can find someone who will maintain it for years. Who takes over when that relationship ends, and how your data comes out, both matter more than the name of the platform.
Question three: how much lock-in can you live with?
Fewest people think about this at the start, and it is the one most regretted two or three years later. The more work a platform takes off your hands, the harder it usually is to leave, because taking that work away is exactly what ties everything together.
Sites built on Wix, Shopify and Webflow live on those platforms. When you want to move, text content can often be exported, while the layout and the functionality generally have to be rebuilt. WordPress is open source: the files and the database are yours, and moving to another host is usually half a day to a couple of days of work.
| Platform | Can you take the content? | What about layout and features? |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Files and database are in your hands, so the whole site moves | Theme and plugins travel with it, no rebuild when you change host |
| Wix | Text content can be exported; anything beyond that depends on what the platform offers at the time | Layout is tied to the platform, so moving means rebuilding |
| Shopify | Products and orders have export formats; check customer data separately | Layout is tied to the platform, so moving means rebuilding |
| Webflow | Content can be exported; dynamic content depends on your plan | Page files can be exported, but forms and membership features do not come with them |
Monthly fees are the other thing people underestimate. Platform pricing steps up with the plan, so an option that looks cheap at the start can cost more over three years than self-hosting, once features get added and traffic grows. Do not price only the first year.
The honest list of what WordPress costs you
WordPress is not the right answer to everything. What follows is what you actually run into after choosing it. Better to know now than to find out two years in.
Five things to accept before choosing it
- Somebody has to look after it. Core, theme and plugins all need updating, and an unattended site will eventually be broken into. On platform services that layer is theirs. On WordPress it is yours.
- Plugin quality varies wildly. One abandoned plugin can slow the whole site or open a hole, so choosing plugins takes judgement that most site owners do not have.
- It gets heavier over time. Features arrive one plugin at a time until the speed goes, and by then it is hard to say which one is responsible.
- It is the favourite target of automated attacks. More than four in ten websites worldwide run WordPress, and scanners spend all day looking for the ones nobody updated.
- There is more admin at the start. Hosting, domain, certificates and backups are all yours to arrange. Platform services bundle that away.
The other way round, most of those are problems of needing somebody to look after it, not problems of capability. A WordPress site with someone maintaining it regularly looks good on both flexibility and long-term cost. With nobody looking after it, a platform service is genuinely the safer choice, if only because updates and backups will not be forgotten.
Putting the three answers together
Line the three answers up and most people land in one of the situations below.
| Your situation | Usually | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Not selling, updating it yourself, no interest in the technical side | Wix | Usable as soon as it is built; the price is limited flexibility and a fee that never stops |
| Not selling, content will keep accumulating, someone can maintain it | WordPress | Suits companies whose visibility comes from publishing |
| A store with a lot of product lines | Shopify | Do not force a large catalogue onto WordPress; the maintenance cost is worse than you expect |
| Few pages, high design standards, someone willing to learn | Webflow | More control than Wix, provided somebody can carry the learning curve |
| Memberships, bookings, or a link into an existing system | None of the four is enough | That is no longer a platform choice; it is a decision about custom development |
The table generalises common situations rather than setting rules. If you are genuinely stuck between two options, go back to question two. That answer usually breaks the tie.
No platform is the right one, only the one that fits. If the three questions leave you undecided, you are almost certainly stuck on the second one, which is who maintains the site afterwards. Settle that and the choice tends to make itself.
Common questions
- Is WordPress really free?
- The software is. The website is not. You still pay for a domain, hosting and certificates, most good plugins and themes cost money, and updates and backups cost somebody's time. Compared with a platform service the spending is more spread out and more flexible, which is not the same as cheaper.
- How hard is moving from Wix or Shopify to WordPress?
- It depends how much of your site is tied to the platform. Plain text content usually exports, but the layout almost always has to be rebuilt, because those templates do not travel. Product data, customer accounts and order history depend on the export formats the platform provides. Run a full export as a test before you move, and confirm you can get the data out before agreeing a schedule.
- I have no technical background. Is WordPress too hard for me?
- Day-to-day writing and editing is not hard: the admin is typing and uploading. The hard parts are hosting, updates, backups and security, which are the parts you never see. So the question is not whether you can use it, but whether somebody is looking after that layer. If nobody is, a platform service or a managed WordPress arrangement both beat leaving it alone.