24 Feb WordPress vs Shopify: 10 Key Advantages of Using WordPress for Your Website
When building an online store or website, two major platforms often come to mind: WordPress and Shopify. While both have their strengths, WordPress continues to be the preferred choice for millions of businesses, bloggers, and developers worldwide. Whether you’re launching an eCommerce site or a content-driven blog, WordPress offers unmatched flexibility, control, and SEO advantages that make it a superior long-term choice.
In this blog, we’ll explore 10 powerful advantages of using WordPress over Shopify, and why it could be the better investment for your online success.
1. Complete Design & Customization Control
Unlike Shopify, which limits design flexibility unless you pay for premium themes or hire a developer, WordPress (especially with themes like Newspaper, Porto, or Bridge) gives you full control over your website’s design. Using drag-and-drop builders like Elementor or WPBakery, you can customize every pixel of your site, no coding required.
2. Scalability Beyond eCommerce
Shopify is great for online stores, but it’s not ideal for content-heavy sites, membership platforms, forums, or directories. WordPress is a true content management system (CMS) that grows with your business. You can start with a simple blog and evolve into a multi-faceted site with ease.
3. Superior SEO Capabilities
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for online visibility. WordPress dominates here. With powerful plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and All in One SEO, you get granular control over meta tags, sitemaps, canonical URLs, and schema markup. Shopify’s SEO is more limited and often requires paid apps for the same functionality.
WordPress sites often rank higher on Google thanks to better content structuring, speed optimization, and advanced SEO tools.
4. Lower Long-Term Costs
While Shopify seems affordable initially, costs quickly add up with app subscriptions, payment processing fees, and monthly plans. WordPress is open-source and free, with thousands of free plugins and themes. You only pay for hosting ans SSL Certificate (often around £15/month) and any premium tools you choose to use.
5. Plugin Power: Extend Functionality Without Limits
Shopify apps are curated, and many come with recurring costs. WordPress, on the other hand, offers over 60,000 free plugins for nearly any feature you can imagine, from security to lead generation to advanced analytics.
Popular examples include:
• WooCommerce for eCommerce
• WPForms for form building
• MonsterInsights for Google Analytics
• MemberPress for subscription and membership sites
6. Full Ownership of Your Website
With WordPress, you own your website completely: hosting, content, data, and design. Shopify is a closed platform, meaning if you cancel your subscription, your site disappears. WordPress offers more independence and portability.
7. Open-Source Flexibility
Being open-source, WordPress allows developers to modify core files, create custom plugins, and build entirely unique solutions. Shopify is proprietary and locked down, making it harder to fully tailor the platform to your needs.
8. Blogging Excellence
While Shopify does offer a basic blogging function, WordPress was built as a blogging platform, and it shows. Advanced blog formatting, custom categories, tags, RSS feeds, comment systems, and editorial workflows are native to WordPress.
9. Multi-Language and Multi-Site Support
Need a site in multiple languages or want to manage several websites under one dashboard? WordPress supports both through tools like WPML, Polylang, and Multisite networks. Shopify has more limited and costly options for multi-language and multi-store management.
10. More Robust Community & Resources
WordPress powers over 43% of the web, making it the largest CMS in the world. That means more tutorials, developer support, forums, themes, and integrations than any other platform, including Shopify which is currently around 10%.
Final Thoughts: Is WordPress Better Than Shopify?
If you’re looking for a simple, plug-and-play eCommerce solution, Shopify is a decent option. But if you want full creative control, superior SEO, long-term scalability, and a truly customizable platform, WordPress is the clear winner.
With tools like WooCommerce, WPBakery, and a vast plugin ecosystem, you can build a powerful website that’s truly your own, and optimized for growth.
Ready to Start With WordPress?
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