WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress. That framing is accurate and almost completely unhelpful, because the plugin was never the cost.
What running WooCommerce actually involves
Hosting that can take the load. Shared hosting will not. Managed WordPress hosting capable of running a real store runs from tens to hundreds a month.
Plugins, and their subscriptions. Subscriptions, bookings, advanced shipping, proper search — each is a paid plugin with an annual renewal. A functioning Woo store commonly carries fifteen to thirty plugins.
Someone to maintain it. WordPress core updates, plugin updates, PHP version upgrades, and the compatibility problems between them. This is a real recurring job, and when it is skipped the store becomes a security exposure rather than merely out of date.
Security. WooCommerce stores are attacked constantly, mostly through outdated plugins. On Shopify, this is not your concern in any sense.
| WooCommerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Free | From roughly $40/month |
| Hosting | Yours to buy and manage | Included |
| Plugins | Many, mostly paid annually | Apps, mostly monthly |
| Updates and patching | Your responsibility | Handled |
| PCI compliance | Your responsibility | Handled |
| Content publishing | Excellent | Adequate |
| Checkout | Yours to build and optimise | Among the best in the industry |
Where WooCommerce genuinely wins
Content-led businesses. If the store exists alongside a serious publishing operation — a magazine, a large resource library, a membership — WordPress is a better content system than Shopify and that can decide it.
Total control of the data. Self-hosted means the database is yours, on infrastructure you choose. For some businesses that is a requirement rather than a preference.
A small catalogue attached to something else. A few products bolted onto an established WordPress site rarely justifies a separate platform.
The cost that catches people is not any single line. It is that hosting, plugin renewals and maintenance are all recurring, and none of them appear in the comparison that persuaded them Woo was free.
Where Shopify wins for DTC specifically
Checkout. Shopify Checkout and Shop Pay are the most tested checkout in ecommerce. On Woo you are assembling and optimising that yourself.
Time to live. Weeks rather than months, with far less that can go wrong.
Nothing to maintain. No patching, no compatibility matrix, no 2am update that took the store down.
The ecosystem. Whatever you need to connect — 3PL, subscriptions, attribution, retention — someone has already solved it for Shopify.
Talk it through
On WooCommerce and wondering what a move would take?
Send us the store. We will tell you what the migration involves, what it would cost, and honestly whether the maintenance you are carrying justifies it yet.
Ask usA real read within one business day — not a sales call.
If you are migrating
Two things decide it. Product data — Woo catalogues often use custom fields and attribute structures that need mapping to Shopify products and metafields. And URLs — a WordPress site accumulates years of them, including category archives, tag pages and old blog structures.
We wrote the full method in WordPress to Shopify migration without losing SEO. The short version: map every URL before you build anything, and the traffic carries across.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Manpreet Singh is the founder of Proscube, an ecommerce growth studio. He leads the studio's Shopify and Shopify Plus engineering, headless builds, CRO, and its work on AI engine optimization, and writes its guidance on how to grow a DTC brand without wasting money. He works directly with founders — no account-manager layers between you and the people doing the work — and would rather tell a client not to build something than sell them work they don't need.
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