Shopify vs. WordPress: Which is better for you in 2022?

Pixlogix-Logo
Pixlogix Infotech Pvt Ltd
  • Date Published
  • Categories Blog
  • Reading Time 13-Minute Read

Shopify and WordPress are two of the best-known brands in the ecommerce world. Here is everything you need to know about Shopify and WordPress development.

When you hear about Shopify vs WordPress, you might be wondering which is the best and which one should you go for. Unfortunately, it is not just you but quite common among people. But you don’t need to stress as you can clear all the doubts here and learn more about the platforms. Once you go through all the facts and pros, you can get a clear idea of which platform will best align with your business needs.

What do you need to know about Shopify development?

Shopify is a web application specially designed to allow suppliers to craft and launch their online store. They can get their hands on broad themes or tablets. Users can also personalize it to their needs, like the branding requirements. You can sell both physical and virtual goods on the platform.

One of the main aims behind Shopify is to allow people to create a store all by themselves. Also, without actually relying on any technical design. Creators also don’t need specific skills to create an online store here.

But when you choose Shopify, you can get access to edit the CSS and HTML of your website. This means those who have coding skills can easily personalize their stores perfectly. Shopify is mainly a hosted solution where everything runs on Shopify’s servers. So, you don’t need to stress about installing software or web hosting.

The idea is that building and running a store happens out of the box. You can personalize a Shopify store to align with customized bespoke requirements through additional apps.

Shopify is ideally is online store builder and you need to pay a monthly fee. Shopify runs in your cloud. Being a web application, you can manage your store easily anywhere when you have access to a web browser and internet.

What do you need to know about WordPress development?

Ideally, there are two versions of WordPress available, and we have described them both. The hosted WordPress is available on wordpress.com. It is pretty similar to Shopify because it is a service SAAS tool. If you want to go for a monthly package, you need to pay around $4 to $45.

Once you buy the plan, you can access various features. The paid version allows you to craft and maintain a simple blog and eCommerce platforms site.

Another WordPress available is self-hosted. It is a type of web application that you need to download from wordpress.org and install on your web browser. It is open-source, which means the coding is available freely, and users can alter it easily.

This implies that the sites crafted with WordPress can easily get personalized to a large extend. Overall, WordPress is a very flexible platform also. The platform is in the credibility of the right developer or, through installing the perfect plugins, can be edited to align with the web design project’s requirements.

When it comes to installing a WordPress website, you can use it on any device, and the best of all is that it is freely available. But you need to pay some hosting expenses, domain registration charges, and future developments. In this post, we shall focus on the self-hosted version.

Comparing Shopify and WordPress based on user needs

You can say that Shopify’s primary target audience is users who lack web development skills and a budget to hire professionals at Shopify development company to build the store. The users turn to Shopify because it allows them to create an online store without any coding skills required. The best part is that they don’t need to invest considerable money using it.

WordPress serves a wide range of groups like the web design novices, users with the bandwidth to hire a professional, and web development skills. Like Shopify, users choose WordPress if they are pretty new to design and not that tech-savvy. It is quite possible to maintain and create a website without any coding mastery, mainly if one uses a visual editor for WordPress.

Before you can publish any website, more configuration of WordPress is needed. There is a steeper learning curve for setting a WordPress site. WordPress also serves people who have a great web development experience, and they would usually be found using WordPress to create the website they want.

Lastly, WordPress also serves people who have a great budget. The funds can be used to hire a WordPress developer to build a completely customized website that runs on fast servers. The word customize is vital here as it underlines a significant difference between Shopify and WordPress that although it makes it possible to alter Shopify in several ways. There are several limits to what you can do.

How many users can use Shopify and WordPress?

It is essential to get some sense of how many people use the same to create their websites or online stores when choosing a website-building strategy.

Generally speaking, if a specific platform has a vast target audience, you will see several features available online such as:

  • Support options
  • Apps
  • Resources
  • Plugins

For example, WordPress has at least 30 million sites, while several million users use Shopify. Therefore, WordPress is ideally a safer bet in the long term.

Shopify costs:

If you want to try Shopify for free, which is available for 14 days. But the significant plans available here:

  • Lite: $9 per month.
  • Basic: $29 per month.
  • Shopify: $79 per month.
  • Advanced: $299 per month.
  • The plus plan is negotiable, around $2000 per month.

The lite plan allows you to integrate products and analogs on the current site through Shopify “buy button” or sell through Facebook, but you don’t get any standalone. Phone support is also supported on higher plans or a $29 plan. The users that can use the program vary from plan to plan.

As monthly plans become pretty expensive, credit card fees and transaction fees will likely decrease. To make the most of point-of-sale functionality, you need to pay for Shopify POS pro-add-on. Hence one can easily use Shopify to sell your products and services in physical locations. If your budget allows, you can also hire a Shopify developer.

WordPress costs:

It can be challenging to say how much a WordPress site costs to craft it because several variables are included. One of the major misconceptions here is that WordPress is completely free, but that’s not the case. You can get CMS or content management system software for free. But there are some things which you need to pay for:

  • Hosting is server space on which you can install WordPress and store the website.
  • The template which designs your website.
  • Ecommerce integration is about the addition of various tools which allow you to sell your products online.

You also need to pay for a developer to help you build a website, but it depends on your goals or ambitions. WordPress hosting is something you need to always pay for. Without it, you cannot install WordPress.

There are comprehensive options available on this front, but you need to choose one which aligns with your goals. You can go for a Managed website option, but it comes with a price tag.

The choice is worth the price as you will get a faster and safer website. If you are running a small-sized project, you should consider the budget. You can get away technically by using a free template, plugins, and eCommerce integration in mind other factors. To get maximum results, it is ideally worth it to invest some money and choose paid promotions.

Some figures you can expect if you are building a site by yourself:

  • Annual hosting on WordPress costs around $300.
  • If you choose the premium theme, you need to pay $175.
  • $180 is the yearly cost of eCommerce integration
  • $100 is for paid plugins.
  • To maintain the WordPress site, you need to pay $50 monthly.

Overall, you must have $1080 as the annual recurring cost to build a website. You can incur more charges if you plan to hire a developer to help you build, configure and maintain your WordPress site. If you want to go for cheap and straightforward plans, you can go for Shopify.

Quality and quantity: Shopify vs. WordPress, which is the better for you?

One of the main concerns for anyone building a website is how their website will look. Will it look professional or not? If you choose Shopify, you can try your hands on various templates. Ten templates are available for free, while 71 are paid ones available on the Shopify theme store.

You need to pay around $150 to $350 for paid themes. The best part is that all articles are designed by the best experts in the team to be edited without any stress.

Furthermore, they are responsive, which would automatically adjust to display perfectly on all mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. With these awesome templates, you can be pretty confident of getting excellent support from Shopify when it comes to templates.

You can also buy templates from third-party Shopify theme designers if that range of templates isn’t sufficient for you. The number of Shopify templates is available dwarfed by a vast range of templates available under WordPress.

Shopify is specially designed for non-technical users. It is fair to say that you can easily personalize the Shopify templates but configuring a perfect WordPress involves a lot of learning curve. WordPress is the ultimate winner here as the sheer quantity available ensures that the users will have plenty of choices for template shoots. But some of the WordPress templates contain malicious codes which can play with your site’s security.

Mobile performance:

As you know by now, all the officially supported templates on Shopify are pretty responsive. It means they will automatically adjust to be readily displayed on all devices. It is not challenging to find a WordPress template in the tech-dominated era.

Still, you need to check doubly for suitability across multiple devices before installing them. Several templates around the corner aren’t compatible with all devices.

Instead, you can go for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for WordPress and Shopify, a Google-backed project. AMP helps improve website speed by loading the pages on your mobile devices by stripping out some codes. Besides improving speed, it can also improve the website’s visibility in different search engines.

Ease of use and interface

The basic layouts for both platforms are pretty similar. On the left-hand side of the screen, you can see a host of menus. You can choose some pieces of content to change or tweak settings if required.

Shopify is a little bit modern and clean when it comes to appearance. The platforms have a similar style of editing and publishing.

The main difference is that you can use visual editor plugins in WordPress to create a real-time editing interface. This helps people new to web design.

The only thing you need to watch out for is the bloat. Suppose you are interested in building or managing your online store. In that case, Shopify’s interface is intuitive, which isn’t entirely surprising because the platform is designed with a specific purpose in mind.

Content management: Shopify Vs. WordPress, which is best and why?

WordPress beats Shopify without any second thoughts when it comes to content management:

  1. You need to know that WordPress features a revision history feature for all pages. It is also available for pages stored in the history you can roll back to it whenever you want. On the flip side, Shopify doesn’t allow you to access this feature.
  2. You can flexibly use different categories and tags when choosing WordPress. So you can easily present the site’s content in a way that is relevant to your target audience, and they can filter it more seamlessly to align with their needs.
  3. Drop and drag editors are available for both WordPress and Shopify.

The main difference here is the new template format which hasn’t been available yet for all the Shopify themes. So now, you must understand why WordPress is your best bet.

It is pretty challenging to compare content management between the platforms because e-commerce is unavailable. So, how both the platforms stack up will depend on the eCommerce app you go for selling your products online. It is possible to say that you can easily manage your products with Shopify. It is a dedicated eCommerce solution, and a lot has been put through it.

Flexibility

We can say that WordPress is way more flexible than Shopify of the two products in discussion now. The platform has been around for years now and is one of the most used platforms. This means the number of plugins and templates is way more significant than Shopify. In addition, the platform has an open-source nature which means you can easily manipulate it to create customized websites.

Undoubtedly, the Shopify app also contains several apps that allow you to extend the site’s functionality easily. But WordPress doesn’t do any good here when it comes to eCommerce because there is no e-commerce tool inbuilt here. When it comes to eCommerce, Shopify gives you an instant advantage as it is a dedicated online store builder, with almost everything you need to get your store running and up, especially out of the box. So you know by now why Shopify plays a crucial role.

SEO Comparison between Shopify and WordPress

SEO or search engine optimization plays a crucial role in any website’s performance. If you fail to get the desired visibility, you will struggle to get the perfect traffic.

No doubt, you can use different tools like AdWords or social ads to attract maximum traffic. But for long-term success, decent placement in organic search results plays a crucial role in several cases. WordPress SEO is undoubtedly a winner if we are considering general content.

The best of all is that you can Yoast while you use WordPress, and it is one of the best SEO tools available. This tool analyses your content perfectly from the SEO perspective and lists some fundamental changes to enhance your content quality. The SEO features are generally robust when it comes to Shopify SEO.

Often blogging is overlooked, but it is a vital element you need to consider while using these platforms. Since blogging is one of the best inbound marketing hacks where the best quality blogs can drive traffic to your website, besides hooking the readers, you can generate purchases.

Conclusion: WordPress and Shopify

Hence these are some significant differences between WordPress and Shopify. You must learn about these differences if you plan to start an eCommerce online business and need to choose any one of the platforms. You can make the best decision when you are clear with the basics.

Above all, you must weigh the pros and cons before going. Both platforms have their own set of specifics. After doing a detailed analysis to reap the benefits, one must make a choice, as per their own needs and wants.