WordPress, Shopify, or Custom-Built: Choosing Where Your Site Lands

Deciding to leave Wix is the easy half. The question that actually shapes the next five years of your website is where you land — and it deserves more than the fifteen seconds most people give it.

Here is the framework we walk through with every client, in the order the questions actually matter.

Question one: do you sell products online?#

If yes, and e-commerce is central to the business, the answer is almost always Shopify, and you can stop reading here. Carts, payments, tax, inventory, fraud, shipping — this is fifteen years of solved problems you do not want to re-solve. WooCommerce on WordPress is legitimate when a store is a minor side function of a content site; headless commerce is legitimate at a scale most small businesses have not reached. For a real store, Shopify.

If no, continue.

Question two: how often does your site change shape?#

Not content — shape. New sections, new page types, new functionality.

Changes shape often (quarterly experiments, new services, evolving structure): WordPress. The plugin ecosystem means a new capability is usually an install away rather than a development cycle. This flexibility is what you are paying WordPress's maintenance overhead for, so make sure you actually use it.

Stable shape, changing content (same pages, fresh words and images): this is where a custom build earns consideration. Static-first sites reward structural stability with structural speed. If the shape holds, you give up flexibility you were not using and gain performance you could not otherwise reach.

Question three: what does search traffic mean to your business?#

If organic search is a rounding error, weigh cost and convenience and pick accordingly.

If organic search drives revenue, speed becomes a business input. WordPress can be made fast with discipline (good hosting, restrained plugins, caching). A custom static build is fast, structurally, with no ongoing discipline required. That difference compounds over years of Core Web Vitals being a ranking consideration.

Question four: what is your honest relationship with maintenance?#

WordPress asks for ongoing attention: updates, backups, security, plugin health. Either you do it, your host does it (managed WordPress), or you pay someone. Unattended WordPress sites decay — this is the single most common way the platform goes wrong.

Shopify maintains itself. You configure; they operate.

Custom builds need almost no maintenance — no plugins, no patches, no database — but changes need a developer. Low upkeep, higher change cost.

Pick the failure mode you can live with.

The three-year money picture#

Rough totals for a typical small business site, including the migration itself:

Destination	Upfront	Monthly	Three-year total
WordPress	$499–899	$10–30 hosting (+ maintenance)	$1,000–2,500
Shopify	$1,499–2,199	from $39 platform	$3,000–4,300
Custom build	from $2,499	~$0 hosting	$2,500–3,700

The custom build's arithmetic surprises people: higher entry, then almost nothing. It rarely wins on a three-year horizon, but hold a stable site for five or more years and it usually ends up the cheapest thing on the table — if it fit your answers to questions two and four.

The mistakes that lock people in wrong#

Choosing Shopify without a store. Shopify is a commerce engine with pages attached. Using it as a content site means paying commerce prices for a weaker content toolset.

Choosing WordPress for flexibility you will never use. If you install a theme, five plugins, and never touch it again, you bought maintenance obligations and got nothing for them.

Choosing custom to be modern. "Modern stack" is not a business reason. Speed-as-revenue, ownership, and low upkeep are business reasons. If none apply, modern is just expensive.

Choosing anything because the migration quote was cheapest. The migration is weeks; the destination is years. A few hundred dollars of difference on the move is noise against three years on the wrong platform.

Whatever you choose, the move is the same discipline#

Full URL inventory, complete 301 redirect map, metadata carried over, Search Console watched for six weeks. The destination changes your next five years; the redirect map decides whether your rankings survive the next five weeks. Do not let excitement about the former distract anyone from the latter.

The short version#

Store → Shopify. Shape changes often → WordPress. Shape stable and speed matters → custom build. Then check the maintenance question honestly, run the three-year math instead of the upfront math, and distrust any recommendation — ours included — that arrives before anyone has asked what your site actually does.