WooCommerce is free and Shopify is £25/month, which is why the comparison is usually wrong. Real three-year costs for a shop doing £100k a year.
The pitch for WooCommerce is that the plugin is free, so you avoid Shopify's subscription. This is true and almost entirely beside the point. WooCommerce shifts costs from a subscription to hosting, plugins and maintenance, and for many shops the total lands higher.
Why WooCommerce is expensive to host
An ordinary WordPress site serves nearly every visitor a cached HTML file. A shop cannot. Carts, checkouts, account pages and any logged-in session must bypass the page cache entirely and hit PHP and MySQL for every request — that is the whole reason cheap shared hosting falls over under commercial traffic while handling a brochure site with a hundred times the pageviews.
WooCommerce also writes constantly: sessions, cart contents, order meta, stock levels. It is a database-heavy application wearing a CMS, and it needs I/O, RAM and a properly configured object cache. Hosting a serious Woo store on a £5 plan is the single most common cause of "my shop is slow at checkout".
Three-year cost for a shop turning over £100k/year
| Shopify Basic | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform / hosting | ~£25/mo | ~£40/mo (Nexcess or Kinsta) |
| Theme | £0–£250 once | £0–£100 once |
| Apps / plugins | ~£40/mo (typical 4–6 apps) | ~£25/mo (subscriptions, shipping, bookings) |
| Payment processing | ~1.75% + 20p (Shopify Payments) | ~1.5% + 20p (Stripe) |
| Extra transaction fee | 2% if not using Shopify Payments | None |
| Maintenance | £0 — platform handles it | £0 DIY, or £50–£150/mo agency |
| Backups & security | Included | Included on managed hosting |
| 3-year total (DIY) | ~£2,300 + fees | ~£2,300 + fees |
| 3-year total (with maintenance) | ~£2,300 + fees | ~£5,900 + fees |
Indicative. The row that decides it is the last one: WooCommerce and Shopify cost about the same if you maintain the shop yourself, and WooCommerce costs roughly twice as much if you pay someone to.
Where Shopify genuinely wins
- You never think about PCI compliance, PHP versions or plugin conflicts. For a shop, that is not a small thing — a broken checkout is lost revenue measured in hours.
- Scaling is not your problem. Black Friday traffic is Shopify's engineering department's concern.
- Payment and shipping coverage is deeper and better integrated, particularly internationally.
- Time to launch. A competent Shopify store is days. A competent WooCommerce store is weeks.
Where WooCommerce genuinely wins
- Content. If your shop sells through articles, guides, recipes or reviews, WordPress's publishing tools are far ahead and Shopify's blogging is an afterthought. Content-led commerce is the strongest case for Woo.
- Unusual requirements. Complex product configurators, subscriptions with odd rules, bespoke B2B pricing, integration with a legacy system — you have PHP, a database and hooks. Shopify has an app store and a wall.
- No platform transaction fee and no 2% penalty for using your own payment processor.
- You own it. Full export, self-hostable, no possibility of a terms change altering your business model.
If you go WooCommerce, host it properly
- Nexcess — genuinely ecommerce-specialised, auto-scales for sales spikes, has a London region, and is one of the very few managed hosts that includes email.
- Kinsta — fastest of the mainstream managed platforms; budget separately for mailboxes.
- Cloudways — the value option. Pick a 4 GB server, enable Redis object caching, and you have a competent Woo host for around £30/month.
- Non-negotiables: Redis or Memcached object caching, PHP 8.3, at least 4 GB RAM, daily off-site backups, and a staging site you actually test plugin updates on before they touch the shop.
The one-line version
If selling is the whole point of the site, Shopify usually wins on total cost of ownership until you need something it will not do. If the site is a publication that also sells, WooCommerce wins, and you should spend the money you saved on the subscription on hosting that can actually run it.
Published 2 July 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.