Shopify vs WooCommerce 2026: The Honest Cost + Conversion Breakdown

I get asked this question every week.

"Should we be on Shopify or WooCommerce?"

The honest answer changes depending on which year you're asking it, what stage your business is at, and what you're actually selling. The answer for a beauty brand doing $300k/year is different from the answer for a B2B industrial parts catalog doing $4M/year. And the answer for both of those brands in 2026 is different from the answer in 2022.

Let me skip the surface comparisons (Shopify is hosted, WooCommerce is open-source — yes, we know). Here's the real cost breakdown, the real conversion data, and the real reason most DTC brands I work with end up on Shopify even when they started on Woo.

The cost comparison everyone gets wrong

You'll see comparison posts that say "Shopify costs $39/month, WooCommerce is free." That comparison is wrong because it counts only the platform fee.

Here's the actual monthly cost when you stack everything up.

Shopify (Basic plan, real total)

Cost	Amount
Platform	$39
Apps (typical stack: Klaviyo connector, reviews, popups)	$50-150
Theme (one-time, amortized over 24 months)	~$10
Transaction fees (with Shopify Payments, no third-party processor fee)	$0
Developer maintenance	$0-50
Total monthly	$99-249

WooCommerce (real total)

Cost	Amount
Hosting (managed WordPress with performance, e.g., Kinsta or WP Engine starter tier)	$30-100
Premium theme (annual / 12)	$5-15
Plugins: WooCommerce Subscriptions ($199/yr ÷ 12), security (Wordfence Premium), backup (BlogVault), SEO (RankMath Pro), forms, performance optimisation, payment gateway plugin, currency, taxes	$100-300
Klaviyo for WooCommerce connector / WP Engine eCommerce plan upgrade	$30-75
Payment processor fees (you're using Stripe direct, no Shopify wrap)	Same as Shopify
Developer maintenance (real: monthly retainer for security patches + plugin updates + the inevitable "site is down" call)	$200-800
Total monthly	$365-1,290

For a $500k/year DTC brand: Shopify Basic runs $1,200-$3,000/year total. The same brand on WooCommerce typically spends $4,400-$15,500/year by the time you count the dev time the founder pretends isn't a cost.

The brands that swear WooCommerce is cheap either don't count their own developer hours or have a sub-$100k/year store where the maintenance burden is genuinely small.

The conversion data nobody shares

Here's the part the "Shopify vs WooCommerce" articles never quantify, because they don't have access to data across both platforms.

We've migrated 18 brands from WooCommerce to Shopify over the last 24 months. The brands didn't change their products, prices, theme aesthetic, or paid traffic spend during the migration. Most kept similar (often identical) product page layouts.

Average results 90 days post-launch:

• Mobile conversion rate: +22% on average (range: +12% to +41%)
• Cart-to-checkout completion: +18% on average
• Average page load time: -1.4 seconds
• Meta ROAS: +15% on average (cleaner Pixel + CAPI setup)

The conversion lift didn't come from anything we did to the product pages. It came from the platform — Shop Pay autofill, Apple Pay default surfacing, faster pages reducing bounce, and a checkout flow that doesn't ask 14 questions.

Above $1M/year, the conversion lift alone usually pays back the migration cost within 4-6 months.

When WooCommerce is the right call

I'm not anti-WooCommerce. I run a WordPress site myself for a different project. There are real cases where WooCommerce wins.

Stay on WooCommerce if:

• You sell deeply configurable products (industrial parts, made-to-order furniture, B2B catalogs with 50+ variant axes) where Shopify's variant limits become a problem
• You have an in-house WordPress developer who's been with you for 3+ years and the site is stable
• Your entire stack is WordPress-centric (membership site + LMS + ecommerce all tied together)
• You sell digital-only products with complex licensing rules where WooCommerce's plugin ecosystem has battle-tested solutions Shopify doesn't
• You're doing under $200k/year and your current site works — migration cost won't pay back

I've turned down WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration projects when the brand fit one of these. Switching costs real money. If the math doesn't work, don't switch.

When Shopify is the right call (most DTC brands)

Move to Shopify if:

• You're running paid traffic and your CPA has crept up over 12+ months while you "fix tracking" without success
• Your mobile conversion rate is under 1.5% and you've spent more than 6 months trying to improve it
• Your dev maintenance bill exceeds $500/month and you're still putting out fires
• You're spending more time on the site than on the marketing
• You want subscriptions, B2B, international expansion, or multi-store and Woo's plugin solutions are buckling
• You're considering raising capital or selling — sophisticated buyers discount WooCommerce-based DTC businesses meaningfully versus Shopify-based ones because the platform risk is real

If 2+ of those apply, the migration math works. Above $500k/year revenue, the case is usually airtight.

The SEO question

This used to be the strongest argument for WooCommerce. WordPress had a decade of SEO maturity, every plugin under the sun, deeper customisation of every tag.

That argument is dead in 2026. Here's why:

• Shopify finally fixed canonical URL handling in 2024
• robots.txt is now editable on Shopify (it wasn't until 2022)
• Native structured data is solid (Product, Breadcrumb, Article)
• Shopify's Core Web Vitals beat WordPress + WooCommerce + caching plugins by a measurable margin on mobile

For the 95% of stores, Shopify SEO is now better out of the box than WooCommerce SEO with a $300/year RankMath setup. Read our deep-dive on Shopify migration SEO if you're worried about losing rankings during a move.

The edge cases (custom URL structures, deeper schema control, multi-language SEO without third-party apps) still favour WooCommerce. But if you need that level of customisation, you also need a dev team that costs more than the platform fee difference. The math still doesn't work in WooCommerce's favour.

The migration cost question

This is where most brands choke.

The migration apps that promise "$499, switch to Shopify in a weekend" only move database records — products, customers, orders. They don't handle:

• 301 redirects (the single biggest cause of post-migration SEO loss)
• Theme rebuild (Liquid is a different language from PHP)
• Meta Pixel + Conversion API setup (different event structure)
• Klaviyo flow migration (different event names)
• App remapping (Yotpo on Woo isn't Yotpo on Shopify)
• Subscription migration (if you sell subscriptions, this is a separate sub-project)

A real migration runs $5,000-$50,000+ depending on scope. We covered the full breakdown in our WooCommerce to Shopify migration cost guide — including the realistic 8-week timeline and what every other agency I respect charges.

The cheap quote isn't a deal. It's a future fix project for someone else.

What I'd actually do at each revenue stage

Under $200k/year: Stay where you are. Migration cost won't pay back fast enough. Focus the budget on Klaviyo + Meta instead.

$200k-$500k/year: Audit first, decide second. Honest answer might be "spend the budget on growth, not migration." Or it might be "your tracking is so broken you're losing money every day on Woo." Get a Shopify Growth Audit and decide based on the real numbers.

$500k-$2M/year: Most brands at this stage benefit measurably from the move. The conversion lift + tracking improvement usually pays back in 4-8 months. Plan the migration during a slow quarter.

$2M+/year: You're already losing money every month you stay on Woo. Plan the move, do it right, and consider whether Shopify Plus is the better landing point — checkout extensions, B2B catalogs, expansion stores. We cover the math in our Shopify Plus Readiness post.

The bottom line

Shopify wins for most DTC brands above $200k/year. WooCommerce still wins for specific cases — configurable B2B catalogs, WordPress-centric stacks, sub-$200k stores with in-house WP expertise.

If you've been on Woo for 2+ years and your business has doubled since then, the platform that fit when you started probably doesn't fit now. That's not a Woo problem — it's a stage problem. Every platform has a stage it serves best.

The brands that move at the right time get a 4-12 month CVR lift, cleaner Meta attribution, and 60% lower maintenance overhead. The brands that delay the move usually delay it because of sunk cost — "we've already paid for the custom Woo theme, the plugins, the dev relationship." That sunk cost gets bigger every month you stay.

If you're not sure which side of the line your business is on, that's exactly what our free Shopify Growth Audit covers. 30 minutes with me, real numbers, no agenda to sell you a migration if it doesn't make sense. Most weeks I tell at least one prospect to stay on WooCommerce. The math is the math.