We build on Webflow, WordPress and Shopify. An honest comparison of who each one suits, what it costs to run, and when each is the wrong choice.
A platform comparison is only as useful as the incentives behind it, and anyone who only builds on one platform has an answer before the question is asked. We build on all three, which means we have no reason to talk you into any of them. This is the same reasoning we use when a Perth business asks us which platform to build on, including the parts where we say a platform is the wrong choice. The short version: the platform matters far less than whether the person who has to run the site afterwards can actually run it.
Every one of these three is capable of producing a fast, well ranked, good looking website. The platform is almost never the thing standing between a site and that outcome. So when someone asks which platform is best, the honest answer is that the question is slightly wrong.
What actually differs is the trade you are making. Webflow trades flexibility for control of the design and a hosting stack you never have to think about. WordPress trades convenience for the ability to do almost anything, at the cost of ongoing maintenance you are now responsible for. Shopify trades design freedom for a trading engine that handles inventory, tax, shipping and payments properly out of the box.
Pick the trade that matches your business, not the one that matches a review site.
Webflow suits a business whose website is a marketing asset rather than a system. Brochure sites, service businesses, professional firms, anything where the job is to explain what you do, prove it, and get an enquiry.
It is the strongest of the three for design fidelity. What we draw is what ships, without a theme fighting us. Hosting, CDN, SSL and backups come with the plan, so there is no server to patch and no plugin conflict to wake up to. For a small team with no in-house developer, that removal of maintenance risk is worth a lot more than it sounds.
Where Webflow is the wrong choice: complex ecommerce, membership systems, multi-language sites with heavy content operations, anything needing custom server-side logic, and any business that wants dozens of people editing content loosely. It is also the one where you are most locked into a single vendor. If Webflow changes its pricing or terms, you have limited leverage.
WordPress suits a business with either a real content operation or a genuinely custom requirement. Publishing several posts a month, running a members area, integrating a booking system or a CRM in an unusual way, needing a specific plugin that exists nowhere else. The ecosystem around it is enormous, which is why so much of what you might need already exists as a plugin.
It also suits anyone who cares about ownership. You can move a WordPress site between hosts, export everything, and hire from a very deep pool of developers. Nobody can price you into a corner.
Where WordPress is the wrong choice: when nobody is going to maintain it. A WordPress site is software you now own. Core, theme and plugin updates, security, backups, performance, and the slow accumulation of plugins that each add weight. An unmaintained WordPress site does not fail on launch day. It degrades quietly, and by the time something breaks badly enough to notice, a rebuild is often cheaper than a repair. If you will not fund maintenance, do not build on WordPress. Choose something where maintenance is somebody else's job.
If you sell physical products and stock levels matter, Shopify is usually the right answer and it is not close. Inventory, variants, shipping rates, GST, discount logic, abandoned carts, refunds and payments are all solved problems on it. Trying to rebuild that on another platform is how good money gets burned.
Where Shopify is the wrong choice: a service business with no products, a content-led site that happens to sell a couple of items, or a business that wants total design control on every template. Shopify themes impose structure, and fighting that structure gets expensive. It is also the platform where the running cost creeps most, because the answer to almost every gap is an app with its own monthly fee. An app stack can quietly end up costing more than the platform subscription it sits on.
Ignore the headline sticker price and look at the shape of the cost, because that is what differs.
Webflow is a flat subscription per site, and hosting, CDN and security are inside it. It is the most predictable of the three. You will pay more for the base plan than you would for cheap shared hosting, and you will spend almost nothing on maintenance.
WordPress software is free, which is the most misleading part of this comparison. Your real cost is hosting, premium plugin licences, a page builder if you use one, and either your time or somebody else's on updates and security. Cheap hosting is a common starting point for the WordPress performance problems we get called about.
Shopify is a monthly plan, plus payment processing on every transaction, plus apps. Transaction costs scale with revenue, which is fair, but it means the platform gets more expensive exactly as you grow.
Platform pricing changes, so check the current plan pages before you budget rather than trusting a figure in an article.
This is the question that gets skipped, and it is the one that decides whether a site stays useful.
Webflow's editor is the easiest of the three for a non-technical person to use without breaking anything, because the design system is locked away from the content. A staff member can change copy, swap an image and publish a blog post safely.
WordPress is the most capable and the least safe. With a page builder, someone confident can restructure whole pages. Someone less confident can also delete a section, install a plugin that conflicts with another, or break a layout, and nothing stops them.
Shopify sits in between. Adding products, editing collections and running discounts is genuinely easy. Changing the theme's structure is not, and usually needs a developer.
Be honest with yourself about who will really be updating the site. If the answer is nobody, that pushes you towards the platform with the lowest maintenance burden, not the most powerful one.
All three can rank. We do the SEO work on all three and the platform is rarely the reason a site is not ranking. That said, the control you get is not identical.
WordPress gives you the most control, full stop. Server-level redirects, robots.txt, granular indexing rules, structured data, and complete freedom over URL structure. If you have a technically demanding SEO problem, this is the most flexible place to solve it.
Webflow covers the fundamentals properly. Per-page titles and meta descriptions, clean markup, fast hosting, custom code in the head, sitemap and redirect handling in site settings. The constraints show up in URL structure, where folders and slugs are less forgiving, and in the absence of any server-side layer.
Shopify forces URL patterns on you. Products sit under /products/, collections under /collections/, blog posts under /blogs/. You cannot change that, and it also creates duplicate paths for products reached through collections, which needs handling. Everything else is workable.
None of these differences will decide whether you rank. Content, internal linking and authority will. Read more about how we approach that on our SEO page.
Moving platforms is not a redesign with a different logo. It is a rebuild plus a data move plus a redirect map, and the redirect map is where sites lose rankings.
Every URL that changes needs a 301 to its closest equivalent. Miss them and you drop the accumulated authority on those pages, which can take months to recover if it recovers at all. Content, images, product data, reviews, form integrations and tracking all have to come across and be tested.
The practical rule we apply: do not migrate because you dislike how the admin looks. Migrate when the current platform is structurally blocking something the business needs, when maintenance cost has become irrational, or when the site is being rebuilt anyway. Otherwise you are paying to end up in the same commercial position on nicer software.
The decision usually collapses quickly once you answer three questions honestly.
Do you sell physical products with real stock, shipping and payments? Then Shopify, unless there is a specific reason it cannot work.
Do you have an unusual functional requirement, a heavy publishing operation, or a hard requirement to own and move the software? Then WordPress, and budget properly for maintenance from day one.
Is the site primarily there to explain what you do, prove it, and generate enquiries, with a small team and no developer? Then Webflow, and enjoy never thinking about hosting again.
If you are between two of those, the tiebreaker is almost always the person who has to run it. We would rather build on the platform your team will actually use than the one that scores better on paper.
Over the first year, a simple Webflow site is usually the most predictable, because hosting and security are inside the subscription and there is very little maintenance. WordPress can be cheaper on paper and more expensive in practice once you add hosting, plugin licences and someone to keep it updated. Shopify is rarely the cheapest, but if you are selling products it is the only one of the three that is not quietly costing you in workarounds. Compare total cost over three years, not the launch invoice.
It can be done without losing rankings, provided the migration is done properly. The two things that protect rankings are keeping the content substantively intact and mapping every old URL to a 301 redirect on the new site. Rankings can wobble for a few weeks while Google re-crawls, which is normal. Rankings are lost when redirects are skipped or content is thinned out during the rebuild, not because of the platform itself.
Often not. If you sell a handful of items, take payment infrequently, and the site's main job is to explain your service, the ecommerce features on Webflow or WooCommerce on WordPress may be enough. The moment stock levels, variants, shipping rules or regular order volume matter, Shopify stops being overkill and starts saving you money.
Because no single platform is right for every business. If we only built on one, we would have an incentive to recommend it to everyone, and you would have no way of knowing whether it actually suited you. We would rather be able to say plainly when a platform is the wrong fit, including when the right answer is to leave your current site alone.
Look at whether the problem is structural or cosmetic. If the site is slow, hard to edit, insecure or physically cannot do something the business needs, that is structural and a rebuild is worth costing. If it looks dated but converts and ranks, you are usually better off spending that money on content, search visibility and conversion improvements to the site you already have.
