WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or custom: how to actually choose
Platform arguments are usually about taste. The decision should be about who maintains the site, what it has to integrate with, and what happens in year three.
Contents
Most platform advice is written by people who sell one platform. What follows is the set of questions we actually ask, in the order we ask them, when a client wants to know which way to go. The answers change per project, which is the point.
Start with who will maintain it
This is the first question and it decides more than anything technical. Who is going to change this site in eighteen months?
If the answer is a non technical person in your team, editing text and swapping images between other jobs, you need a system with a forgiving editor and a large pool of people who know it. If the answer is a developer, or us, then editor ergonomics matter far less and you can optimise for other things.
Choosing a platform your team cannot operate is the most reliable way to end up with a site frozen at its launch state, which then goes stale, which then gets replaced early. The replacement cost is the real cost of that decision.
Then ask what it has to talk to
List every other system the site must exchange data with. Stock, bookings, accounting, CRM, email marketing, a membership database, an in house tool nobody outside the company has heard of.
Now check, honestly, whether each platform has a maintained, official route to each of those systems, or whether it will need custom work. A single awkward integration can outweigh every other consideration, because it will be the thing that breaks, and the thing that is expensive to fix.
WordPress
WordPress is a content system that will do almost anything, because almost anyone can extend it. That is its strength and its weakness in the same sentence.
It suits you when: content is central, you publish regularly, you need flexible page structures, you want to own your hosting and data outright, and you need a large market of developers so you are never dependent on one supplier.
It costs you when: it is assembled from a dozen plugins nobody chose deliberately. A WordPress site is only as sound as the decisions behind it. Built with restraint and a custom theme, it is fast, stable and genuinely yours. Built by stacking plugins until the feature list is satisfied, it becomes slow, fragile and expensive to maintain, and every update is a small gamble.
The honest summary: WordPress rewards discipline and punishes its absence more than any other platform on this list.
Shopify
Shopify is a commerce platform first and a website second, and you should choose it in that spirit.
It suits you when: selling is the primary job, you want checkout, payments, tax, fraud handling and PCI compliance to be somebody else’s problem, and you value operational reliability over total design freedom. The checkout in particular is worth a great deal. It is tested at a scale no individual store can replicate, and you are not allowed to break it, which is a feature.
It costs you when: your content needs are heavy, your catalogue is structured in an unusual way, or your margins make transaction fees and app subscriptions painful. App costs accumulate quietly. Six small monthly subscriptions is a real line on the accounts and each one is a dependency you do not control.
Webflow
Webflow is a visual design tool that outputs a hosted site, aimed squarely at marketing sites that need to look distinct and change often.
It suits you when: design fidelity matters, the site is mostly marketing pages plus a modest collection or two, and a designer rather than a developer will be making changes. It removes a whole category of handover friction.
It costs you when: you need deep custom logic, complex data relationships, or to run anything on a server. You are also renting the platform. Export exists, but the editing experience does not come with it, so leaving means rebuilding.
Custom
A custom build means a framework, a codebase and hosting chosen for your requirements, usually with a headless content system behind it.
It suits you when: the site is the product, the interface has real application logic, performance is a commercial requirement rather than a nice to have, or your data model genuinely does not fit anything off the shelf.
It costs you when: you choose it for status rather than need. Custom means everything is your responsibility, including the parts a platform would have handled invisibly. That is fine if the trade is deliberate, and expensive if it is not.
The questions that settle it
When a decision is close, these usually break the tie.
- What happens if we want to leave in three years? Where does the content live, what format does it come out in, and what would a migration actually involve?
- Who else can work on this? If we vanished tomorrow, how hard is it to find your next supplier?
- What is the total running cost, including every subscription? Not the headline plan. All of it.
- Which decisions are reversible? Prefer the platform where the expensive mistakes are the ones you are least likely to make.
- Is there anything here the platform forbids? Every platform has a boundary. Find yours before you commit, not during the build.
How we decide
We work with all of them, which means we have no reason to steer you. In practice we recommend WordPress when content and ownership lead, Shopify when selling leads, Webflow when a small team needs design control without engineering, and custom when the requirements genuinely have no home. We put the reasoning in writing, including what we think the weaknesses of the choice are, so the decision belongs to you rather than to us.