I get asked this a lot by clients before a project even starts: "should we build on WordPress or Shopify?" Having shipped corporate sites, real estate platforms and e-commerce stores on both, here is the honest, practical answer.
Pick WordPress when...
WordPress (with a custom theme and ACF) wins when the site is content-heavy and not primarily a shop — corporate websites, real estate portals, service businesses, blogs and news platforms. It gives you full control over the data structure: custom post types for properties, listings or case studies, and dynamic sections the client can edit without touching code. If the site needs to rank for a lot of long-tail content over time, WordPress's flexibility around URLs, taxonomies and on-page SEO is hard to beat.
Pick Shopify when...
Shopify wins the moment the core business is selling physical products online. Checkout, payments, shipping rules, inventory and abandoned-cart recovery are handled for you, tested at a scale no custom build can match without months of extra work. What you trade away is some layout flexibility — Shopify's Liquid theme system is powerful, but it is not as open-ended as a from-scratch WordPress template.
What actually matters more than the platform
In my experience, the platform choice matters less than how the build is done. A WordPress site stuffed with fifteen page-builder plugins will be slower than a lean Shopify store, and a Shopify store with unused apps piling up JavaScript will be slower than a clean WordPress build. Whichever platform you pick, insist on: custom, dynamic sections rather than hard-coded content; image optimisation from day one; and on-page SEO baked into the templates, not bolted on afterwards.
My rule of thumb
If more than half the site is "buy this product," I reach for Shopify. If more than half the site is "read this / learn this / enquire about this," I reach for WordPress. For stores that also need a lot of editorial content, WooCommerce on WordPress can be the middle ground — I have built that combination too.