When it comes to popularity curves, both Shopify and WordPress, which are online development platforms, are nearly identical. Both companies are excelling in the e-commerce website creation industry, thanks to their incredible features, stellar reputation, flexibility, and perks.
In the event that you already have a WordPress website ready for your online store, it may be a good decision to continue using this content management system. Furthermore, optimising WordPress for eCommerce takes a disproportionately shorter amount of time.
Shopify, on the other hand, is a fantastic option for individuals who do not have have an ecommerce website and are seeking for a dedicated solution to build one. It includes a slew of innovative features that are designed to make your life easier.
Let’s get into the specifics to assist you comprehend a fair comparison so that you can make an informed decision in 2021 about your business.
Overview of Shopify vs WordPress
Both systems are excellent in their own right, regardless of their features, advantages, disadvantages, and other characteristics. However, in order to get the most out of any of these platforms, you must assess and take into account a variety of aspects such as the scope of the application and the technological complexity.
Both Shopify and WordPress are major participants in the area of content management systems. Let’s take a closer look.
Shopify
More than just an easy eCommerce store builder, Shopify is a closed source with an amazing range of features and hosted approach that is simple and has a distinctive way of designing an e-commerce website. It handles and manages everything for you so that you can run your store hassle-free. All you need to do is set up your account with signup formalities, and then you’re all set to add or sell products.
One interesting fact that makes Shopify a perfect choice for ecommerce websites is its full customization ability by which you can edit the HTML and CSS code of your website. With a brief coding skills, you can fully customize your stores more extensively as per your needs.
WordPress
WordPress is one of the popular website-building software that you can install into your web server. It is an extremely flexible platform that’s easy to use if you have coding skills. Many of us believe that WordPress is free of cost; yes, it’s true. But it’s a half-truth!
There are some additional costs for hosting solutions and other features or plugins that you cannot ever overlook.
One interesting thing about WordPress is it comes with access to amazing WordPress plugins and tools that make your eCommerce site or store’s checkout process or storefront easily navigable and accessible.
Features of ecommerce platforms
Shopify
- Mobile-Responsive Themes: Shopify has mobile-responsive themes, ten free themes, and 64 premium themes. The benefit of themes is you can automatically design your site according to screen preferences and other prerequisites. In addition, different themes will make your eCommerce store look spectacular and professionally designed.
- Best Analytics: Shopify offers an abundance of built-in analytics features that can help you to keep track of your eCommerce site. You can track customer behaviour, total sales, average order value, stock levels, and conversion tracking. This way, you’ll have a complete understanding of how your business is running and whether it needs any optimizations for better results or not!
- Robust and scalable: Shopify will take care of the e-commerce site owner’s realistic needs to take the business to the next level. Built with security in mind, this platform will effectively handle sudden traffic spurts or increasing traffic over time.
- In-House App Store: Shopify has an in-house app that contains over 1200 plugins. It simply means you can use these apps and plugins to automate and streamline your site to make it run faster while also enhancing the efficiency of other processes of your business management like accounting and shipping.
- Better Security: Shopify understands that customers no longer want to wait to complete a transaction or load a site’s page. Therefore, it provides 100% SSL to make ecommerce sites work fast and secure. Also, as customers pay via different payment gateways such as credit cards, it takes responsibility to keep their data safe. It hires cybersecurity experts to keep its website hack-proof so that it can keep checkouts fast and secure customer’s confidential information.
WordPress
- Free and Open Source: WordPress is a free and open-source platform. It has become a perfect choice for startups and small businesses to create an online selling platform. Only a few of its extensions for site management are payable. Rest, with brief knowledge about the programming, you can easily set it up and use it.
- 100% Customizable: The freedom to choose your favourable design and theme is what makes it a 100% customizable and professional choice for an eCommerce site. WordPress is filled with tons of features and a choice of Millions of website owners. Based on your choice and preference, you can design a header, footer, checkout page, product pages, and much more.
- Flexible Inventory Management: The highly rich and intuitive user interface will help you create, add, and manage your product and inventory in real-time. By regularly keeping track of what product your eCommerce store needs and what is under stock, you can manage inventory quite well.
- Uncompromised Cybersecurity: With the number of cyber threats increasing day by day, hackers are coming up with more sophisticated methods to steal your valuable data of your and your valuable users. WordPress prioritizes privacy and protection in each of the activities users perform after visiting a site. It creates a secure environment for them to help your eCommerce site stay ahead of security issues.The WordPress security team, in collaboration with the WordPress Core Leadership Team and backed by the WordPress global community, works to identify and resolve security issues in the core software available for distribution and installation at WordPress.org.
- Loads of Extensions: To boost customer experience, you may require additional features and functionalities to satisfy them with their purchase. WordPress has a tonne of beautiful extensions, paid or free, that you can choose to give your eCommerce site a new look and your potential users a great customer experience.
- SEO Capabilities: SEO is very important for an eCommerce site to help it achieve the top spot in the SERPs. A big thanks to WordPress’s useful SEO capabilities that are not challenging anymore and can perform well in optimizing your site speed and boost traffic. With amazing plugins and extensions such as Yoast, you can boost your site speed and make SEO a simple yet easy job.
Pros of Shopify
- Easy to setup & use
- No tech or any programming related worries
- 24/7 support
- Highly customizable
- Marketing tools
- Easy Abandoned cart recovery
- Dozens of superb payment gateways
Pros of WordPress
- Easy management from any device
- SEO friendly
- No HTML editing required
- Easy to use
- 100% customizable
- Best-in-quality plugins to extend the functionality of the site
- Best to set up multiple users
- Provides full control on your site
Cons of Shopify
- Customization limitations
- Difficult learning curve
- Time consuming product filtering and categorization
- Lack of email hosting facility
Cons of WordPress
- Lacks in many advanced features
- The time-consuming frequent update process
- Difficult for beginners to learn
- Multiple performance glitches
Which one is preferable?
As a result, after reading the post, you should be able to determine which is preferable for your Ecommerce website. Though it is difficult to tell which one is superior than another, if you have clearly defined your eCommerce site’s objectives in terms of what you want to generate and achieve from it, you should be able to make an informed decision rather quickly. You should be able to swiftly create your online store after reading this tutorial, which we hope has given you a better understanding of each platform.
Rest assured, if you require any assistance with Shopify or wordpress design, you may seek the advice of the top website developers. With their expertise and skills, they’ll guide you through the process of selecting the most appropriate platform and assisting you in the creation of a visually appealing and scalable website.