WordPress, Wix, Shopify or bespoke: a straight-talking comparison

The comparisons you find elsewhere are often written by affiliates paid on commission. Here are the four solutions judged on what actually matters: what they cost over three years, what they prevent you from doing and when you become locked in.

Wix and Squarespace

These are complete services. You pay a subscription and everything is included: hosting, security, updates and a visual editor. You manage nothing technical and cannot break anything.

Cost: €150 to €400 per year. Over three years, €450 to €1,200, making this by far the cheapest solution on the list.

What it prevents you from doing: leaving. The website cannot be exported elsewhere. When you want to change, you rebuild from scratch. Your domain name and text belong to you; the construction does not.

The myth to put to rest: ‘Wix is bad for SEO.’ That was true ten years ago; it no longer is. A Wix website with good content can rank perfectly well. What stops you ranking is a lack of content, not your tool.

Who it suits: a business that wants complete independence, has a tight budget and an owner willing to spend thirty to fifty hours on it.

WordPress

The web’s standard platform. The software itself is free; you pay for hosting, a theme, sometimes plugins and, above all, someone to maintain it. Almost anything is possible because the ecosystem is vast.

Cost: €60 to €360 per year for hosting, plus €50 to €300 per month for maintenance if you delegate it. Over three years, between €2,000 and €12,000 excluding the build.

The real hidden cost is maintenance, and it is not optional. Outdated plugins are the main entry point for hacks of small business websites. A WordPress site abandoned for eighteen months ends up serving something other than your business, often without you knowing.

What it gives you in return: portability. You can change hosting provider, change agency, export and take back control. That is the reward for the upkeep, and it has value.

Who it suits: a business that wants to truly own its website and accepts paying for maintenance, or has needs closed platforms cannot cover.

Shopify and WooCommerce

Once you are selling online, the discussion changes. You are no longer comparing publishing tools but systems for taking payments.

Shopify: €30 to €400 per month depending on the plan, plus a sales fee if you do not use its payment solution. Everything works straight away. The trade-off is the same as Wix: you rent rather than own.

WooCommerce: WordPress with a shop added. No subscription or commission, but hosting needs to keep up, and maintenance becomes serious because a shop that is down loses money by the minute.

The simple rule: below €100,000 in annual online revenue, Shopify costs less than the human time WooCommerce requires. Above that, the commission starts to matter and the calculation reverses.

Bespoke development

A website built for you, without a template or generic editor. This is what the brands whose websites impress you do.

Cost: from €6,000 for a business website, with no real upper limit. Modern hosting, meanwhile, often costs less than traditional shared hosting, between zero and €25 per month.

What it delivers: speed, which stopped being a minor detail when Google began measuring the loading experience, and a look nobody else has. What it requires: someone to make changes. You cannot edit a bespoke page through a visual editor unless one has been provided.

Who it suits: a business whose image is a selling point, or whose website is a genuine acquisition channel optimised over time.

The deciding question

It is not ‘which is best?’ None is best in every situation. It is: who will be working on this website in eighteen months?

If it is you, choose a tool you know, even if that means sacrificing originality. If it is a provider, choose what they know, but insist on a standard rather than a homemade system. If nobody will ever touch it, choose the simplest option, because an unchanging website on a complex tool is the worst of both worlds.