WordPress or Shopify for a Calgary business? An honest comparison

The question behind the question

“WordPress or Shopify” is really “what kind of business am I”. Once that is clear, the platform choice usually makes itself.

We build on both, and on Joomla, Kajabi and Tiendanube when they fit. That is the only reason to trust the comparison below: we make the same money either way.

WordPress: for businesses that sell services and publish

WordPress runs a large share of the web because it is flexible, you own it completely, and it handles content well. If your business is a plumber, a dentist, a law office, a contractor, a consultant or anyone whose website exists to explain services, capture leads and rank for searches, WordPress is the right tool.

What you get: a page for every service and every neighbourhood, forms and booking integrations, a blog that ranks, full control over URLs, structured data and speed, and a site you can move to any host.

What you take on: maintenance. WordPress and its plugins need updates, backups and security monitoring, or the site eventually gets hacked. This is not a reason to avoid it; it is a reason to budget a care plan ($129 a month with us, which includes Canadian hosting).

Excelsior Mechanical, an HVAC contractor in New York, is a typical WordPress build: one page per service, a portfolio, a quote form, local SEO for each service area, and a security setup that keeps it up when the phones are busiest.

Shopify: for businesses that sell products

If you sell physical products online, Shopify removes an entire category of problems. Payments, Canadian taxes by province, shipping rates and zones, discount codes, abandoned-cart emails, inventory, Shop Pay for one-tap checkout, and a checkout that is tested on millions of orders a day. You do not maintain any of it.

What you take on: a monthly fee, payment processing fees, and a platform you rent rather than own. Your data, design and domain are yours and can be exported; the software is not. For nearly every retail store we have worked with, that trade is worth it, because a broken checkout costs more than a year of Shopify fees.

House of Salma, a Calgary modest fashion boutique, moved from a slow WordPress site to Shopify. Online orders went up 4.3 times and mobile conversion rose 62%, with the same products. Canadian Raw, a raw dog food maker, runs subscriptions with automatic billing and delivery zones on Shopify; monthly online revenue is five times what the old site produced.

WooCommerce: the middle path

WooCommerce is a store built inside WordPress. It suits businesses that need both a serious content site and a store, or stores with logic Shopify handles awkwardly: complex B2B pricing, unusual product configurators, tight integration with a WordPress membership or booking system.

The cost is that you now maintain a store, not just a website. Every WooCommerce update, payment plugin update and theme update can affect checkout. If you go this route, a care plan is not optional.

What each one costs to run in Canada

	WordPress (service site)	Shopify (store)	WooCommerce (store on WordPress)
Platform fee	None	About $50 CAD/month and up	None
Hosting	$15 to $40/month, or included in a care plan	Included	$25 to $60/month
Maintenance	Needed (care plan $129/month)	Handled by Shopify	Needed, more critical
Payment fees	Only if you sell	Around 2.7% + 30¢ (Shopify Payments)	Depends on gateway, typically similar
Ownership	Full	Data and design yes, platform no	Full

How we decide with clients

We ask three questions. What do you sell, services or products? If products, how many, and do they have variants, subscriptions or B2B pricing? And how much do you want to maintain yourself?

Services, or products sold in person with the site as a brochure: WordPress. Physical products online, ten to a few thousand: Shopify. Products with unusual logic, or a content-heavy site that also sells: WooCommerce, with a care plan.

If you are on the wrong one

Moving is a project, not a disaster. The work is exporting products, customers and orders, rebuilding the pages, and redirecting every old URL to its new address so Google’s index follows you. Our guide to redesigning without losing rankings covers the checklist. Done properly, rankings survive and usually improve, because the new site is faster and clearer than the one it replaced.