Which CMS for your business website? WordPress, Shopify and Webflow compared

For most UK business websites, WordPress is still the best choice of CMS: you own it, it handles content better than anything else at the price, and almost any developer in the country can work on it. Choose Shopify if the site is mainly a shop and you never want to think about hosting or updates. Choose Webflow if you want a design-led marketing site edited by a small team that is comfortable with visual tools, and you accept monthly fees in US dollars. Wix and Squarespace suit very small sites you build yourself.

That is the short answer. The longer one depends on what your website is for, who edits it and what it will cost over five years, so here is how we help clients decide.

What a CMS is, in one paragraph

A content management system is the software behind your website that lets non-developers add pages, edit text, upload images and publish posts without touching code. Some are installed on your own hosting (WordPress, Drupal, Craft). Some are hosted services you rent by the month (Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace). Some are “headless”, storing content only and leaving the website itself to a developer. The choice affects your running costs, how easy the site is to change, and how hard it would be to leave.

WordPress, Shopify and Webflow at a glance

Hosted platform prices change often, so check Shopify’s and Webflow’s pricing pages for current figures before you budget.

WordPress

WordPress runs more than four in ten websites worldwide, according to W3Techs, which explains its biggest practical advantage: if your developer disappears, you can find another one in any UK town by Friday. It is free, open source and installed on hosting you control.

Where it shines

• Content. Pages, posts, categories, custom content types such as case studies, locations or team members, and an editor most office staff pick up in an afternoon.
• Flexibility. Bookings, memberships, multilingual sites, shops and integrations with your CRM can all be added, by plugin or custom code.
• Ownership. You can move host, change agency or export everything at any time. No one can raise your licence fee.
• SEO. Full control over URLs, titles, structured data and redirects.

Where to be careful

WordPress has a reputation for being slow and insecure. In our experience that comes from two habits: drag-and-drop page builders, which pile megabytes of code onto every page, and installing a plugin for every small job. A WordPress site with a hand-built theme, a short list of maintained plugins and regular updates is fast and secure. One built by stacking a premium theme, a page builder and forty plugins is not. It also needs looking after; budget for updates and backups, done by you or by someone like us. We explain our approach in why we build on WordPress without page builders.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform. You pay a monthly fee, and Shopify handles servers, security, updates and the checkout. For a business whose website is first and foremost a shop, it is a genuinely good product.

Where it shines

• fast to launch, with a polished checkout and Shop Pay;
• no server to manage and very little that can break after an update;
• a large app store for reviews, subscriptions, loyalty and shipping;
• good point-of-sale hardware if you also sell in person.

Where to be careful

• Costs add up. Plan fees, paid apps at £10 to £50 a month each, and an extra transaction fee if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments.
• Content is basic. The blog and page tools are fine for a few posts, weak for a content-led site.
• Fixed structures. URLs follow Shopify’s patterns (such as /products/ and /collections/), and checkout customisation is limited on lower plans.
• Leaving is work. Products and customers export; your theme and app setup do not.

If you are comparing Shopify with WooCommerce specifically, our WooCommerce guide for UK shops has a side-by-side table.

Webflow

Webflow is a hosted visual builder aimed at designers. It produces clean front-end code and gives very fine control over layout and animation, with a built-in CMS for collections such as blog posts or case studies.

Where it shines

• pixel-precise design without a page-builder’s bloat;
• hosting, SSL and a CDN included;
• good for marketing teams who want to build landing pages themselves.

Where to be careful

• Billing in US dollars for many accounts, so your costs move with the exchange rate, plus VAT.
• Plan limits. CMS item counts, form submissions and editor seats are capped by plan, and features such as localisation cost extra.
• Limited exit. You can export the static code, but not a working CMS. Leaving Webflow usually means rebuilding.
• Smaller talent pool in the UK than WordPress, and the editor interface is less familiar to non-designers.
• E-commerce is fine for small catalogues but some way behind Shopify and WooCommerce.

What about Wix, Squarespace and headless CMSs?

Wix and Squarespace are fine for a sole trader building a few pages themselves on a tiny budget. The trade-off is limited control over speed and SEO, and a site you can never take with you. We have run the three-year numbers in Wix vs a web agency.

Headless CMSs such as Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, or WordPress used headlessly, store content and serve it to a separately built front end. They make sense for publishers feeding one set of content to a website, apps and screens, or for very large sites with a dedicated development team. For a typical business site they add cost and complexity without much benefit; see headless vs classic WordPress for the detail.

How to choose: six questions

1. What is the website’s main job?

If it is to sell products online, start with Shopify and WooCommerce. If it is to win enquiries through content (services, guides, case studies), start with WordPress. If it is a brand showcase where design is the point, look at Webflow alongside WordPress.

2. Do you want to own it?

With WordPress you own the site outright. With hosted platforms you rent it, which is fine as long as you are comfortable with their pricing and rules changing over time.

3. Who will edit it, and how often?

A practice manager updating opening hours once a month needs a simple, locked-down editor. A marketing team publishing three posts a week needs good content tools and workflows. A designer building landing pages wants visual control. Match the CMS to the person, not the other way round.

4. What will it cost over five years?

Monthly fees look small and add up. See the worked example below.

5. What needs to connect to it?

Booking systems, CRMs, accounting, stock control, email marketing. WordPress and Shopify connect to almost anything; Webflow relies more on tools like Zapier or custom code for anything beyond forms.

6. Where will you be in three years?

A Manchester consultancy planning to add a members’ area and online courses needs a different platform from a Cardiff café that wants a menu and a map. Pick for the business you are becoming, not just the one you have.

Five-year cost: a worked example

Take a 12-page service business site with a blog and a contact form, edited by the owner. Illustrative running costs, excluding the build and VAT:

On running costs alone, hosted platforms look cheaper for a simple site, and that is fair. The difference is what the money buys: the WordPress figure includes someone keeping the site updated and backed up, and the site is yours. If you would pay for support on Shopify or Webflow anyway, the gap closes. For a shop, Shopify’s plan and app fees grow with you; WooCommerce costs stay mostly flat while card fees scale with sales.

Our recommendation by type of business

Questions to ask before you sign off a CMS

Whoever builds your site, get clear answers to these before work starts. They save arguments later.

• Whose name are the hosting, domain and platform accounts in? (It should be yours.)
• Can we see the editing screen for a typical page before the build is finished?
• Which plugins or apps does the site depend on, and which of them charge a yearly fee?
• Who applies updates, how often, and what happens if an update breaks something?
• Where are backups kept, and how quickly can the site be restored?
• Will the site meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility and pass Core Web Vitals on mobile?
• If we part ways, what exactly do we take with us?

A vague answer to the last question is the biggest warning sign. Some agencies build on their own proprietary CMS, which can be perfectly good until you want to leave and discover that nothing can be moved.

Switching CMS later

Moving CMS is common and manageable if you plan it: export content, rebuild templates, map every old URL to its new address with 301 redirects, and check Google Search Console after launch. The ranking drops we see after migrations almost always come from missing redirects, not from the new platform. It does cost money, so choosing well the first time is worth an hour of thought.

What it costs to get started with us

We build mostly on WordPress with hand-built themes, and on WooCommerce for shops, because that is what gives UK clients the best mix of ownership, cost and flexibility. Our fixed-price packages start at £430 + VAT for a five-page Startup Website (add the CMS for £149), £750 for the 10-page Pro Website with CMS, and £999 for the Elite Website with bookings and payments. Larger sites and shops are priced through our CMS development service.

We are based in London and work with businesses across the UK. If you are still unsure which platform suits you, tell us what the site needs to do and we will give you a straight recommendation, even if it is a platform we do not build on.

Photo: Carriza Maiquez via Unsplash