There’s no best platform. There’s the one that fits what the site has to do, who will run it, and how much it will change. Most bad platform decisions come from choosing the tool first, usually the one the builder already knows, and bending the project to fit.
Here’s what each option is actually like to live with.
WordPress
WordPress is open-source software you install on hosting you choose. The software is free; you pay for hosting, and often for a premium theme and plugins. It’s everywhere: W3Techs’ live survey puts it at about 40% of all websites as of October 2026. That means a huge choice of plugins and plenty of people who can work on it.
Watch for two things. First, WordPress.org (the software you host yourself) and WordPress.com (a hosted service run by Automattic) are different products with different limits; make sure you know which one is being proposed. Second, maintenance is your responsibility. Core, theme and plugin updates need applying, and every plugin is code from a different author. A site with forty plugins nobody updates is a security and speed problem waiting to happen.
Fits: content-heavy sites, blogs, service businesses that want lots of pages and a familiar editor, and teams who want full control over hosting and data.
Shopify
Shopify is a hosted commerce platform on a monthly subscription. Plans are currently called Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus (Shopify pricing). Hosting, security, checkout and payments are handled for you, and the admin is built around products, orders and stock.
The costs to check: if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee on top of the provider’s own charges. And many features come from apps with their own monthly fees, which add up. You also work inside Shopify’s model of how a store works. That’s an advantage for a normal store and a constraint for unusual ones.
Fits: businesses where selling products online is the main job.
Webflow
Webflow is a hosted visual builder with strong design control. Marketing teams can edit pages and CMS content without a developer, and there’s no plugin updating to manage. Webflow sells separate ecommerce plans, and its CMS site plans cap the number of CMS items (Webflow pricing), so check the limits against how much content you’ll have.
Fits: design-led marketing sites edited by a non-technical team, with modest ecommerce or none.
Custom code
A site built with a framework (we use tools like Astro and Next.js) and hosted wherever suits it. You get exactly the design, performance and integrations you need, with no platform rules in the way. The trade-off is that changes outside the editable content need a developer. A custom site should come with a content editor, or a clear agreement on who makes changes.
Fits: sites with unusual functionality, close integration with other business systems, or strict performance needs. Also a sensible base when the website is the front end of a wider system such as a booking tool, customer portal or internal software.
Five questions to decide
- What is the main job? Selling products points to Shopify. Publishing lots of content points to WordPress or Webflow. Unusual logic or deep integration points to custom.
- Who will edit it, and how often? A marketing team updating pages weekly needs a comfortable editor. A site that changes twice a year can live with a developer making edits.
- What will it cost to run for three years? Add hosting or subscription, paid themes and apps, transaction fees and maintenance. Compare totals, not build prices.
- What has to connect to it? List the other systems: accounting, CRM, booking, stock, email. Check each one integrates with the platform you’re considering, in the way you need.
- How hard is it to leave? On WordPress and custom code, you can move hosting and keep everything. On Shopify, you can export products, customers and orders as spreadsheets, but the theme only runs on Shopify, so the design has to be rebuilt elsewhere. Webflow lists code export on paid Workspace plans; check what an export includes for your site before relying on it.
The one-platform agency
Be careful when the recommendation arrives before anyone has asked about your business. An agency that only builds on one platform will recommend that platform. That may still be right for you, but you want to hear why.
We work across WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds in our web projects, and pick after understanding the job. If you’re not sure which fits, tell us what the site needs to do. Running costs are covered in more detail in what a website actually costs.