Most studios our size moved off WooCommerce somewhere between 2020 and 2022. It was the obvious move at the time: the Shopify ecosystem was maturing, headless was getting cheaper, and the performance gap between a well-tuned Hydrogen build and a typical Woo install was measurable. We watched a lot of agencies make the jump and we've heard them tell clients ever since that Woo isn't a real platform.
Two of our biggest live clients run on WooCommerce. We'd pick it again tomorrow for both of them.
The two clients on Woo
Kettle Club is a members-only retail club with a tightly-defined product catalogue and a strong opinion about how members experience renewals. Stillages & Cages is a B2B industrial supplier whose customers expect to log in and see prices that reflect their account-level negotiated rates, with PDF quote generation and EDI-flavoured order forms.
Neither of these is the kind of business Shopify is designed to serve well. Both lean heavily on bespoke data models that live alongside the storefront — member tiers, account-pricing tables, quote artifacts, document templates. WordPress + WooCommerce is actually a decent host for that kind of side-data because Woo doesn't fight you when you add tables.
When Woo wins on its own merits
The arguments people make against WooCommerce are usually about out-of-the-box performance. Those arguments are correct and not decisive. A default Woo install is slow; a properly-built one is fast enough that no buyer will notice the difference. The performance ceiling of Woo is a function of how much engineering the team puts in, not the platform itself.
What Woo wins on, against Shopify and the headless options:
- Operating cost. A six-figure-revenue Woo store runs on hosting that costs less than the difference between Shopify Plus and Shopify Advanced. The savings, over five years, buys a lot of bespoke engineering.
- Data model freedom. Member tiers, custom product attributes, ledger-style audit logs, document generation — all of it lives in the same database the store does, joinable in one query. Shopify forces you to model these as Metafields or in an external app, and the join cost compounds.
- Plugin ecosystem. The plugin world has a bad reputation it earned in 2015 and hasn't fully recovered from. The current ecosystem is fine — most of the dangerous plugins are dead, and the survivors have settled into something that doesn't catch on fire if you patch quarterly.
- Hosting flexibility. WP Engine, Kinsta, self-hosted Lightsail, AWS — pick what fits your operational comfort. Shopify locks you to Shopify.
When NOT to use Woo
We don't pick Woo for high-SKU-breadth catalogue retailers with high traffic and a reasonable enterprise budget. Above ~50k active SKUs and ~£10m revenue, the operational tax of running Woo well starts to outweigh the savings — and Shopify Plus or a headless Hydrogen build becomes the right answer.
We also don't pick Woo for pure-DTC fashion brands aiming for international scale. The merchandising primitives Shopify ships with (collections, sales channels, markets) are genuinely better than what you'd build on Woo. Hell Bunny, on our client list, runs Shopify for exactly this reason.
The boring infrastructure that makes Woo work
Most of the work that distinguishes a good Woo build from a bad one is invisible from the storefront. We run our Woo clients with:
- Read-replica databases, with admin / wp-cron writes sticky-routed to the primary.
- Object cache (Redis) at the WP layer, page cache (Cloudflare or equivalent) above it, with cache-key strategies that respect logged-in member states.
- Quarterly plugin audits — every active plugin gets a sustained look at its support status, last release, and known CVEs.
- Custom plugins for the bespoke business logic, written by us and committed to a real repo. Not a plugin-of-plugins.
- Backups + restore drills. Most Woo agencies skip the restore drill, then discover the backup was corrupt at the worst possible moment.
The unfashionable take
Picking the right platform is mostly about what your business actually does, not what your peers' agencies tell their clients. WooCommerce is unfashionable; it's also the best-fit answer for some real businesses we work with. We won't pretend otherwise to keep up with the discourse.
If you're evaluating a replatform and someone tells you Woo isn't a real option without asking what you're actually trying to do — they're probably wrong. Ask them to show you the work, not the slide.