WooCommerce is the free e-commerce plugin for WordPress and the most used store platform in the world. But only the software is free: a serious WooCommerce store costs 100 to 500 euros a month in practice, once you count hosting, plugins and maintenance. Below are the real costs, the strengths, the pain points as you grow, and the honest answer to when switching pays off.
What exactly is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is not an all-in-one store package but a free, open source plugin that turns a WordPress site into an online store. That difference shapes everything that follows. WordPress is software you have to host somewhere yourself, which means you or your agency are responsible for the server, the updates, the security and the speed. You are not buying a service, you are building your own system.
The plugin has been around since 2011 and has been owned since 2015 by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. The business model is not the software itself but everything around it: paid extensions through its own marketplace, the WooPayments payment product and hosting partnerships.
The scale is enormous. According to platform tracker Storeleads, around 4.1 million active stores run on WooCommerce as of mid 2026, over 91,000 of them on a .nl domain. That makes it the most used store platform both worldwide and in the Netherlands: roughly a third of Dutch online stores run on WooCommerce. Breadth is not the whole story, though. Among the largest stores the ratio flips, and Shopify is the number one. WooCommerce wins on volume mostly with smaller shops that started out as an existing WordPress site.
What does WooCommerce really cost?
The plugin itself is free, and for a small store run entirely by yourself, WooCommerce genuinely is the cheapest serious platform there is. But a store is more than a plugin. These are the items you actually budget for, at price levels as we see them in the market in August 2026, excluding VAT:
| Item | Expect | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce itself | € 0 | Open source, free to install |
| Hosting | € 10 to € 100+ per month | From shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting that can handle peaks |
| Theme | € 0 to € 100 one-off | Premium themes; a custom theme costs a multiple of that |
| Premium plugins | € 200 to € 800 per year | WooCommerce Subscriptions alone costs 245 euros a year |
| Payment provider | Per transaction | Mollie or another PSP; WooCommerce itself adds no surcharge |
| Maintenance | € 0 to € 250+ per month | Doing it yourself costs time, outsourcing it costs money |
Added up: if you are technical and do everything yourself, a WooCommerce store runs on a few tens of euros a month. If you run a serious store and outsource the upkeep, hosting, licences and a maintenance contract quickly add up to somewhere between 100 and 500 euros a month. That is not a criticism of the platform, it is the arithmetic the word "free" leaves out. For a complete picture, also count the small items that come with it in practice: a backup service, a security scanner, a transactional email service and a staging environment to test updates safely.
The biggest cost is not in the table: time. WordPress, your theme, WooCommerce itself and every plugin ship updates, and someone has to test and apply them. Skip them and the security risks pile up. Apply them blindly and a broken checkout once a year is not bad luck but statistics.
What WooCommerce is good at
An honest review starts with what is right, and that is a lot:
Full ownership and control
The software is open source, the database lives on your server and no platform can impose rules, retire features or raise prices on you. If you are principled about not living inside a closed system, this is the argument.
Content and commerce in one
WordPress is the strongest blogging system there is. If your revenue is driven by content, say a knowledge site that grew a store or a brand built on organic traffic, that combination is hard to beat.
Unlimited customisation
Every line of code can be changed. If your process differs from the standard, you rebuild it, without waiting for a platform to allow it.
No revenue cut
WooCommerce takes no percentage of your orders. You only pay your payment provider, at their own rate.
The largest ecosystem
Tens of thousands of plugins, an integration for virtually every system, and more WordPress developers worldwide than for any other platform.
Do you have a technical co-founder, a regular developer or the skills yourself, and does your store stay manageable in size? Then there is little wrong with WooCommerce and this article is mostly reassurance.
Where it starts to strain as you grow
The pain points of WooCommerce are not hidden defects. They are the flip side of the same freedom, and you only feel them once the store becomes more important than the website it once belonged to:
You are the system administrator
Hosting, PHP versions, backups, uptime and the updates for WordPress, your theme and every plugin: all of it is your responsibility. Nobody calls you when it breaks; you do the calling.
Security is a daily job
WordPress powers over forty percent of the web, which automatically makes it the most attacked system in the world. Nearly all break-ins come through outdated plugins and themes. Postpone updates and you leave the back door open.
Every feature is another plugin
Subscriptions, filters, bundles, shipping rules, tiered pricing: each comes from a different maker, with its own updates and its own conflicts. A mid-sized WooCommerce store easily runs on twenty to forty plugins that do not know each other but share the same checkout.
Speed requires specialists
Out of the box WooCommerce is not slow, but with every plugin and every extra thousand products it becomes so. Caching, database optimisation and the right hosting are a craft of their own, and a slow store demonstrably costs conversion.
Peaks are your problem
Black Friday, a TV mention, a campaign that takes off: on a managed platform the infrastructure scales automatically, on WooCommerce your hosting plan is the ceiling. And you discover that ceiling, by definition, on the busiest day of the year.
Nobody is ultimately accountable
When the store goes down, the host points at a plugin, the plugin maker points at the theme and the theme builder points at the host. You hold the responsibility, whether you want it or not.
B2B and international keep stacking
Customer-specific pricing, quotes, payment on account, multiple currencies and languages: it can all be done, but every piece is yet another plugin or custom build on top of the pile. What a full B2B store needs quickly becomes a structure only one person still understands.
How is the platform doing?
Two things are true at once, and you deserve to know both. WooCommerce is actively developed: the checkout has been rebuilt in recent years, order storage has been made faster and updates ship almost monthly. This is not a dying platform; four million stores are too much mass for that.
At the same time it is shrinking for the first time. Storeleads counts eight percent fewer active WooCommerce stores in 2026 than a year earlier, while Shopify keeps growing, in the Netherlands too. And the house WooCommerce lives in is restless: since late 2024 owner Automattic has been publicly at odds with hosting company WP Engine, a conflict that led to lawsuits still running as of mid 2026. For you as a merchant that is no reason to panic, but it is a direction to weigh. New features from payment providers, marketplaces and tools land first on the platforms that grow, and the energy of an ecosystem ultimately matters as much as the software itself.
WooCommerce or Shopify?
The question is not which platform is better, but which responsibility you want to carry. Side by side:
| WooCommerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Free, open source | € 21 to € 289 p/m, Plus from € 2,100 |
| Hosting and security | Arrange and pay yourself | Included, scales automatically |
| Transaction fees | Only your payment provider | Provider plus a 0.2 to 2% surcharge with an external PSP |
| Maintenance and updates | Your responsibility | Handled by the platform |
| Customisation | Unlimited, everything is code | Within theme and apps; checkout customisation on Plus |
| Content and blogging | WordPress, the benchmark | Basic, often a separate solution alongside |
| B2B | A stack of plugins | Built in on Plus, with custom work below it too |
| International | A plugin per piece | Markets, currencies and languages built in |
| Data ownership | Full, your own database | Platform managed, export always possible |
Where WooCommerce wins: full control, the content power of WordPress, no monthly subscription and no transaction surcharge. Where Shopify wins: all the upkeep off your plate, a checkout built for conversion, peaks that scale by themselves, and B2B and international without a stack of plugins.
And total cost? The two are closer than the price tags suggest. "Free" WooCommerce plus hosting, licences and maintenance often ends up in the same range as a Shopify subscription with apps. The real difference is not money but who does the work: with WooCommerce you buy freedom and do the upkeep yourself, with Shopify you pay rent and the upkeep is handled.
Stay or switch: how to decide
Stay on WooCommerce if your store is an extension of a content-rich WordPress site, if you have a regular developer or are one yourself and the upkeep costs you little effort, or if you run custom work that no closed platform can accommodate. A migration costs 8,000 to 20,000 euros with us, and that investment has to solve a problem you actually have. Without that problem, switching is a waste of money, however much we would like you as a client.
Switching becomes logical as soon as one of these situations sounds familiar:
- Maintenance has become nobody's job. Updates pile up, the developer from back then has moved on, and every change feels like surgery on a system nobody fully understands anymore.
- You pay structurally for stability: an invoice for broken plugins every quarter, a site that keeps getting slower despite investments, or a checkout that goes down under load.
- B2B is getting serious. Customer-specific pricing, quotes and payment on account are a stack of plugins on WooCommerce and a built-in layer on Shopify.
- You want to sell across borders with local payment methods, currencies and languages per market, without maintaining another plugin for every country.
- You want to run a business, not a system. The hours that now go into upkeep should go into buying, marketing and customers.
What moves with you, and what does not?
The question behind every migration is what you lose. The honest answer: less than you fear, but not nothing.
Products move
Including variants, prices, stock levels, images and copy. Product categories become collections.
Customers and order history move
Your customers find their details and past orders in the new store.
Passwords do not move
They are stored encrypted and cannot be transferred in any platform migration. Customers set a new password at their first login; we prepare that message together.
Your blog and pages move, or simply stay
We migrate WordPress posts to Shopify blogs, with images and internal links. If your content performs so well you want to keep WordPress, that works too: the store on Shopify, the blog on WordPress, each on the system it is strongest at.
Your rankings move, provided you arrange it
WordPress permalinks and Shopify URLs differ fundamentally, so every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new address, category and blog pages included.
Plugins do not move, their function does
We list every active plugin: what Shopify covers out of the box, what becomes an app and where custom work is needed. Usually less remains than you expect.
Your design deliberately does not move
A WordPress theme cannot be ported to Shopify. That is not a loss but the moment to build a theme that is fully yours.
The full approach, from plugin audit to launch, is on our page about migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify.
What a switch costs and how it works
A migration is not a matter of an export button. We first take stock of your plugins, theme customisations, products and URL structure, and determine the Shopify equivalent for each part. Then we build the store, migrate the data and give every old URL its 301 redirect. Your WooCommerce store keeps selling until launch day; you do not miss a day of revenue.
Expect 8,000 to 20,000 euros for a regular store, and up to 60,000 euros once B2B functionality, an ERP integration or a very large catalogue is involved, with a lead time of six to twelve weeks. After the audit you get one fixed price. Our platform-by-platform approach is on the page about migrating your store to Shopify, and the complete story of this specific switch, with pricing and frequently asked questions, is on the page about the WooCommerce to Shopify migration.
Not sure your current store is the problem? Have it checked first, free of charge. Our free store analysis scans your store live for speed, SEO, accessibility, security and checkout, and works on any store, WooCommerce included. Within two minutes you have a report with concrete improvements.
Frequently asked questions about WooCommerce
The plugin is free. A complete store is not: expect 10 to 100 euros a month for hosting, 200 to 800 euros a year for premium plugins, plus the cost of maintenance, done yourself or through an agency. A serious store with outsourced upkeep ends up between 100 and 500 euros a month in practice.
The software is: WooCommerce is an open source plugin you install at no cost. Everything around it is not: hosting, a theme, premium plugins and above all maintenance cost money or time. Compare total costs and a serious WooCommerce store is closer to a Shopify subscription than the price tag suggests.
WordPress is the content management system, the website itself. WooCommerce is the plugin that turns it into a store: products, cart, checkout and order management. No WordPress, no WooCommerce, so whoever runs WooCommerce always maintains a WordPress site as well.
According to platform tracker Storeleads, around 4.1 million active stores worldwide as of mid 2026, over 91,000 of them on a .nl domain. That makes it the most used platform worldwide and in the Netherlands, although the number is shrinking for the first time: eight percent fewer than a year earlier.
Technically yes, there are large stores on WooCommerce. But the bigger the store, the more specialist care hosting, database and the plugin stack demand, and you have to organise and pay for that expertise yourself. Large catalogues, B2B and peak traffic are exactly where managed platforms take that work over.
Yes. We extract products, variants, customers, orders, blog posts and pages from WordPress through the API or an export and transfer them in a structured way. Every old URL gets a 301 redirect so your rankings move with you, and for every plugin we determine the Shopify equivalent up front.
With us, 8,000 to 20,000 euros for a regular store, including data migration and 301 redirects. Add B2B functionality, an ERP integration or a very large catalogue and it rises to 60,000 euros. After the audit you get one fixed price, no surprises afterwards.
Yes, there are two routes: migrate the blog to Shopify, or keep WordPress as your content platform next to the new store. Brands that lean heavily on content choose the latter. The store runs on Shopify, the blog stays on WordPress, and visitors never notice the split.
Yes, provided every old URL gets a 301 redirect to the right new page and the new store is technically sound. WordPress permalinks and Shopify URLs differ fundamentally, so the redirect plan is a fixed part of every migration we do, not an option.
