When to Use WordPress for Ecommerce and When to Avoid It

If you’re building a site that’s 100% focused on content or 100% focused on ecommerce, the best choice on how to build your site is very clear.

What WordPress does best = Content

WordPress Dashboard

WordPress is now a decade old and is still the reigning champ for managing sites with a ton of content. If you plan on pursuing an SEO or content marketing strategy for your business, WordPress is the only legitimate choice for your site. Nothing else comes close to giving you all the features that you need to manage so much content along with all the extra functionality for SEO and other traffic sources. It’s the default content management platform for a reason.

What Shopify does best = Ecommerce

Shopify Dashboard

If you want to sell stuff with an ecommerce store, Shopify is by far your best choice. There really aren’t any legitimate contenders anymore. The functionality, the ease of use, and the price are unmatched. Even more impressive, Shopify will scale with your business no matter how large it gets — they’ve pushed into the enterprise segment in the last few years and are now considered ”best-in-class” at all tiers of ecommerce. From trying to sell your first product to selling one million products, Shopify is the default choice.

The problem is knowing what to do when you have a content and an ecommerce site?

This is when things get a bit trickier and more nuanced.

Why You Should (Almost) Always Use Shopify for Your Ecommerce Site

As much as I personally love WordPress, it just doesn’t compare to Shopify when it comes to ecommerce, even if you add an ecommerce plugin to WordPress.

There are a bunch of unique features that any ecommerce site needs:

Shopping carts
Check-out and payment flows
Integrations with payment providers
Fulfillment options and integrations
Integrations with shipping providers
Easy ways to manage all your product pages
Revenue reporting
Refund and return management
Integrations with ecommerce platforms like Amazon

Shopify was built from the ground up around all of these features. WordPress wasn’t.

With Shopify, you get every ecommerce feature you could ever need right out of the box. A bit of easy configuration and your site is ready to go. Of course, Shopify also has the ability to deeply customize anything you could want. With how popular Shopify has been, there’s now a large community of developers and marketers that can use the more advanced features of Shopify to tailor it to your exact situation.

Shopify also has Shopify Lite. It’s a super streamlined version of Shopify, perfect for adding a couple of buy buttons to your WordPress site or your Facebook page. So even if you want to run a few small tests to see if you can sell items on your site, it’s still worth starting with Shopify.

We really can’t over-hype the benefits of using Shopify — they’ve done an amazing job at building a tool to solve the needs of any ecommerce business owner.

The benefits of Shopify are so large that it’s not worth trying to contort WordPress into an ecommerce site itself.

The only real weakness to Shopify is it’s blogging functionality. Yes, you can technically publish a blog on Shopify, using that for your content. But you won’t want to.

The blogging features in Shopify are so bare-bones that they’re only fit for the occasional company updates every few months. But if you’re only posting a few times a year, you might as well skip the blog entirely.

In other words, the only companies that would get value out of the Shopify blog feature shouldn’t have a blog in the first place.

What to do?

Let’s say that you have your core ecommerce store on Shopify. It’s going great. But you also want to start a high-caliber blog that could generate some serious traffic and help increase sales.

Your best best bet will be to use Shopify for your store and WordPress for your blog. You’ll be on both platforms.

Using multiple platforms on the same site is very common. Lots of sites do it.

The Easiest Way to Use Shopify and WordPress at the Same Time

Put one of them on a subdomain and the other on your main domain, like this:

WordPress installed at company.com
Shopify installed at store.company.com

This is easy enough that you’ll be able to get this set up with your WordPress host, domain registrar, and Shopify account on your own. There’s no need to hire a developer to do anything fancy. Simply set up WordPress on your main domain like normal while setting Shopify up on a subdomain.

Should Shopify or WordPress go on the subdomain?

In the example above, I put Shopify on the subdomain at store.company.com. The reverse also works by putting WordPress on a subdomain while Shopify is on the main domain, like this:

WordPress installed at blog.company.com
Shopify installed at company.com

Which one should you do? Which goes on the subdomain?

I would make this decision based on your marketing strategy.

If you’re pursuing an SEO strategy for your online store, your goal will be to get product pages to rank for keywords. In other words, your main SEO priority is the product pages within your store. In this case, you’d want Shopify to be on your main domain.

Why?

In SEO, the main domain will always carry a bit more weight than a subdomain. It’ll have an easier time ranking for any given keyword. So if your main goal is to get your product pages to rank for search terms in Google, install Shopify on your main domain so it gets as much help as possible.

Now let’s switch it up. What if you have a large blog and you’re using content to obtain the vast majority of your traffic? In this case, install WordPress on your main domain and put Shopify on a subdomain.

To recap, decide whether it’s a bigger priority for you to rank your WordPress content or your Shopify product pages for SEO. Once you’ve made a decision, put your first choice on your main domain and the other one on a subdomain.

What if you’re not pursuing SEO?

Then it doesn’t really matter. If you’re focusing on paid marketing or some other strategy for your ecommerce site then it’s completely up to you. In this situation, I’d use a subdomain for whichever tool hasn’t been installed yet since the main domain will already be taken.

The One Reason to Use WordPress for Ecommerce

It does make sense to turn your WordPress site into an ecommerce store if you meet these conditions:

You already have a large WordPress site built with lots of content.
You have a small store that you want to build out, in the range of 10–20 products.
You don’t plan on putting a ton of energy behind the store; you view it as a “one-and-done” project.

In this situation, you’re already on WordPress so you’ll want to keep that. You also have enough products to warrant a store section in your site, you’ll need more than just a few buy buttons. But it doesn’t make sense to get an entire ecommerce platform set up on your site since you don’t plan on making it a major priority.

The best bet is to keep everything on WordPress and use an ecommerce WordPress plugin to add a store to your site. The most well-respected ecommerce plugin is WooCommerce. It gets plenty of great reviews.

Or if you really love WordPress and hate the thought of adding another tool to your site, WooCommerce is still a legitimate option. Feel free to use it if you’d prefer to spend as much of your time as possible within WordPress.