WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or Custom?

The platform debate gets heated, and most of the heat is misplaced. There’s no single best platform — only the right one for what you’re trying to do. The trouble starts when someone picks the tool first and bends the goal to fit it. Choose the other way round, and the decision gets simple.

Pick by the job, not the brand

Each of the main options is genuinely good at something, and a compromise at something else.

WordPress

The workhorse of the web. It shines when you’ll publish often — blogs, news, lots of pages — and want deep flexibility and full ownership. It powers a huge share of the internet for a reason. The trade-off is that it needs looking after: updates, security and hosting are real responsibilities, not afterthoughts.

Good fit: content-heavy sites you’ll edit regularly, and businesses that want maximum flexibility.

Shopify

Built for one thing — selling products — and built for it well. Payments, inventory, shipping and checkout are handled out of the box, reliably, at scale. If serious ecommerce is the point, this is usually where the conversation starts.

Good fit: real online stores where the shop is the business, not a side feature.

Webflow

A modern way to build polished, custom-looking marketing sites quickly, without the maintenance overhead of WordPress. Strong design control, clean output, easy to keep tidy. It’s less suited to heavy ecommerce or complex custom logic.

Good fit: design-led marketing sites that need to look sharp and ship fast.

Custom code

When the goal outgrows any template — unusual functionality, specific integrations, performance demands, or an experience nothing off-the-shelf can give — custom is the answer. It’s the most work and the most freedom. You build exactly what the business needs, with nothing in the way.

Good fit: ambitious or unusual projects where templates start to fight you.

How to actually decide

Skip the brand loyalty and ask plainly:

• What does the site mainly have to do — sell products, publish content, generate enquiries, or something custom?
• Who will run it after launch, and how technical are they?
• How much will it change week to week?
• Where might it need to grow in the next couple of years?

Answer those honestly and the shortlist narrows itself. A small enquiry-driven service site and a high-volume store have almost nothing in common; they shouldn’t land on the same platform just because it’s the one someone knows.

Beware the one-size-fits-all shop

If an agency builds everything on a single platform, notice that their recommendation is decided before they’ve heard your goal. That’s convenient for them, not for you. We stay deliberately platform-agnostic in our web work — WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or custom — and choose around what your business actually needs to do, then tell you why. You’re never forced onto a recognisable template to make our life easier.

Not sure which fits? Tell us what the site needs to do and we’ll point you to the right platform, even if it’s not the one we’d most enjoy building.