Recently, I made the decision to switch from Wordpress/Woocommerce to Shopify, which I can say has changed how I interact with my website content. Back then, I was concerned that my WordPress site was too slow to load and the backend wasn’t user friendly; it had way too many plug-in. It also was not responsive and would have cost a lot of time and money update and therefore it didn’t correctly display my kiddimoto balance bikes, helmets, scooters, bells, and any other content. I did some research and discovered that Shopify for e-commerce was perfectly fit for my purposes. After moving the website from WordPress to Shopify, I was pleasantly surprised by the multitude of features I got access to. Granted, a lot of apps are pay for, but there are a lot of perfectly useful free add ons.
WordPress vs. Shopify: why I chose Shopify?
I chose Shopify for my shop because Shopify is a website builder, an online tool that allows people with limited or no tech knowledge to craft an practical, brand led and interesting e-commerce site. And besides this, it gets you access to plenty of features you can use to promote your products. As you can see, my balance bikes and accessories are presented today in a simple, easy to nav and light.
It took me some time to understand that WordPress is better as a blogging platform and good for graphic designers, even though you can add on WooCommerce to make it a store site. Still, after I used Shopify, I can tell you I won’t be going back to WordPress. And the best part about Shopify is that it is incredibly user-friendly. All I had to do was create an account, select a theme, add my kiddimoto balance bikes, helmets, bells, scooters and ride ons and publish them. You can see the results by simply scrolling my website!
Here my favourite Shopify features and advantages
My opinion is that you can always give Shopify a try since you get a trial and do not have to publish the site. The general rule is that the more you pay for a theme and apps, the more features you get access to. Still, I do recommend Shopify instead of WordPress because:
- It is user-friendly, and you don’t need any coding knowledge to use it
- It was specially designed for e-commerce
- It doesn’t require you pay for hosting or security externally
- It comes with built-in SEO features (meta title, canonical tags, sitemap or image alt text)
- It has it’s own analytics data and allows you to compare to Google Analytics
- It gives you useful features like abandoned cart recovery emails, discount codes, social media integration and many more
- It gives you access to Shopify’s payment gateway, along with top payment methods like credit cards, PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and several other
- It has 24/7 support through email, chat or phone
The bottom line
Of course, I don’t dismiss the usefulness of WordPress, but if you are looking for something more user friendly for your website, I do encourage you to try Shopify. You can take my website as an example, as I did my best to test and implement all sorts of e-commerce features available with Shopify. Indeed, it is best to start your site from scratch straight with Shopify, but I can tell you from my experience that you can move it from WordPress with little hassle too.