Shopify, Wix or WordPress? Choosing a platform for an SA small business.
We build on all three, and on our own custom stack, so this is not a sales pitch for one of them. It is the questions we ask before recommending a platform, and the South Australian stores and sites that show each one doing its job.
Every week someone asks us whether they should be on Shopify, Wix or WordPress. The honest answer is that the platform matters less than what you sell, how you sell it and who will look after the site. We build and migrate on all three, plus our own custom, hand-built sites, so the choice is made on fit rather than on what we happen to know.
The questions that decide it
Do you sell physical products online with shipping, stock and variants? If yes, and there are more than a handful of them, Shopify is almost always the answer. Do you need a brochure site with a contact or quote form, fast and cheap to run? A custom static site is faster and lighter than any builder. Will you edit it yourself every week? Then the editor matters, and Wix or a simple admin panel wins. Do you need a large content site with many editors, plugins and a membership or booking system? That is WordPress territory, with the maintenance that comes with it.
Shopify: for stores that are actually stores
Shopify handles products, variants, stock, payments, shipping rates, discounts and the checkout, and it does them reliably. You pay a monthly subscription plus transaction fees, and in return nothing about selling has to be built from scratch. The trade-offs: themes constrain the design unless you code around them, apps add monthly costs quickly, and content pages and blogs are weaker than the product side.
The Hustle Collective in Tanunda sells ten Barossa wine brands and a gin from one cart, with live shipping rates calculated at checkout. Roam Offroad in Gawler is a Shopify store we rebuilt from an existing base; it is now the second organic result for “bull bars adelaide” and fourth for “gvm upgrade adelaide” (live checks from Adelaide, 5 October 2026), with Google clicks up 52% in the 28 days to 3 October. My Positive Perspectives moved from Wix to Shopify because the product side had outgrown the builder.
Wix: for owners who want to edit it themselves
Wix is a hosted builder with a drag-and-drop editor, templates and a small store. Its strength is that a non-technical owner can change a photo or a price without calling anyone. Its weaknesses are performance on phones, which is usually middling, and the ceiling: once a store has many products, complex shipping or custom features, you end up fighting the builder. SEO on Wix is fine these days for a local business, as long as the basics are done.
We do a lot of Wix work in the Barossa, from fixing existing Wix sites to moving them off Wix when they have outgrown it. For Pets Sake SA in Angaston liked the look of a particular Wix template; we built that look as a custom site instead, so it loads fast and Manda still gets a simple admin to edit it.
WordPress: powerful, and it needs looking after
WordPress runs a huge share of the web because it can do almost anything with the right plugins, and WooCommerce turns it into a store. The cost of that flexibility is maintenance: hosting, PHP, theme and plugin updates, security and backups are your problem or your developer’s. A neglected WordPress site is the one most often hacked or broken by an update. If you have a WordPress site and nobody is updating it, that is the first thing to sort out.
We build and maintain WordPress and WooCommerce sites where the project calls for it, usually larger content sites or clients who already have a WordPress investment and a team that knows it.
Custom static sites: what most local businesses actually need
Most of our clients are not on any of the three. A cafe, a welder, a pet shop or a cleaner needs a fast, mobile-first site with a quote form, a menu or a gallery, and a way to edit the words and photos. We hand-build those, host them on a global network, and give the owner a simple admin for the parts they change. They score well on Google’s Core Web Vitals because there is nothing heavy on the page, and they cost less to run than any builder subscription.
Moving between platforms without losing rankings
If you already rank for anything, the migration matters more than the platform. Every old URL needs a redirect to its new equivalent, the page titles and content that earned the rankings need to survive, and Search Console needs the new sitemap on day one. We have moved stores from Wix to Shopify and from an old WordPress store to Shopify, and rebuilt plenty of ageing builder sites as custom ones; thewebsite redesign page explains how we run it.
A quick decision guide
Online store with real stock and shipping: Shopify. Brochure or quote-driven local business: custom static site with an admin. Owner wants to drag and drop everything and the site is small: Wix. Big content site, memberships, bookings, or an existing WordPress team: WordPress. Not sure: tell us what you sell and how, and we will say which one fits, including when the answer is to stay where you are. Our Shopify, WordPress and Wix page lists what each build includes, and pricing is published for all of them.
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