WooCommerce alternatives in 2026: real costs, limits and how to move

WooCommerce is still the most used shop software in the Netherlands. Store Leads counts 98,489 live Dutch WooCommerce stores against 67,941 on Shopify. The trend runs the other way: worldwide, WooCommerce lost 10% of its live stores in the past year, while Shopify grew 15%.

Most shops that leave do not leave because WooCommerce stopped working. They leave because the stack around it grew: managed hosting, a dozen paid extensions with annual licences, a security plugin, a caching plugin, and a developer who spends more time on updates than on the shop. This guide puts numbers on that stack. It shows what WooCommerce really costs over three years, how it scores on speed and security, which alternatives exist and where their limits are, and how to move subscriptions, content and SEO without losing them.

Prices and figures: status October 2026, from the vendors' own pricing pages, the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025, Patchstack and Store Leads. Check VAT and current prices before you decide.

Key takeaways

• Market: 98,489 Dutch WooCommerce stores against 67,941 on Shopify, but worldwide WooCommerce shrank 10% in a year while Shopify grew 15% (Store Leads).

• Speed: 35% of WooCommerce sites pass all Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 76% on Shopify (Web Almanac 2025).

• Security: 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 91% of them in plugins; 46% had no patch when they were disclosed (Patchstack).

• Cost: for a €2 million shop the platform barely decides the bill. The payment setup does: keeping Mollie on Shopify Grow adds €20,000 a year in fees.

• Subscriptions: Shopify imports stored payment methods only from Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.Net, PayPal and Adyen. iDEAL and SEPA mandates at Mollie do not move.

• Timing: to sell on a new platform on Black Friday 2027, you decide in February 2027.

Where WooCommerce stands in 2026

Market data

WooCommerce is everywhere. The Web Almanac 2025 detected it on 35.4% of e-commerce sites, against 21.5% for Shopify, in a sample of 995,782 WooCommerce and 567,932 Shopify mobile origins. In the Netherlands, Store Leads counts 98,489 live WooCommerce stores against 67,941 on Shopify.

Share is not direction. Worldwide, WooCommerce lost 10% of its live stores in the last twelve months; Shopify grew 15%. Store Leads counts live stores, so the drop includes shops that closed as well as shops that moved.

What is changing

WooCommerce has no end-of-life date like Magento. The pressure comes from the parts around it:

• PHP. PHP 8.1 is already out of support. Security support for PHP 8.2 ends on 31 December 2026 (php.net). Many older plugins and themes block the upgrade.

• Order storage. Since WooCommerce 8.2 (October 2023), new stores use High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS): orders in their own tables instead of the WordPress posts table. Older stores often still run on the old storage, and some plugins never became compatible.

• Annual licences. Paid WooCommerce extensions are annual licences. When one lapses, updates stop, including security updates.

Which version are you running?

Everything you need is in one screen: WooCommerce › Status (the System Status report). Copy it before any conversation with an agency.

Count the plugins in the Active plugins list. That number is the size of your maintenance job, and the start of the plugin audit further down.

What WooCommerce really costs

The annual bill

The plugin is free. Running a serious shop on it is not.

Put maintenance on its own budget line. It is the cost that does not show up on an invoice from a vendor: a developer who tests every update on staging, fixes what breaks and watches the security advisories. Ask your developer or agency how many hours went into updates and fixes in the last twelve months. That number is the real price of WooCommerce for your shop.

A three-year example

A fictional but realistic Dutch shop. Assumptions:

• €2 million online revenue a year, average order €80: 25,000 orders.

• 70% of orders paid with iDEAL | Wero (17,500), 30% with EEA consumer cards (7,500, €600,000).

• WooCommerce on Hypernode Falcon M (€237 per month), with Subscriptions, Product Bundles and Dynamic Pricing. Payments via Mollie: iDEAL €0.32, cards 1.80% + €0.25.

• Shopify Grow on annual billing (€59 per month). Shopify Payments: iDEAL €0.29, cards 1.8% + €0.25. Without Shopify Payments, Shopify charges 1% on top.

• Not included: development and maintenance hours, migration cost, Shopify apps, themes, VAT.

Three things stand out. First, the platform barely decides the bill: payment fees are more than 80% of every column. Second, the payment provider does decide it: keeping Mollie on Shopify Grow costs €20,000 a year in extra fees. On Advanced (€289 per month, cards 1.6% + €0.25) the same shop pays €60,054 over three years with Shopify Payments. Third, the honest comparison is in the line we left open: maintenance hours on WooCommerce against app subscriptions on Shopify. Fill both in with your own numbers. Our overview of Shopify costs lists the running costs on the other side.

Audit your plugin stack first

A WooCommerce shop is the sum of its plugins. Before you compare platforms, give every active plugin one of four labels: Shopify native (the platform does it), app (a Shopify app does it), custom (needs development) or bin (nobody needs it any more).

Put a name next to every row. A plugin no one can explain is a bin row. The custom rows decide your budget; the app rows decide your monthly bill. Check them against our list of Shopify integrations.

Speed and security in depth

Core Web Vitals

The Web Almanac 2025 measured Core Web Vitals, the speed and stability metrics Google uses, on real visits to e-commerce sites.

These are averages. A lean WooCommerce shop on good hosting can pass. Most do not, because every plugin adds scripts and database queries, and the shop owner pays for the server that has to answer them. On Shopify the hosting, CDN and checkout are run by the platform, so the baseline starts higher. Apps and heavy themes can still pull it down.

Security

Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42% more than in 2024. 91% were in plugins, 9% in themes and six in WordPress core. 46% had no patch available when they were disclosed. The most exploited ones were attacked at scale within a median of five hours. WooCommerce Payments up to version 5.6.1 (2023) was one of the most exploited WordPress vulnerabilities in Patchstack's data.

For a shop with customer and payment data, that makes plugin choice and update discipline a business risk. Five hours is shorter than a weekend.

If you stay: what helps

• Move to HPOS (WooCommerce › Settings › Advanced) once every plugin is compatible.

• Upgrade PHP before 31 December 2026, and test plugins on staging first.

• Choose managed e-commerce hosting with staging and backups.

• Cut the plugin count. Every plugin removed is one less update and one less attack surface.

• Set a fixed update routine with a named owner, and renew extension licences on time.

The alternatives compared

Shopify

For whom: growing shops that want to stop running servers and plugins. Cost: Basic €21, Grow €59, Advanced €289 per month on annual billing. iDEAL €0.29 per transaction with Shopify Payments. Strong: hosting, checkout and security are the platform's job; B2B, Markets and subscriptions are native or free. Limits: fixed URL prefixes, 3 options and 2,048 variants per product, and a 0.6–2% fee if you keep an external payment provider.

Shopify Plus

For whom: B2B next to B2C, several markets or high volumes. Cost: from €2,100 per month on a three-year term, €2,250 on one year; iDEAL €0.15, external gateway 0.2%. Strong: unlimited B2B catalogues, 20 million redirects, a main store plus nine expansion stores. Limits: one brand per contract. See Shopify Plus and Shopify B2B.

Shopware 6

For whom: brands that want to keep open source and own code, often B2B or in the DACH region. Cost: Community Edition free, Rise €600 and Evolve €2,400 per month. Above €1 million GMV, Shopware's fair-usage rule requires a paid plan. Strong: built for commerce, not a blog with a shop. Limits: you still pay for hosting, updates and developers. It solves the plugin sprawl, not the maintenance.

BigCommerce

For whom: teams that want SaaS with an open API and several storefronts. Cost: Core $39 ($29 yearly), Growth $105 ($79), Scale $399 ($299), Performance from $1,499 per month. Strong: open API, no hosting. Limits: USD pricing with revenue caps per plan, a 2% to 0.6% fee with a third-party payment provider, and a small partner ecosystem in the Benelux.

Lightspeed eCom

For whom: Dutch retailers who already use Lightspeed in their stores. Cost: from €68 per month on annual billing. Strong: shop and till from one vendor. Limits: one domain, seven languages, limited filters and API calls.

CCV Shop and Mijnwebwinkel

For whom: small Dutch shops. Cost: CCV Shop from €36, Mijnwebwinkel from €20 per month, excl. VAT. Strong: simple, Dutch support. Limits: not built for international growth or complex catalogues.

Staying on WooCommerce

For whom: content-led brands with modest volumes and a strong WordPress team. Cost: hosting from €129 per month at Hypernode, plus extensions and hours. Strong: full control and WordPress for content. Limits: you own every update and every vulnerability.

Hard limits side by side

Limits decide more than features. These are the ones that come up in WooCommerce migrations.

If your catalogue has products with more than three options, or a configurator, settle that before anything else.

The decision

The Breakup Talk

We ask every merchant the same three questions, in one meeting, with twelve months of invoices on the table.

No red answers: stay and invest in conversion, margin and marketing. One red: fix that one thing, such as PHP, hosting or the theme. Do not move a whole shop for one issue. Two or more: move, because two red answers reinforce each other. Let the merchandiser and the marketer answer the ceiling question, not the developer: they hit the ceiling every week.

Decision matrix

When we do not advise Shopify

• Configurators: 3 options, 2,048 variants and 250 media per product. Custom products cross that in week one.

• B2B pricing engines: tiered prices and approval flows are not Shopify objects. If your ERP cannot deliver a price per customer per line, do not start.

• Checkout rules: Functions have hard limits. Rebuild the rule on paper and test it against those limits before you sign.

• House of brands: Plus is one brand per contract. Four brands means four contracts.

• Timing: we say no in the middle of a rebrand, during an ERP change in the same quarter, and when there is less time to Black Friday than the build needs.

WordPress content: keep it or move it?

WooCommerce shops often have years of blog posts that rank. That content is an asset and the riskiest part of the move.

Three options

• Move the blog to Shopify. One system, one team. Shopify's blog has tags, multiple blogs and scheduled posts, but it is simpler than WordPress: fewer layout options, no plugins.

• Keep WordPress for content. The editors keep their tool. You keep maintaining WordPress, and the content moves to another host or subdomain, so it needs redirects too.

• A headless CMS such as Storyblok. Fits brands with a content team and a custom front end. Two codebases, two budgets.

The URL structure

Shopify uses fixed prefixes: /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/ followed by the blog's name, for example /blogs/journal/. Only the last part is editable. WooCommerce's default /product/ and /product-category/ paths and WordPress post URLs all change. Every product, category, page and post needs a redirect to its closest new page.

Internal links

Old posts are full of links to old product and category URLs. Rewrite them to the new paths during the import, in one pass. Do not rely on redirects: a link that redirects is a hop Google has to follow, and chains appear as soon as anything moves again. Images under /wp-content/uploads/ also change address. Redirect the ones with backlinks or image-search traffic.

Moving subscriptions, payment provider by payment provider

The subscription contract is easy to move: Shopify Subscriptions, a free app by Shopify, imports contracts by CSV. The stored payment method is the hard part. Which provider holds it decides how many subscribers you keep.

Check who owns the account where the payment details live. An import needs the cooperation of both providers; plan it with time to spare.

1. Count active subscriptions per provider and per mandate type. That count is your risk.

2. Request the export early. Plan it as a separate workstream with both providers.

3. Import contracts with their next billing date. Stop renewals on the old shop during the switch, so no one is charged twice.

4. Email customers on mandates that do not move before go-live, with a clear link and a date.

5. After go-live, test one renewal per payment method.

The migration plan

Our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide covers the steps in detail. Here is the method behind it.

Plan backwards from Black Friday 2027

Black Friday 2026 is too close. The next one is Friday 26 November 2027. Counting back from a date that does not move is the only planning that works.

Start in May and hypercare lands on top of the freeze. Put a name next to the freeze, not just a date: someone must be allowed to say no in week 46.

The Moving Box: keep, improve or bin

Every page, template, plugin, flow, field, integration and URL gets exactly one label, with a name, before the scope freeze.

• Keep: makes money now, or the law says you keep it. Products, customers with consent, 24 months of orders, URLs with a click in 16 months.

• Improve: works, and the new platform makes it better. Converting templates, checkout and payments, product data.

• Bin: nobody knows the week it last made money. Plugins no one opens, pages without sessions, discount codes from 2019.

An empty row is a bin row. An "improve" without one sentence on what better means falls back to keep.

The Data Manifest

Migrations fail on data more often than on design. Write down where every field lands.

Three runs, never one

1. Dry run in a development store: which fields arrive empty.

2. Dress rehearsal on the real store with the full set: how long the import takes. That sets the go-live hour.

3. Delta after the freeze. Size: orders per year ÷ 8,760 × hours frozen. For our example shop: 25,000 ÷ 8,760 × 4 hours = about 11 orders.

Agree the tolerance in advance and count five totals on both sides: customers, products, variants, orders and gross revenue.

The redirect matrix

• Start with every URL that ever returned a 200: a crawl, the sitemaps and 16 months of Search Console.

• Sort by clicks, then by referring domains. Everything with a click or a link gets a target chosen by a person; the rest gets a pattern rule.

• Search and filter URLs get a 410. Never send old URLs to the homepage: Google reads that as a soft 404.

• A dead product goes to its collection. One hop, no chains.

Go-live, hour by hour

• T−7 days: decide whether rolling back is possible. DNS TTL to 300 seconds 48 hours ahead.

• T−2 h: go/no-go. One owner, four criteria, one decision.

• T−1 h: the old shop stops taking orders.

• T−0: switch the A record and CNAME, remove the password.

• T+15 min: one paid order per payment method, then a refund.

• T+60 min: 50 old URLs by hand, then the full map.

• T+2 h: compare counters with the same hour last week.

Never on a Friday. A Tuesday morning, with the whole team on the switch and on call until T+72 hours.

The Silence Test and the first 90 days

A go-live succeeded when your customers notice nothing. For 72 hours, five counters stay level, compared hour by hour with the same weekday a week earlier: orders per hour, checkout conversion, failed payments per method, 404s per 1,000 sessions and support tickets per 1,000 sessions. One counter out of line for 30 minutes is an incident.

Then 90 days of hypercare: daily checks in weeks two to four, weekly after that. The only measure that counts is margin per visitor, same months this year against last year. Revenue and sessions lie in this period. For how we run a full move, see WooCommerce to Shopify migration.

Dutch specifics

• iDEAL | Wero first. It is used for 73% of Dutch online purchases (Betaalvereniging, first half of 2026). By the end of 2027 every iDEAL merchant will have moved to Wero. Ask your provider how and when.

• Compare iDEAL rates. Mollie charges €0.32 per iDEAL payment, Shopify Payments €0.29 (€0.15 on Plus). At 17,500 payments a year that is a difference of €525 to €2,975.

• Reviews and trust marks. Import Kiyoh reviews with the review app and put the Thuiswinkel Waarborg mark back before go-live.

• CCD2. From 20 November 2026, buy now, pay later in the EU falls under the new Consumer Credit Directive: credit and age checks, with AFM supervision. Check what your provider changes.

• European Accessibility Act. It has applied to EU webshops since 28 June 2025. A new theme is the moment to get it right.

Common mistakes

1. Moving the shop one-to-one. Rebuilding every plugin as an app brings the old stack along. Run the plugin audit first.

2. Skipping the baseline. Search Console keeps 16 months. A measurement after go-live is not a baseline.

3. Sending old URLs to the homepage. Google reads it as a soft 404 and the ranking is gone.

4. Buying apps to close gaps nobody measured. Every app is a monthly fee and a script on the page.

5. Letting the agency choose the payment mix. iDEAL | Wero belongs at the front, and the provider decides your fees.

6. Going live on a Friday. This is one we made ourselves.

7. Stopping at go-live. The first 90 days decide whether the move pays off.

Cases as proof

Jansen Holland moved from WooCommerce to Shopify with us. Their review in the Shopify Partner Directory: “Our migration from WooCommerce to Shopify was handled smoothly and professionally, with excellent support throughout the process.” High Clean also moved from WordPress and WooCommerce to Shopify with us; its store now runs in eleven languages. The brands below came from other platforms and show the same method.

• Malelions: 180,000+ customers moved from Lightspeed, 40+ custom sections, three brands on one codebase.

• OGÉR: Magento to Shopify Plus and POS, 2+ ERP and WMS connectors, 3+ custom POS apps; +45% revenue after go-live, according to their CCO.

• Mason Garments: Magento to Shopify Plus, B2C and B2B.

• NØORDCODE.: Lightspeed to Shopify Plus with Markets.

• John Beerens: 20,000+ SKUs, B2C and B2B, live in 6–8 months, Exact linked via xCore.

• Stoov: four stores merged into one Plus store with Markets; +13% conversion, +50% speed.

When staying on WooCommerce is the better choice

Stay if content drives your sales, your volumes are modest and a strong WordPress team keeps the site fast, updated and secure. Then invest in managed hosting, HPOS, a current PHP version, fewer plugins and a fixed update routine. Look again when sales peaks slow the shop down, when updates keep breaking things, or when you start selling in more countries or to business customers.

Our view

WooCommerce is a good tool for content-led brands and a costly one for growing shops that depend on a stack of plugins. The data on speed and security explains why more shops leave than join. Our own example shows the platform fee is rarely the deciding number: payment setup and maintenance hours are.

As a Shopify Platinum Partner we are not neutral, so we say it openly. If you want to keep open source and your own hosting, look at Shopware. If you want to stop running infrastructure, look at Shopify. If your Breakup Talk shows no red, stay. For custom work on the new store, see Shopify development.