Every agency hits this question sooner or later. A client asks for a new website, you scope the project, and then someone says: “So what are we building it in?”
Get the answer right and the build runs smoothly, the client can manage their own content, and you spend the next three years billing for sensible improvements. Get it wrong and you spend the next three years apologising for a platform that can’t do what the client needs — or quietly rebuilding the site at your own cost.
This guide is the decision framework we use at The Outsourcing Agency when partner agencies ask us which platform to put a project on. It’s written for agencies, not for developers, and it assumes you care about three things above all: whether the platform can deliver what the client wants, whether the client can live with it afterwards, and whether the numbers work for you.
The short version
If you only read one section, read this one.
| Scenario | Recommend |
| Content-heavy brochure or lead-gen site | WordPress |
| Complex or unusual functionality, integrations, membership, multilingual | WordPress |
| Pure product retail, 20–2,000 SKUs, wants to run it themselves | Shopify |
| High-volume retail with warehouse, EPOS or ERP integration | Shopify (with a specialist) |
| Design-led marketing site, small page count, no complex back end | Webflow |
| Client has no in-house technical confidence at all | WordPress on a care plan, or Shopify |
| Client is price-sensitive and wants to own everything outright | WordPress |
Most agency work in the UK lands on WordPress, and that isn’t laziness — it’s the platform with the widest functional range and the lowest licensing cost. But the exceptions matter, and recommending Shopify or Webflow at the right moment makes you look like an adviser rather than a supplier.
WordPress: the default for a reason
WordPress powers a huge share of the web because it does something the others don’t: it will build almost anything, and it doesn’t charge you a percentage for the privilege.
Where it wins
Content and SEO. If the client publishes — blogs, guides, news, case studies, resource libraries — WordPress is still the most comfortable place to do it. Custom post types let you model content properly rather than forcing everything into a blog feed.
Custom functionality. Booking systems, member areas, gated content, calculators, directories, job boards, multi-location pages, multilingual sites. There’s either a mature plugin or a clean way to build it.
Integrations. CRMs, marketing automation, accounting systems, third-party APIs. If a client says “it needs to talk to our system”, WordPress is the safest yes.
Ownership. The client owns the files and the database. No platform lock-in, no revenue share, no per-seat licence.
Recurring revenue for you. WordPress needs maintaining, and maintenance is a legitimate, valuable, recurring service. That’s margin you can’t earn on a platform that patches itself.
Where it costs you
WordPress is only as good as the build. A site assembled from a bloated theme and nineteen plugins will be slow, fragile and painful to maintain. It needs decent hosting, an update routine, backups and security cover. That’s not a reason to avoid it — it’s a reason to build it properly and put the client on a care plan.
Recommend it when: the site has more than about ten pages, publishes content, needs anything custom, or the client wants to own their asset outright.
Shopify: the right answer for real retail
Agencies lose money on eCommerce more often than on any other kind of project, and usually for the same reason: they built a shop on the wrong platform because it was the platform they knew.
Where it wins
Retail operations. Inventory, variants, discount logic, abandoned carts, shipping rules, tax, multi-currency, returns. It’s all there, tested, at scale, and it doesn’t break on Black Friday.
Payments and compliance. PCI handled. Checkout optimised by people whose entire job is optimising checkout.
Client self-sufficiency. A shop owner can add products, run a promotion and fulfil orders without calling you. For a busy retailer, that’s the whole argument.
Marketplace and channel selling. Amazon, eBay, Instagram, TikTok, marketplaces and POS all plug in with far less pain than the alternatives.
Where it costs you
You’re renting. There’s a monthly fee, transaction fees if the client doesn’t use Shopify Payments, and paid apps that quietly add up. Content and SEO structure are more rigid than WordPress — URL structures in particular. And genuinely bespoke functionality means Shopify apps or custom development in Shopify’s own ecosystem, which is a narrower talent pool and priced accordingly.
Recommend it when: selling physical products is the primary purpose of the site, the client will manage stock and orders daily, or they plan to sell across multiple channels.
Push back when: the client wants a content-led site that happens to sell six products. That’s a WordPress site with WooCommerce bolted on, and it’ll be cheaper and better for them.
Webflow: strong in a narrow lane
Webflow gets a lot of attention, and for the right project it’s genuinely excellent. The trouble is that the right project is narrower than the marketing suggests.
Where it wins
Design fidelity. Ambitious layouts, scroll animation and interaction design without a developer translating a Figma file. If the site’s job is to look outstanding, Webflow gets you there fast.
Speed to launch. For a 5–15 page marketing site, a good Webflow designer moves quickly.
Low maintenance. Hosting, CDN, SSL and platform updates are handled. Nothing to patch.
Where it costs you
CMS limits. Collection and item limits are real, and content-heavy clients hit them.
Editing experience. Non-technical clients can break layouts more easily than agencies expect. It looks simple; it isn’t always.
Functional ceiling. Complex logic, integrations and eCommerce beyond the basics mean third-party tools stitched together — and every stitch is a subscription and a point of failure.
Support market. Fewer developers, so handover, cover and future changes are harder to resource — including for you.
Recommend it when: the site is design-led, modest in page count, with no complex back-end requirement, and the client’s team is reasonably confident with tools.
Push back when: the client publishes heavily, needs integrations, or expects to grow the site substantially over three years.
The four questions that actually decide it
Skip the feature comparisons. In practice the decision comes down to four questions, asked in this order.
1. What does the site have to do that’s hard?
Not what it has to look like — what’s hard. Every platform will produce a nice homepage. Only one will handle stock sync with the client’s EPOS, or 400 location pages, or a gated member area. Find the hardest requirement first and let it choose the platform. Everything else is negotiable.
2. Who’s updating this in six months?
Be honest. If it’s the client’s marketing coordinator, they need something forgiving. If it’s a director who logs in twice a year, they need something they can’t break. If it’s you, on a retainer, you can pick the platform that’s best for the build rather than the one that’s easiest to hand over.
3. What’s the three-year cost, not the build cost?
Add licences, apps, hosting, maintenance and the likely cost of the changes the client will inevitably ask for. A cheaper build on a platform with a low functional ceiling frequently becomes the most expensive option, because year two is a rebuild.
4. Where does your margin come from?
Platforms that maintain themselves remove a recurring revenue line. Platforms that need care create one. Neither is wrong, but decide deliberately rather than discovering it later.
Four mistakes we see agencies make
Letting the client choose. A client who’s read one article will ask for Webflow because it sounded modern. Your job is to ask what they’re trying to achieve and then decide. If
you hand the decision over, you also inherit the blame.
Choosing for the launch, not the roadmap. Ask what they want the site doing in two years. Bookings? A member area? Selling internationally? Platforms are easy to grow into and expensive to grow out of.
Ignoring the client’s internal reality. Whoever will actually maintain the site should see the CMS before you commit. Ten minutes of demo saves months of support tickets.
Quoting the build and not the running costs. Licences, apps, hosting and maintenance all belong in the proposal. A client who discovers £160 a month of subscriptions after go-live remembers it far longer than they remember the design.
How to present the recommendation
Clients don’t want a menu. They want a decision they can trust, with the reasoning visible. A pattern that works:
1. State the recommendation first. “We’re recommending WordPress for this build.”
2. Tie it to their requirement, not the technology. “Because you’re publishing two articles a month and you need the site to feed enquiries into your CRM.”
3. Name the alternative and why you ruled it out. “We considered Shopify, but you’re selling three products alongside a content site — the shop would be paying rent for features you don’t need.”
4. Be clear about ongoing cost. Licences, hosting, care plan, in one place, before they ask.
That last point is the one agencies skip, and it’s the one that causes arguments in month four. Say it upfront and you look like the adult in the room.
Where a white-label partner fits
The uncomfortable truth is that most agencies recommend the platform they can build in, not the platform the client needs. That’s understandable when you have one developer or one freelancer — but it’s an expensive habit, because you either turn away work that doesn’t fit your stack, or you take it and lose money learning on the client’s time.
With a delivery partner behind you, the recommendation becomes genuinely requirement-led. You scope the project, make the right call, and the build happens on the right platform whether or not it’s the one you’d have chosen for internal reasons. You keep the client relationship, the margin and the retainer — you just stop being limited by what’s currently in the building.
At The Outsourcing Agency we build WordPress and WooCommerce day in, day out for agency partners across the UK, and we’ll tell you honestly when a project belongs on Shopify instead. That honesty is the point: a partner who recommends the right platform is worth considerably more than one who says yes to everything.
If you’ve got a project on your desk and you’d rather just talk it through, get in touch and we’ll give you a straight answer in fifteen minutes.