React, Shopify or WordPress? We get asked some version of this every week, usually framed as a question about technology. It is really a question about who will run the thing after launch, what it has to do in three years, and how much change you expect.
Start with who operates it
The single most predictive question is: who edits this day to day, and how technical are they? A platform your marketing team cannot use becomes a queue of tickets for your developers, and that queue is where velocity goes to die.
- Non-technical team publishing frequently → a mature CMS matters more than framework choice
- Product team with engineers shipping features → a custom application stack earns its complexity
- Merchandisers running a store → a commerce platform with a strong admin beats a bespoke build
When WordPress is the right answer
WordPress is right when content is the product and the people producing it are not developers. It has the largest ecosystem, the most familiar editor, and a hosting market that makes it cheap to run.
It goes wrong when teams pile on plugins until nobody can update anything safely, or use a page builder that produces bloated markup and locks content into proprietary shortcodes. Built properly (custom theme, native blocks, a short plugin list) it is fast, secure and genuinely pleasant to run.
When Shopify is the right answer
If you sell physical products and the business is the store, Shopify is usually the right starting point. Checkout, payments, tax, fraud and inventory are hard problems it has already solved at enormous scale, and you do not want to be solving them yourself.
The limits show up with complex B2B pricing, unusual product configuration, or very high customisation of the buying journey. Even then, headless Shopify (its commerce engine behind your own front end) often beats leaving the platform entirely.
When a custom React stack is the right answer
Build custom when the application itself is the product: logged-in experiences, complex workflows, real-time features, deep integration with your own data. React with Next.js, TypeScript and a proper back end gives you total control, and total responsibility.
That responsibility is the cost people underestimate. You own hosting, security, performance, accessibility and every feature a CMS would have given you for free. It is worth it when the product demands it, and an expensive vanity project when it does not.
The hybrid that often wins
Many of our best builds combine them: a Next.js front end, WordPress or a headless CMS for editorial content, Shopify for commerce, and your own services for anything proprietary. Each part does what it is good at, and the seams are APIs rather than compromises.
The trade-off is operational complexity. More moving parts means more to monitor and more to go wrong, so it only makes sense with a team (yours or ours) to run it.
Questions that decide it
- Who publishes content, how often, and how technical are they?
- Is the core of the business content, commerce or application functionality?
- What must integrate with it, ERP, CRM, payments, data warehouse?
- How much will requirements change over the next three years?
- Who will maintain it after launch, and what does that cost per year?
Answer those honestly and the stack usually picks itself. If you want a second opinion before committing, we are happy to give one, including when the answer is to keep what you have.
