If you have absolutely no technical skills, Shopify might be easier if more expensive. At the same time, if you are willing to learn a little more, WooCommerce is more flexible in the long run.

Hey Eva, if your main traffic strategy is blogging, WordPress is definitely the best option among the three. Having to hire freelancers is annoying of course but might still be cheaper in the long run than going with a paid service over a self-hosted website. My recommendation would be to try and reduce the number of plugins you use to a minimum and also consider springing for some paid plugins for the most important areas. That way, you can avoid a lot of trouble.

In that case, you might want to go with WordPress. It allows you to create any kind of website, including a showcase for your business, and you can always add ecommerce capability via plugins such as WooCommerce later.

SEO for e-commerce is generally more difficult because there is so much competition and only so much content you can add to products. Therefore, any marketing you can do to get a leg up is probably a good idea. However, I wouldn’t just link from a WordPress site. If you want to use another site for creating traffic, use it as a blogging platform and integrate your products into the content such as with the Shopify buy button.

If you want to create custom page templates, you do need coding skills. It’s just that Shopify is set up in a way that it allows people with absolutely no technical skills to create an online shop.

Shopify Lite is a great solution for those with limited products who only need a shopping cart solution. If it makes sense for your case, I say go for it!

Hey Jacqueline, we have a whole article on this topic: https://createawebsitenow.com/how-to-speed-up-wordpress/. At the bottom, you can also find tools for speed testing your website so you can find out what is slowing it down. Aside from the two mentioned, there is also https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. Let me know if you have any additional questions!

I’ve been hearing that shopify supports better bandwidth (more customers visiting wont crash the site).

I absolutely agree with you. Though, it is easily possible to get tech savvy enough to run a WordPress website. However, in the case of an online shop, there is the added problem of securing sensitive data.