WordPress used where it improves the product.

Keep WordPress when the people publishing are non-technical and the authoring experience matters to them daily. Consider headless when the frontend genuinely needs something a theme cannot deliver, when content feeds more than one surface, or when you already maintain a React application and do not want a second stack. Note that headless WordPress is also an option — the editors keep their interface and the frontend becomes yours. That middle path costs two systems to operate, which is a real ongoing expense and belongs in the decision rather than being discovered afterwards.

Comfortably, when it is built and hosted for it. WordPress powers a substantial share of the largest publishers online, so the platform ceiling is far above where most sites operate. Problems come from specific, fixable things: pages that cannot be cached because they are personalised, expensive database queries running on every request, plugins calling external services synchronously, and media served at full size. Capacity planning should start with a load profile of the journeys that actually matter, including the ones that bypass caching entirely such as search, cart and checkout.

Hosting, premium plugin and theme licences, and maintenance time. Hosting is usually the smallest of the three. Licences accumulate quietly — a store running eight or ten commercial extensions often pays more annually in renewals than in hosting. Maintenance is the cost most often ignored and the one that determines whether the site is still safe to update in two years: core and plugin updates with regression checks, backups with tested restores, monitoring, and someone available when something breaks. Budgeting nothing for it is how sites become unsupportable.

When the reasons you chose it no longer apply. If plugin dependencies now block updates, if the theme layer is the hard limit on performance you need, if two teams need to work on the frontend independently, or if the site has become an application where the CMS is incidental — those are genuine signals. What is not a signal is that another platform sounds more modern. Migration costs real money and carries real search risk, so it should be justified by a constraint you can name and demonstrate, not by dissatisfaction with the platform's reputation.

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into an online store. Installing it adds products, a shopping cart, checkout, order management, tax and shipping handling to a site that was previously just pages and posts. The combination is powerful because you get a full content management system and a store in one place — the same editor publishes a blog post and a product — and because both are open source, you own the data and can host it anywhere. It sells physical goods, digital downloads and services, though services usually need an extension for scheduling or subscriptions.

Yes. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, not standalone software, so it requires a working WordPress installation to run at all. That is a genuine consideration when comparing it against hosted platforms: with Shopify you sign up and start, while with WooCommerce you first need hosting, a domain, WordPress installed and maintained, then WooCommerce configured on top. The trade is control and cost — nothing is locked to a vendor and there are no transaction fees on the platform itself — in exchange for being responsible for the stack underneath.

The plugin is free and always has been, with no licence fee and no cut of your sales. The realistic total is different. You pay for hosting, a domain and an SSL certificate. Payment gateways charge their normal processing fees. Most real stores end up buying two or three commercial extensions — subscriptions, bookings, advanced shipping, a better search — and those renew annually. A working store commonly costs a few hundred dollars a year in extensions plus hosting, which is still frequently cheaper than a hosted platform at volume, but it is not zero.

You are responsible for the stack. Updates to WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, the theme and every plugin are yours to manage, and a bad combination can break checkout. Performance degrades if plugins accumulate unchecked, since nothing prevents you installing thirty of them. Security is your operational discipline rather than a vendor's. Extension quality varies widely and support is not centralised. At very large catalogue sizes it needs deliberate database and hosting work. None of this makes it a poor choice — it makes it a choice that assumes someone competent is maintaining it.