Half the CMS decisions we see get made by whoever built the site. The developer knew WordPress, so it’s WordPress. Or a cousin set up a Wix page over a weekend and now, 200 products later, the business is trying to run an online shop through it. Neither is a disaster exactly. But the platform you pick decides what your monthly bill looks like, who you call when something breaks at 11pm before a sale, and how painful it’ll be to move later, so it’s worth twenty minutes of thought before anyone starts designing. So below is how we’d think it through for an Indian business in 2026, with real rupee numbers wherever we could find them.
Key takeaways
- WordPress runs 58.3% of sites with a known CMS, according to W3Techs, and Shopify is a distant second at 7.9%.
- Selling products online? Shopify is usually less hassle. A content-heavy service business usually suits WordPress better.
- Shopify’s Basic plan costs ₹1,499 a month billed yearly in India, plus a 2% fee if you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments.
- Most WordPress hacks come through plugins. Patchstack put 91% of 2025’s new vulnerabilities in plugins.
- All the major CMSs can rank on Google. The person running it matters far more.
Which CMS do most businesses use?
WordPress, by a mile. W3Techs data from October 2026 has WordPress on 39.6% of all websites, which works out to 58.3% of sites using a CMS it can detect. In the same data Shopify sits at 7.9% of that CMS market, Wix at 6.2% and Squarespace at 3.6%, and about a third of sites run no recognisable CMS at all.
Popularity alone won’t pick your platform. It does get you a huge pool of WordPress developers in Jaipur and pretty much everywhere else, findable in about ten minutes, and that matters more than people think when the original one stops answering calls.
What should you decide before comparing platforms?
A few questions first. Are you selling products online or mostly getting enquiries, and who’s going to update the site week to week? Then the money one, which people skip: what can you afford every month once the launch invoice is paid and the developer has moved on to someone else’s project?
The last one trips people up. A ₹40,000 website on a platform with ₹6,000 a month in apps isn’t cheaper than a ₹90,000 site with ₹800 a month in hosting, once you add it all up. Work out the three-year number. Our post on what a website costs Indian businesses in 2026 has the build side of that sum.
When is WordPress the right choice?
When the site is mostly content and enquiries. Service businesses, clinics, CA firms, schools, anyone who’ll publish regularly and wants full control over pages and URLs (schema too) without paying a platform every month for the privilege, because WordPress itself is free and you own every file.
You own the maintenance too. Hosting and updates land on you or your developer. Backups and plugin licences too, and if nobody’s doing them the site slowly rots. We’d only recommend WordPress to a business that’s either comfortable logging in monthly or has someone on a small retainer to do it. WooCommerce turns it into a shop, and it works well with Indian gateways like Razorpay, but you end up with more moving parts than Shopify would ever give you. Our WooCommerce SEO guide covers that route if you’re leaning that way.
When is Shopify the better pick?
When selling is the point. Shopify handles hosting and security patches for you, checkout too, so a D2C brand with a small team can spend its time on products and ads rather than server errors at midnight.
You pay for that convenience monthly. According to Shopify’s India pricing page, Basic costs ₹1,499 a month and Grow ₹5,599, both billed yearly, and if you use a third-party gateway rather than Shopify Payments there’s a 2% fee on Basic (1% on Grow). Apps add up on top. Reviews, WhatsApp, GST invoicing, COD verification: it’s normal for a growing Indian store to spend more on apps than on the plan itself.
Content is where Shopify feels clunky. The blog is basic and URL structures are fixed (product pages always sit under /products/), which is fine for most stores and annoying if you’d planned to publish a lot. Our Shopify SEO guide goes into the workarounds.
What about website builders like Wix and Webflow?
Good for small sites that won’t grow much. A photographer’s portfolio, a café with a menu and a map, a consultant’s five-page site: Wix or Squarespace gets you live fast and nobody needs to touch a server.
Webflow sits somewhere else entirely. Designers love it because the visual control is excellent, but the plans are priced in dollars and the editor has a real learning curve, so we mostly see it with funded startups that have a designer in-house. For a typical small business in a tier-2 city, it’s more tool than the job needs.
Where all three hurt is the exit. Moving off a hosted builder usually means rebuilding the site and redirecting every URL by hand.
How much does each CMS cost in India?
| Platform | Platform fee | Usual extras | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Free software | Hosting, premium plugins, maintenance | Service businesses, content-heavy sites |
| WooCommerce | Free plugin | Better hosting, paid extensions, gateway fees | Stores that want full control |
| Shopify | ₹1,499 to ₹22,680 a month (yearly billing) | Apps, theme, transaction fees | D2C and product brands |
| Wix / Squarespace | Monthly plan | Premium plan for a shop or bookings | Small, simple sites |
If you’d like help pricing a specific build, our website development team in Jaipur quotes all four.
How safe is WordPress?
As safe as the plugins you install. The core software is solid. Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, and 91% of them were in plugins, with only six in WordPress core. Worse, according to the same report, 46% had no fix available when they were disclosed.
So keep the plugin list short and update it every week or so, with daily backups going somewhere other than your own server (a Google Drive folder is fine). Boring, but it works. That one habit prevents most of the hacked-site calls we get. Shopify and the hosted builders take this job off your hands entirely, which for some owners is reason enough to pick them.
Which CMS is best for SEO?
Any of the big ones. Google doesn’t rank sites higher for running WordPress, and we’ve seen Shopify stores and Wix sites outrank agency-built WordPress sites plenty of times because their content was better and the page loaded faster.
WordPress does give you more control. You can set custom URLs and any schema you like and get into the code itself, which matters on big sites and in competitive niches but much less for a 10-page local business. A slow theme stuffed with sliders hurts SEO far more, and so does a migration done without redirects.
What if you’re already on the wrong one?
Don’t rush the move. Switching platforms is where sites lose rankings, usually because old URLs weren’t redirected to the new ones and Google treats every page as brand new.
If you do move, map every old URL to its new home before launch and keep page titles and content close to what ranked. Then watch Search Console daily. Our URL migration guide walks through it, and the wellness brand we moved off OpenCart is a real example of a migration that grew traffic afterwards.
