WordPress vs Shopify for E-Commerce
Comparing WordPress vs. Shopify for your e-commerce site? The general consensus is that Shopify is more popular than WordPress for e-commerce, but not for Valentte.
Here’s how Valentte successfully built their e-commerce site on WordPress, and how you can, too.
Meet Luke Bream, co-founder of Valentte, a fragrance and skincare company in the UK. Originally selling its handmade bars of soap at farmers’ markets and events, Valentte was forced to move its sales online when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“We started Facebook advertising, and the business exploded. Over the next two years of Covid, we grew to a staff of 160 employees,” Luke recalls. Valentte moved into two new buildings with 35,000 square feet in total to accommodate their growth. It was clear that they needed to scale everything – including their e-commerce site – and do so quickly.
Of course, this expansion didn’t come without its challenges.
Growing Pains for a Growing Company
During that time, Valentte’s WordPress e-commerce site was hosted on Kinsta. Luke had preferred WordPress for its customization capabilities and had experience working with the platform before.
However, with the increasing demand and traffic, Valentte’s WordPress e-commerce site began to face challenges with speed and performance. The website crashed often, so customers could not visit it when they needed to most. Once a customer did make it to the website, they were stuck on a page waiting for it to load.
When he raised the issue with their hosting provider Kinsta, they recommended he upgrade his plan and add more resources to improve their site’s performance. Each upgrade still had a cap on its site performance, and the Valentte website soon became a money pit.
On top of that, Valentte was constantly cycling through different support staff at Kinsta. This typically meant repeatedly explaining their operations and situation to every support staff member who got in touch.
The time and effort to try and take care of these issues was frustrating, to say the least. Luke and the team had reached their limits – both mentally and financially.
Comparing BigScoots Enterprise WordPress vs. Shopify
At the same time, Luke was weighing his options for Valentte to move forward. He had seen many fast-growing companies set up their businesses on Shopify and considered migrating to Shopify, too.
It was an ongoing internal debate with the Valentte team: Should they stay on WordPress? Was it worth the trouble migrating to Shopify?
Luke also considered hiring a consultant to solve their technical problems. When Luke met Mike Andreasen from WP Bullet, an IT professional well-known for successfully optimizing hundreds of WordPress websites, Mike referred him to us, a web hosting provider that specializes in WordPress.
That’s when we first had a conversation with Valentte, which helped them realize that the benefits of staying on WordPress for e-commerce greatly outweighed those of Shopify.
Since site speed was their primary concern, migrating to Shopify would not solve the issue. Additionally, we discussed several concerns with Shopify that are well-known in the community:
- Transaction Fees – Shopify charges percentage costs on each sale, which can eat away at revenues as Valentte grows.
- Impact on Load Speed – Shopify is built and operates on apps by default. This can significantly impact page load speed.
- Limited Control – Because Shopify is not open source, Valentte would not be able to customize certain aspects of the site, unlike WordPress.
After speaking with Scott Stapley, CEO and Co-Founder of BigScoots, Luke quickly learned that rather than switch to Shopify, BigScoots could solve their concerns with an Enterprise WordPress Hosting plan.
This was a massive relief for Luke, as he’d always been very comfortable with WordPress.
Scott helped me believe and understand that you can scale a business and stay on WordPress and WooCommerce, and I’m so glad he did!
Luke Bream, co-founder of Valentte
Why WordPress and BigScoots Are Game-changers For E-Commerce Businesses
Once onboarded, we deployed a custom-built Enterprise WordPress solution that connected to servers in London to support Valentte’s local online market in Europe with geo-diverse failover protection in BigScoots’ Chicago data center.
Luke describes switching to BigScoots as a total game-changer for Valentte.
Valentte quickly realized not only the competence of our team, but also the high level of service.
Choosing BigScoots was the single best technical decision that we’ve ever made because before working with you guys, we were on our own.
Luke Bream, co-founder of Valentte
Here are other benefits the Valentte team has gained since working with BigScoots:
Peace of Mind
Working with BigScoots has allowed Valentte to concentrate on growing their business. If something goes wrong, Valentte simply sends a message to the BigScoots team and knows he’ll get a response immediately.
“BigScoots gives us a level of peace of mind that’s worth any money in the world. We just simply didn’t have that before. It was so stressful when something went wrong. And that stress has all gone away since we’ve worked with you guys,” says Luke.
“If you were to ask me the value that you bring, it is to reduce my risk is so that I can sleep at night and not stress at the bloody website, the website’s not going to break down tonight or tomorrow, and if it needs to be updated and it’s going to be safely updated and so on,” he adds.
Removed the Need for Additional In-House IT Staff
Earlier, Luke considered employing a full-time IT employee, but it was still a risk for the growing company. They needed an expert who could monitor the website 24/7, optimize its performance, and keep it secure so the business could continue. And that’s what BigScoots does for them.
“I feel like we are dealing with a small team who have our back in every possible way, technically, and that to us has been absolutely invaluable. It’s freed us up to concentrate on growing the business rather than constantly looking over our shoulder,” Luke says.
And with BigScoots, he gets the same dedicated account managers all the time.
BigScoots WordPress Maintenance Service
Valentte’s website depends on fast load speeds and high performance 24/7. That’s why they chose to upgrade to a WordPress maintenance service plan, which proactively delivers ongoing site optimizations.
The ongoing optimization not only speeds up the site; it helps to keep it safe and secure. The plan has proven invaluable for Valentte as they introduce more resource-heavy plugins to the site.
This service includes conducting an audit and fine-tuning all page-specific optimizations to get everything up as best as possible. Every month, BigScoots spends 5 hours monitoring, testing, and further refining the site so it runs at optimal levels. This partnership helps us proactively catch and resolve issues before they cause any damage to the site.
Additionally, with their WordPress Speed Optimization services, Valentte has gained access to Cloudflare Enterprise, significantly reducing their site load times to 600 milliseconds or less.
“Having your Cloudflare Enterprise integration has massively benefited our site in terms of page load speed and financial value. It would have been much more expensive for us to access Cloudflare directly on our own,” he says.
Valentte sees these WordPress maintenance services as critical because the cost of the site going offline for a day is significantly more than the monthly cost of keeping the site operating at its best.
And the best part? He didn’t need to switch over to Shopify!
How BigScoots Can Help You
If you run a highly dynamic, resource-heavy e-commerce site and want to improve its performance, why not explore an Enterprise WordPress Hosting plan with BigScoots?
Our infrastructure can amplify the benefits of scaling a WordPress for e-commerce on the back of WooCommerce.
We have over a decade of experience working with Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing companies, and we’re dedicated to providing unparalleled customer service and peace of mind, just like Luke has experienced.
Chat with a BigScoots team member and schedule a free consultation today!
