Wix or Shopify: Which Is Right for Your UK Store?

I migrate stores onto Shopify for a living, and a good number of them come off Wix — so let me be fair to it first: Wix is genuinely good at what it was built for. For a brochure site, a portfolio, or a service business that sells a few things on the side, its drag-anywhere editor lets a non-technical owner build something that looks the part without writing a line of code. That’s a real strength, and I wouldn’t move a business that only needs that.

This isn’t a feature comparison. Feature lists date the day they’re published. What matters is what each platform is built for, and how that maps to where your business is heading — because the gap between “a website that sells” and “a shop that has a website” is the whole decision.

What Wix actually is — and why that’s the whole story

Wix is a website builder. It added a shop. That order matters, and it explains both what Wix does beautifully and where it runs out of road.

The builder came first, so the design tools are excellent: you drag elements anywhere on the page, lay things out by eye, and it just works without code. For a site that’s mostly content — a restaurant, a consultant, a photographer, a shop window with a few products behind it — that’s exactly the right tool.

The shop came second, so it sits on top of a system that was never designed around selling. Inventory, checkout, multi-channel, the data underneath — all of it is competent rather than built-for-purpose. None of that matters until selling becomes the point. Then all of it does.

Four structural reasons people move off Wix

These aren’t taste complaints. They’re the points where the bolt-on shop starts costing you real money.

1. The shop is the bolt-on, not the engine

Wix’s checkout is functional but basic; Shopify’s, especially with Shop Pay, is tuned across millions of stores and converts measurably better. Inventory, discounts, abandoned-cart recovery, proper tax and shipping logic — all the machinery of actually selling — is deeper and more reliable on a platform that started there. On a small catalogue you won’t feel the difference. On a growing one, you feel it in the conversion rate.

2. You can’t really leave — and that’s a reason to think now

Wix was not designed to let you out. It renders everything client-side, gives you only partial data exports, and uses proprietary URLs that map cleanly to nothing. Your store is yours in name, but you can’t pick it up and carry it somewhere else.

That’s worth naming plainly, because it’s the opposite of how I build. On Shopify your store sits in your account, on your domain, with your data exportable any day you like — you’re free to fire me, or Shopify, and walk off with the lot. The lock-in doesn’t feel like anything until the day you try to leave, and by then you’re carrying more.

3. The ceiling is real

Around fifty products, Wix starts to feel the strain — catalogue management, performance, the URL structure that hampers SEO. There’s no enterprise gear to shift into, no headless option, no checkout you can extend. Shopify’s Basic → Shopify → Advanced → Plus is a genuine progression that grows with you. Wix doesn’t have one; you simply reach the edge of what it does.

4. Selling in more than one place

Modern ecommerce isn’t one storefront — it’s Google Shopping, Amazon, eBay, Instagram, TikTok Shop, all fed from one catalogue. Shopify connects to these natively. Wix can’t do it properly. If the plan is to sell wherever your customers are, Wix quietly becomes the thing holding that back.

What Wix does genuinely better than Shopify

Here’s the part a migration pitch usually skips, because it complicates the sell. I’ll name it, because a comparison that won’t tell you what you’re giving up isn’t worth reading.

The meta-point matters more than any row. If your website is the main event and the shop is a sideline, Wix may be the better, simpler, cheaper tool — and the “move to Shopify” argument doesn’t apply to you. Shopify wins decisively when selling is the business. It wins less clearly when selling is the hobby, and saying so is the difference between advice and a pitch.

When Wix is still the right answer

I would not migrate a business off Wix if any of these are true:

• The website is the main event. A service business, a consultant, a restaurant, a portfolio that sells a few things on the side — Wix does the whole job in one place, simply.
• The catalogue is tiny and stable. A handful of products with no plan to grow doesn’t need a platform built for scale.
• Bookings or events are the real product. Wix’s native verticals genuinely save you the app stack Shopify would need.
• You want to build it yourself, by hand, and never touch code. Wix’s editor is the friendliest there is for that, and Shopify won’t match it without a developer.

If you’re in any of those, my honest advice is to stay where you are.

When the move to Shopify is worth it

I would migrate a store if any of these are true:

• Selling is becoming the business. The order volume is climbing, the catalogue is growing, and the shop is no longer a sideline.
• You’ve hit the ceiling. More than fifty products, checkout conversion that won’t improve, inventory you can’t manage properly, or SEO capped by Wix’s URLs.
• You need to sell in more than one place. Amazon, eBay, social commerce, Google Shopping — Shopify does multi-channel natively, Wix doesn’t.
• You’re selling digital and physical together, or you need wholesale pricing alongside retail — both are native or app-served on Shopify, awkward on Wix.
• You want to own a store you can actually leave. If being locked into a platform you can’t export from bothers you — and it should — that alone is a structural reason to move while the store is still small enough to move easily.

If you’re reading a piece like this, you’re probably in the second list — that’s usually what brings someone to it. But the first list matters just as much, because it’s what lets you trust the answer when it really is “migrate.”

What moving actually involves

Worth being straight: Wix is one of the harder platforms to leave, precisely because it was built not to let you. It gives you partial exports and friction by design — products come out as a CSV that doesn’t map to Shopify cleanly, content and blog posts have no export at all and have to be lifted from the rendered pages, and images sit on Wix’s CDN behind proprietary URLs that need pulling down and re-hosting. None of it is impossible; all of it needs doing by hand, carefully.

I’ve done it across very different shapes — including a direct-to-consumer supplements brand with around a hundred products and twice as many variants, where the imagery had to be scraped from the Wix CDN because the product export simply doesn’t carry it. The full mechanics, the traps, and the redirect work are in the Wix to Shopify migration guide, and the complete scope of what moves is on the Wix to Shopify migration page. The short version: your Wix store stays live and selling throughout, the new one is built alongside it, and nothing changes for your customers until the cutover.

What it costs

Most Wix migrations fit a fixed price — from £1,490 for the build and the full data and SEO transfer, published openly in the Shopify migration cost guide rather than hidden behind a quote form. What moves the number is catalogue size and any Wix functionality — bookings, events, digital downloads — that has to be rebuilt on the Shopify side.

Larger or more complex stores get scoped on their merits. If yours doesn’t fit the standard shape, get in touch and I’ll scope it honestly before quoting.

The bottom line

Wix isn’t the thing to escape from. For a content-led site that sells a little, it’s a genuinely good tool, and I’d tell you to stay on it. The honest question isn’t “which platform is better” — it’s this: are you running a website that sells, or a shop that needs a website?

If the website is the point and the shop is the sideline, Wix earns its place. If selling has become the business — the volume, the channels, the catalogue, the ambition to grow — then you’ve outgrown the builder, and Shopify is built for exactly that trajectory. Done properly, the move takes everything you’ve built across with you, and hands you a store you actually own.

If you’d like me to look at your specific case, get in touch. I’ll be honest about whether the migration is right for you — including, sometimes, telling you to stay on Wix.

Related: the Wix to Shopify migration guide covers the execution and the traps, the Wix to Shopify migration page covers the full scope, the Shopify migration cost guide covers pricing, and WooCommerce or Shopify, Magento or Shopify and EKM or Shopify run the same honest comparison for those platforms.