Shopify vs WordPress for Breweries: Which One Actually Suits You?

It's the question we get asked more than "what's your best seller?" Should your brewery website be on Shopify or WordPress?

The honest answer is that both are good, both are used by breweries you've heard of, and the wrong one will quietly cost you money and patience for years. So rather than pick a side, here's how to work out which one fits the way your business actually makes money.

The short version

• Go Shopify if the website's main job is selling beer: mixed cases, subscriptions, merch, gift boxes, and a steady flow of online orders.
• Go WordPress if the website's main job is telling your story and filling the taproom: events, tap lists, food menus, bookings, news, and a shop that's useful but not the main event.
• Go both (WordPress for the site, Shopify for the shop, or a headless setup) if you're a bigger operation doing serious volume online and serious storytelling. Most independents don't need this yet.

Now the longer version.

What Shopify is good at

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform. You pay a monthly fee, and Shopify looks after the servers, security, updates and checkout. It was built to sell things, and it's very, very good at it.

Where it shines for breweries:

• Checkout that converts. Shopify's checkout is fast, trusted and works brilliantly on phones. Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay come as standard.
• Subscriptions and beer clubs. There's a mature app ecosystem for monthly boxes, skip-a-month, and member discounts.
• Stock and fulfilment. Inventory, shipping rules, delivery zones and order management are all built in.
• Low maintenance. No plugins to update at 11pm on a Friday. No hosting to worry about.

Where it's weaker:

• Content. Shopify's blog and page tools are basic. Event listings, rich brewery stories and complex taproom pages are possible but take more work (or more apps).
• App creep. Need age verification, subscriptions, reviews, a mixed-case builder and better filters? That's five apps, five monthly fees, and five things that can slow your site down.
• Fees on every sale. On top of the subscription, you pay card processing on every order, and an extra transaction fee if you don't use Shopify Payments.

What it costs (UK, at the time of writing): Shopify's main plans run from about £19/month (Basic, billed annually) to £49/month (Grow) and £259/month (Advanced). Online card rates through Shopify Payments start around 2% + 25p on Basic and drop on higher plans. Prices change, so always check Shopify's own pricing page before you commit.

What WordPress is good at

WordPress is open-source software that powers a huge chunk of the web. You (or your web team) host it, and it can be shaped into pretty much anything. For selling, most WordPress sites use WooCommerce, a free e-commerce plugin.

Where it shines for breweries and pubs:

• Storytelling. Brewer profiles, "how we brew" pages, long-form blog posts, galleries, award pages. WordPress was built for content, and it shows.
• Events and bookings. Quiz nights, tap takeovers, meet-the-brewer evenings, and table bookings all slot in nicely.
• Flexibility. Custom tap list pages, food menus that change weekly, location pages for multiple sites. If you can describe it, it can be built.
• No platform fees on sales. WooCommerce itself doesn't take a cut. You still pay your payment provider (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), but there's no extra platform percentage.
• SEO control. Fine-grained control over pages, URLs, structured data and content, which matters a lot for "pub near me" style searches.

Where it's weaker:

• Maintenance. WordPress, its theme and its plugins need regular updates. Skip them and you're asking for security problems. This is where a good support plan earns its keep.
• Hosting matters. Cheap hosting makes WordPress slow. Decent managed hosting is a must.
• E-commerce takes more setup. WooCommerce can do everything Shopify can, but subscriptions, age checks and shipping rules usually need extra plugins and more careful configuration.

What it costs: The software is free. Realistic running costs are hosting (roughly £10–£30/month for decent managed WordPress hosting), any premium plugins, and a maintenance plan. The build itself is where most of the money goes, on either platform.

The brewery-specific bits nobody mentions

Selling alcohol online

Whichever platform you choose, you are responsible for selling alcohol legally. That means the right premises licence covering off-sales, an age verification process at checkout and on delivery, and a clearly displayed Challenge 25 policy. Neither Shopify nor WordPress does this for you out of the box. Both can do it with the right setup. (We've written a whole post on this: Selling beer online in the UK: what your webshop needs.)

Tap lists

If you run a taproom or pub, your tap list is probably the most-visited page on your site. Both platforms can pull in a live list from Untappd for Business or similar, but WordPress gives you more control over how it looks and how Google reads it.

Mixed cases

"Pick any 12" is a brewery classic and surprisingly fiddly to build well. Shopify has ready-made apps for it. WooCommerce has plugins too, but they vary in quality. Either way, test it on a phone before launch.

Who's going to update it?

Be honest about this one. If the person updating the website is also pulling pints, packing boxes and running the brewery's Instagram, simplicity wins. Shopify is easier to keep ticking over. WordPress is easier to make exactly how you want. Pick the one your team will actually use.

So which one?

Ask yourself one question: where does the money come from?

There's no shame in either. A brilliant Shopify site beats a neglected WordPress one every time, and vice versa.

The bit where we tell you what we do

At BEVV we build on WordPress, Shopify and headless, so we've got no reason to push you one way. We'll ask how you sell, who updates the site and where you want to be in two years, then recommend the platform that fits. Sometimes that's the one you came in thinking of. Sometimes it isn't.

Not sure which way to go? Start with a free chat. The first pint's on us.