WooCommerce
Self-hosted, fully yours.
WooCommerce sites for Irish businesses who want WordPress's flexibility with full commerce capability — content-rich stores, subscription billing, membership gating, bespoke extensions. No transaction fees to a platform.
Hook into anything
You own the data
Stack · top to foundation
Klaviyo
Email + SMS automation
ShipStation
Shipping + labels
Stripe Payment Gateway
Cards · Apple/Google Pay
WC Subscriptions
Recurring billing
Advanced Custom Fields
Extra product data
Yoast SEO
Search optimisation
WooCommerce Core
Ecommerce layer
WordPress
CMS foundation
Active layer
WordPress
Content management, user accounts, page/post system, media library, REST API, role-based permissions — the foundation.
8 layers · 8 of 8
When Woo beats Shopify
Content-heavy stores, custom logic, no platform fees.
Content + commerce on one stack
You're running a blog, editorial, magazine alongside a shop. WordPress is unmatched for content — adding WooCommerce keeps both worlds on one CMS.
You need bespoke commerce logic
Custom pricing rules, member-only products, complex discount stacking, conditional shipping — WooCommerce's action/filter hook architecture lets you code it directly. No "this isn't supported" from a SaaS.
Subscriptions and memberships
WC Subscriptions + WC Memberships + WC Paid Courses cover subscription businesses properly. Shopify needs Recharge ($39+/mo); Woo licences once or uses subscription plugins.
Data sovereignty matters
Healthcare-adjacent, financial, or regulated verticals where data must stay on Irish/EU servers you control. WooCommerce self-hosted = you pick the data centre, you run the backups.
Large catalogues with categorisation depth
WordPress handles 50k+ posts cleanly. WooCommerce handles 10k+ SKUs, nested categories, custom taxonomies, and deep filtering with properly-indexed databases better than many SaaS options.
In-house developer team
You have developers comfortable with PHP/MySQL and the WordPress stack. Total cost of ownership works out lower long-term than SaaS monthly fees when you've got the skillset in-house.
The hosting decision
Where we host Irish WooCommerce stores.
Hosting is 60% of WooCommerce site success. Cheap shared hosting kills stores. These three tiers cover what we actually recommend.
Our default
Managed WordPress
€35–€90/mo
Kinsta · WP Engine · Cloudways
For mid-sized WooCommerce stores (500–10k monthly orders). Daily backups, staging, server-level caching, WAF, CDN — all managed. Our default recommendation.
Dedicated cloud
€120–€400/mo
AWS · DigitalOcean · Hetzner
For high-traffic stores (10k+ monthly orders) or stores with bespoke infrastructure needs. We configure + maintain. More control, more complexity.
WooCommerce.com Hosting
€60–€180/mo
Automattic/Pressable
Operated by WooCommerce's parent. Fine, but usually marginally more expensive than Kinsta/WPE for equivalent specs. Worth it if you want "all-from-one-vendor".
Avoid: GoDaddy shared, Bluehost basic, anything under €10/month. Page load > 3s kills conversions.
The hook architecture
Why WooCommerce is infinitely customisable.
WooCommerce exposes 400+ action hooks and filters. You attach custom code to any event — before a product is added to cart, after an order is placed, when the shipping total is calculated — and modify behaviour without touching core.
This is the architecture that lets us build: custom pricing by customer group, conditional checkout fields, integrations with any external system, calculated shipping based on product metadata, dynamic bundles, and hundreds of other per-client behaviours.
woocommerce_add_to_cart
Trigger when product added — log, discount, cross-sell
action
woocommerce_before_checkout_form
Inject custom messaging, notices, upsells
action
woocommerce_checkout_fields
Add, remove, or modify checkout fields
filter
woocommerce_calculate_totals
Custom cart discount logic, bundle pricing
action
woocommerce_payment_complete
Post-payment hooks — ERP sync, fulfilment triggers
action
woocommerce_order_status_changed
Workflow automation on order state transitions
action
woocommerce_product_tabs
Add/remove product page tabs (specs, reviews, FAQ)
filter
woocommerce_email_recipient_*
Route transactional emails to custom addresses
filter
What Woo gets wrong
The honest limits.
Maintenance never stops
WordPress + WooCommerce + 12 plugins means weekly update decisions. Skipped updates = security risk. You need a retainer or a managed service.
Performance takes work
Out of the box it's slow. Caching (object cache, full-page cache), database optimisation, CDN, image optimisation, query tuning — all required to hit sub-2s loads.
Scaling spikes is harder
Black Friday traffic 10× normal? Shopify auto-scales. WooCommerce needs infrastructure planning — provision more resource, test load, pray.
No centralised app store trust
Plugins come from thousands of devs. Some abandoned, some buggy, some outright security holes. Audit before installing. Use trusted sources (WooCommerce.com, Automattic, iThemes, WPML).
Plugin conflicts happen
Two plugins both hooking into checkout can fight. Debugging plugin conflicts is real engineering work. Minimise plugin count where possible.
Total cost isn't always cheaper
Hosting + managed service + premium plugins (€800–€2,000/year) + dev retainer can exceed Shopify's €105/mo. Only cheaper at scale or in-house.
Frequently asked
WooCommerce questions.
Typical SMB build €6,500–€18,000 including theme customisation, plugin configuration, payment gateway setup, product import, and training. Hosting (€35–€90/mo) + premium plugin licences (€400–€1,200/yr) are separate. Ongoing retainer for updates/support from €300/mo.
Related
Related platforms & services
Not sure if WooCommerce or Shopify fits better?
Free scoping call. Describe your business model + team capacity and we'll give an honest platform recommendation — even if it's not WooCommerce.