WooCommerce's price is its best argument: the plugin costs nothing, and nothing is a hard number to argue with. Plenty of shops should take that deal — we will get to who, honestly. But "free" describes the software, not the store, and somewhere in year two or three many owners do the sum properly for the first time and find they are running the most expensive free thing they have ever owned. This is that sum, in pounds, and the migration path if it comes out the wrong way.
What "free" actually costs
A working WooCommerce store is the free plugin plus everything around it. Hosting good enough to be quick costs real money: budget shared hosting at £5–£30 a month is why some Woo stores feel slow, and proper managed WooCommerce hosting runs £25–£60 a month. Then come the extensions, because the core plugin is deliberately minimal. The official Subscriptions extension is about £200 a year; Bookings is around £180, Memberships around £145, gift cards about £58 — annual subscriptions, all of them, renewing every year. Most stores also add a page builder on top of the block editor, with Elementor Pro starting around $59 a year.
Card processing, to be fair, is where Woo holds its own: WooPayments charges 1.5% + 25p on UK cards (international cards carry an extra 2%), which is competitive with any hosted platform. Payments will not be the reason you leave.
The line no pricing table shows
The big cost is maintenance, and it never appears on an invoice unless you put it there. A typical WooCommerce store runs 15–30 plugins from different vendors, sitting on WordPress core, a theme and a PHP version that all update on their own schedules. Every update cycle can break something — checkout included — and when it does, it is your problem, at whatever hour it chooses.
You either do that work yourself or pay for it. UK maintenance retainers for a small store run £50–£200 a month; ad-hoc WordPress help costs £40–£120 an hour. If you do it yourself, price the hours at something honest, because evenings spent testing plugin updates are evenings not spent on products, photography or customers.
Put together for a £5,000-a-month shop selling subscriptions: managed hosting around £25, the Subscriptions extension around £17 a month, a low-end retainer around £75, and roughly £125 of card fees on about 200 orders — call it £242 a month, or about £167 if you do every bit of maintenance yourself and value the time at nothing. The same shop on Orbit's Team plan billed yearly is £44 with hosting, updates, security, subscriptions and dunning included, plus about £135 in card fees — roughly £179 a month, with nothing to patch.
Who should not move
Some stores should stay put, and it is worth saying so plainly.
If your site is content-first WordPress — a magazine, a community, a portfolio — with a small shop attached, WooCommerce keeps everything in one stack, and that is worth a lot. If you employ WordPress developers, the maintenance burden is genuinely covered in-house and the flexibility comes close to free at the margin. If your store carries heavy customisation — bespoke checkout logic, custom plugin code woven through everything — moving means rebuilding that behaviour, which is a project, not an import; weigh it as one. And if self-hosting is a policy or infrastructure requirement rather than a preference, the question answers itself.
There is also the owner who simply likes the work. If you enjoy running the stack, you are good at it, and you have priced your own time honestly and the numbers still hold — WooCommerce can run genuinely cheap, and no spreadsheet of ours should talk you out of work you enjoy. The catch is that for most growing stores the numbers stop working exactly as the store starts succeeding, because more traffic and more orders raise the stakes on every update.
The migration path
If the sum comes out the other way, the move is less dramatic than it sounds.
Products, customers and order history come across first. WooCommerce exports products and customers as CSV, and Orbit's migration tools import all three from self-hosted platforms including WooCommerce — or take your cleaned-up CSV or Excel file directly through the bulk importer. Treat the export as a spring-clean: dead SKUs and duplicate customer records do not deserve a new home.
The design gets rebuilt rather than ported — themes and builder layouts do not transplant between platforms. Orbit's drag-and-drop page builder replaces both the theme and the builder plugin you were paying for, and for most stores the rebuild is a day or two of honest work from templates.
Redirects are what protect your rankings. Orbit sets up URL redirects as part of the import, so the addresses that rank today keep resolving after the switch, and it automatically 301-redirects slug changes whenever you rename things later. Pull your most-visited URLs from Search Console before the move and spot-check them after cutover.
And your WordPress site does not have to die. If the content side earns its keep, keep WordPress running for the blog and let Orbit run the shop — or move the blog as well, into Orbit's built-in blog and content management, and retire the whole stack. Both are legitimate; only the second one ends the maintenance bill entirely.
What you give up, and what you stop doing
Honesty cuts both ways. On WooCommerce you own the code and the server and can move hosts whenever you like. On a hosted platform you own your data — exportable any time — but not the machinery. What you get in exchange is that the machinery stops being your job: hosting, security patching, backups and updates are handled by the platform, support is email and live chat with the people who run it, and the morning an update breaks something is somebody else's morning.
If you are weighing it, the 14-day trial is the cheap way to find out: import your catalogue, rebuild your best page, and compare the result against the stack you maintain now. Orbit's plans are £25 for Solo, £59 for Team and £249 for Pro, and the plan price plus the published card rate is the whole bill — which, after years of hosting renewals, extension renewals and retainer invoices, may be the part that takes the most getting used to.