Leaving WooCommerce: when self-hosted stops being free

WooCommerce's price is its best argument: the plugin costs nothing, and nothing is a hard number to argue with. 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. Disclosure first: we build Orbit Commerce, the platform this post compares WooCommerce with.

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: SiteGround, one of the hosts WooCommerce's own hosting page recommends, charges £23.99 a month for its managed GrowBig plan after a first year at £3.99 a month, prepaid for 12 months and ex VAT (siteground.co.uk, checked 26 September 2026). Then come the extensions, because the core plugin is deliberately minimal. The official Subscriptions extension is £209 a year; Bookings is £186 and Gift Cards £59 (woocommerce.com, checked 26 September 2026): annual subscriptions, all of them, renewing every year. Many stores also add a paid page builder on top of the block editor.

Card processing, to be fair, is where Woo holds its own: WooPayments charges 1.5% + 25p on UK cards, plus 2% on international cards (woocommerce.com, checked 26 September 2026), 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 a stack of 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. ThriveWP's 2026 guide to WordPress maintenance costs in the UK puts a small business's retainer at £75 to £200 a month, and ad-hoc help from a UK freelancer at roughly £40 to £120 an hour (thrivewp.com, checked 26 September 2026). 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 taking about 200 orders: SiteGround's GrowBig hosting at £23.99 and about £125 of WooPayments fees come to about £149 a month if you do every bit of maintenance yourself and value the time at nothing, or about £224 with a £75 retainer from the low end of that range. The same shop on Orbit's Solo plan billed yearly is £19 a month with hosting, updates and the certificate included, plus £150 in card fees: £169 a month, with nothing to patch.

When to make the move

Timing matters as much as the sum. If you are in your busiest weeks of the year, move once they are over. If you have prepaid a year of hosting with plenty of it left to run, rehearse the move on the trial now and switch when the renewal comes round.

For most growing stores the sum tips towards moving 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 past orders come across first. WooCommerce exports products and customers as CSV. Orbit recognises WooCommerce's product export on upload and reads customers and past orders from CSV, joining each order to the customer with the same email address, and the bulk importer takes your cleaned-up CSV or Excel file too. 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. The import creates none, and a WooCommerce product at /product/ lives at /products/ on Orbit, so upload your old and new addresses with the redirect importer (plain from and to columns are read), or ask Nebula, so the addresses that rank today keep resolving after the switch. Orbit 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. Our guide to changing ecommerce platform without losing your search rankings covers that check in full, from the redirect map to launch day.

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 stop doing

On Orbit your data stays yours, exportable any time, and the machinery stops being your job: hosting, security patching 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, and the fuller side-by-side lives on the Orbit vs WooCommerce page. Orbit's plans are £25 for Solo, £85 for Team and £249 for Pro, and the plan price plus the published card rates 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.