What to Do with WooCommerce When You Migrate Away from WordPress

WooCommerce is one of the first things that comes up when we talk to teams about migrating away from WordPress. Not because it’s a blocker — usually it isn’t — but because the right answer varies a lot depending on what the store is doing. "We have WooCommerce" doesn’t tell you much. A site selling two PDF guides and a site running a multi-currency product catalog with complex shipping rules are both "WooCommerce sites." The migration path for one is nothing like the path for the other.

So before getting into what Statamic can or can’t do for e-commerce, the more useful question is: what are you using WooCommerce for?

The simple digital products case

A lot of WordPress sites have WooCommerce installed to sell a small number of digital products — ebooks, templates, course materials, stock photos, a plugin or two. WooCommerce handles this fine, but it’s also a lot of infrastructure for what is fundamentally a file delivery problem with a payment attached.

If that’s your situation, you probably don’t need a CMS-integrated e-commerce solution at all. Tools like Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy exist specifically for this use case. You embed a buy button, they handle payment processing, file delivery, receipts, and basic license management. The complexity you were carrying with WooCommerce gets offloaded to a service that specializes in it, and your Statamic site handles the content without needing to touch transactions at all.

The tricky part is accepting that the "unified platform" you had with WordPress + WooCommerce isn’t necessarily worth preserving. For most small digital product stores, the simplicity of an external payment tool outweighs the convenience of having everything under one roof.

The "we want better e-commerce" case

If you’re running a real product catalog — physical goods, inventory management, multiple product variants, discount codes, cart abandonment emails, shipping integrations — and you want to migrate away from WordPress because WooCommerce has been getting unwieldy, the answer is probably not to rebuild your store in Statamic. It’s to move your store to Shopify.

Shopify is good at e-commerce in a way that most CMS-attached solutions aren’t. It handles the unsexy infrastructure — payment provider integrations, PCI compliance, carrier-calculated shipping, fraud analysis, abandoned cart flows — without you having to configure or maintain it. WooCommerce does most of these things too, but it requires a stack of extensions and regular attention to keep it healthy. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is often less about gaining new capabilities and more about outsourcing the maintenance burden to a platform built around that specific problem.

Your Statamic site and your Shopify store can coexist. They don’t need to be integrated — most companies in this situation want their marketing site and their store to feel consistent visually, but they’re not asking for deep data integration between the two. A link in the nav is often sufficient.

The deeply custom case

Some WooCommerce stores are complex in ways that off-the-shelf tools don’t handle well: unusual pricing models, custom product configurators, subscription logic tied to external systems, integrations with inventory management platforms, fulfillment workflows that need custom code at every step. If you’ve already pushed WooCommerce well past what it was designed to do, you know it.

In that case, a full Laravel build probably makes more sense than either WooCommerce or Shopify. Laravel gives you complete control over the data model, the business logic, and the integrations. Statamic can sit on top of it to handle the content management side — blog, marketing pages, documentation — while the commerce layer is built exactly how the business needs it. This approach is more expensive than deploying a plugin, but if the business logic is that complex, the cost of building it properly is usually lower than the cost of fighting a platform that wasn’t designed for it.

The "WooCommerce is the business" case

If e-commerce is the core of what the site does — not a side feature, but the reason the site exists — it’s worth asking whether migrating the CMS is the right project at all, at least right now.

Statamic’s native e-commerce options are limited. There are community addons, and the platform can certainly support product listings and basic purchasing flows, but it’s not where Statamic is strongest. If you have a mature WooCommerce store that’s working well, and the main frustration is with WordPress itself rather than the commerce layer, Craft CMS paired with Craft Commerce is worth evaluating. Craft Commerce is a first-party e-commerce plugin that brings real CMS-quality tooling to the commerce side — product variants, flexible pricing models, promotion rules, proper extensibility. It’s not Statamic, but if the store is the product, pointing you there makes more sense than asking you to rebuild your e-commerce on a platform where commerce is an afterthought.

How we handle it in practice

When a migration project involves WooCommerce, the first thing we do is map out what the store is responsible for — what it sells, how customers buy it, how the team manages products, and where the current pain is. From that, the right path usually becomes clear pretty quickly.

In our experience, most WooCommerce migrations fall into the first two categories: either the store is selling a handful of digital products (Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy is the answer), or the team wants a more professional e-commerce setup and Shopify ends up on the table. The deeply custom case is less common but real, and it’s the kind of project that benefits from a proper scoping conversation before any code gets written.

The short version: migrating from WordPress to Statamic and migrating your store are two separate decisions. They often happen at the same time, but they don’t have to, and conflating them can make both projects harder than they need to be.