Shopify Websites Grew 13.1% in a Year vs a 2.6% Drop for the Web Overall

A retailer that has run its online store on WooCommerce for eight years gets another security update notice, another hosting bill and another plugin conflict. It moves the catalog to Shopify, where the platform handles hosting, checkout and updates. Across the web, thousands of stores made the same decision in the last two years.

Where stores are built matters beyond the store itself. The platform a merchant picks decides which apps, themes, payment options and developers are available, and how much of the technical upkeep the owner carries. Growth on one platform also means more stores going through a migration to get there, and every migration puts search traffic at risk if old product addresses are not redirected.

Shopify is the clear winner of the last two years. It ran on 729,553 homepages in September 2026, 13.1% more than a year earlier, even as the total number of homepages tracked fell 2.6%. Over two years it grew 22.7%, adding 134,869 websites, and it finished the period at its highest count.

HTTP Archive is a public project that loads the homepages of millions of websites in a real browser every month and records the software each one runs. We counted the homepages where Shopify was identified in each monthly snapshot from October 2024 to September 2026, between 14.7 million and 16.4 million homepages a month, and divided by the total for that month. The one-year change compares September 2025 with September 2026.

A platform's share is the percentage of all homepages in that month's snapshot that run it. The share is the fairer measure over time, because the number of homepages HTTP Archive loads changes from month to month. We also looked at the 1 million most visited websites, as ranked by Google's Chrome UX Report, and counted the 1,957 whose platform in March 2026 differed from their platform in September 2025. Those are the switchers.

Shopify grew in 18 of 23 month-to-month steps and finished at its peak: 729,553 homepages in September 2026, against 644,891 a year earlier and 594,684 in October 2024. Its share rose from 3.62% to 4.72% over the two years, a gain of more than a full percentage point, while most other platforms held flat or fell.

The share figure shows how unusual that is. Because the total number of homepages tracked fell 2.6% in the last year, a platform standing still would have lost ground. Shopify's share instead rose from 4.06% to 4.72%, a relative gain of 16.2%.

Shopify added 84,662 homepages in the last year, and 63,884 of them came between March and September 2026, three quarters of the year's growth in six months. The total number of homepages tracked shrank slightly over the same months, so the gain is not a side effect of a bigger snapshot.

No other platform came close to that pace. Over the full two years Shopify added 134,869 homepages, at a time when most website platforms were flat or shrinking.

Among the 1 million most visited websites, 1,957 changed platform between September 2025 and March 2026. Shopify gained 793 of them and lost 76, a net gain of 717. That is 41% of every switch, going to one platform.

The biggest sources were other ecommerce platforms. 264 stores moved from WooCommerce, the store builder that runs on WordPress, and 135 from Magento. Both are self-hosted, which means the store owner arranges hosting, security updates and upgrades. The pattern suggests merchants are trading that work for a hosted platform that takes care of it.

If you are moving to Shopify, budget for SEO as part of the migration. Any platform move changes addresses, and on Shopify products and collections live under fixed /products/ and /collections/ paths, so almost every old product address changes. Export every product, category and blog address with traffic or backlinks, map each one to its Shopify equivalent and load the redirects before launch. Keep product descriptions and title tags as they are rather than rewriting everything at once.

Working with shopify migration services that map every old address before the switch protects the search traffic your current store has built. If you are already on Shopify, the platform's growth means a large app market, but also more apps to keep updated and more scripts on every page, so review your installed apps twice a year.

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