Shopify Won 41% of Websites That Switched Platforms in Six Months

An online store owner has spent another weekend updating plugins, patching the server and fixing a checkout extension that broke after the last update. The question comes up again: should the store move to a platform where someone else handles all of that? Across the most visited websites, owners who do switch are answering yes, and most of them are choosing the same destination.

A website platform is the system a site is built and run on, such as WordPress, Shopify, Magento or Webflow. Moving from one to another is a major project: every page, product and address has to be rebuilt or carried over. That is why platform switches are rare for any one business, and why the direction they take says a lot about where the market is heading.

0.85% of the 1 million most visited websites with a known platform switched completely in six months, 1,957 websites. 41% of them landed on Shopify, a net gain of 717. The platforms that lost the most were those where the owner runs updates, hosting and extensions.

We took every homepage among the 1 million most visited websites in the HTTP Archive crawl, a public project that records the technology behind millions of websites each month, and read the content management and ecommerce platforms it detected in September 2025 and March 2026. 231,415 of those homepages had a detected platform.

A website counts as a switcher when none of its March platforms matches any of its September platforms, a complete change rather than an added tool. For each platform we counted switchers gained and lost; net is gained minus lost. A route such as "WooCommerce to Shopify" counts websites that ran WooCommerce alone in September and Shopify alone in March.

Shopify gained 793 switchers and lost 76, a net gain of 717. No other platform came close: Webflow was a distant second at +41, followed by headless content systems such as Sanity (+28), Contentstack (+20) and Storyblok (+18), the design-led builder Framer (+19) and the commerce platforms Odoo and Tiendanube.

Some platforms trade websites without growing. Craft CMS gained 13 switchers and lost 13, Webflow Ecommerce gained 7 and lost 7, and Adobe Experience Manager gained 38 and lost 21. Large organizations move between these systems as contracts come up for renewal, so the traffic in both directions can be heavy even when the net change is small.

Most switchers left platforms where the owner or a developer runs updates, hosting and extensions. WooCommerce, the store plugin for WordPress, lost 348 websites and gained 109, a net loss of 239, and was the biggest source of Shopify's growth: 264 websites went straight from WooCommerce to Shopify. Magento lost 218 and gained 43, and 135 of the websites leaving Magento went to Shopify.

The pattern points to one motive. Hosted platforms take plugin updates, server security and upgrades off the owner's list, and owners of top websites who switch are choosing that over the flexibility of running it themselves.

WordPress gained 352 switchers, more than any platform except Shopify, and lost 575, more than any platform at all, for a net change of -223. It remains a common landing spot for websites leaving other content systems, even while stores built on WordPress with WooCommerce move to hosted commerce.

For a business, that means the choice is less about WordPress versus everything else and more about what the website does. A content website still has plenty of company on WordPress; a store running WooCommerce is in the group most likely to be weighing a move.

If you run a store on WooCommerce, Magento or another self-managed system and are weighing a move, you are in large company. The move itself is where the risk sits: in a separate Suff Digital study of 185 of these switchers, most websites dipped below their pre-switch Google traffic in the months after the change. Plan redirects and content mapping before you pick a launch date, not after.

If you are staying where you are, budget for the upkeep that is pushing others away: core and plugin updates, PHP upgrades and security patches. If you are moving, working with a team that offers ecommerce migration services means every product, category and old address is mapped to the new store before it goes live.

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