WooCommerce webshop laten maken — eigen code, vanaf €1.500

Having a WooCommerce webshop built — what does that actually mean if you've just seen a Shopify quote of €15,000 and you're wondering whether that's really necessary? For most founders, the honest answer is no. But you do have to do it right, which is exactly where most WooCommerce builds out in the wild go wrong.

At SRI Services I build webshops on WordPress with WooCommerce, for entrepreneurs who want to own their platform. No monthly vendor fee. No platform suddenly changing prices on you. The codebase lives on your GitHub from day one. One operator, end to end, starting at €1,500.

This article: why WooCommerce is the right call for most Dutch shops, what you actually get when we build it, how a migration from Shopify or Lightspeed works in practice, which plugins we use and which we stay away from, and what it costs.

What you get when we build a WooCommerce webshop

A production-ready WooCommerce webshop on WordPress, delivered in 4 to 8 weeks. The exact number depends on what you want in the shop. Concretely:

• A custom WooCommerce theme. Not a ThemeForest template every competitor also runs.
• Full product catalogue with variants, stock management, and bulk import from CSV or another platform.
• Payments via Mollie or Stripe — iDEAL, credit card, Bancontact, Apple Pay. No platform watching your margins.
• Shipping integrated with PostNL, DHL, DPD or MyParcel, depending on what you use.
• Accounting linked to Moneybird, Exact Online or e-Boekhouden, so orders flow into your books automatically.
• Fast hosting on a dedicated VPS or a serious Dutch host. No Wix. No Shopify. No PaaS where you've got nothing to say.
• A real SEO foundation: clean URLs, schema.org Product markup, sitemap, hreflang for multilingual.
• A WordPress admin your team can actually use without calling a developer for every change.

The codebase is yours. Fully. No platform lock-in, no subscription on your own shop, no "this plugin doesn't work on the Basic plan."

Why WooCommerce, and not Shopify, Lightspeed or Magento

Shopify is fine to start with. Live fast, lots out of the box. But once revenue grows it gets expensive. €1M revenue on Shopify Plus quickly turns into €30,000+ per year in platform costs. Money you keep on a self-owned WooCommerce shop.

Lightspeed was built for physical retail. The webshop side stays a derivative. For pure online sales it's rarely the best choice.

Magento is technically strong, but maintenance is brutal. Plan on €1,500 to €3,000 per month just for ops, plus hours from a developer who knows Magento. For 99% of Dutch shops it's overkill.

WooCommerce sits in the sweet spot:

• Open source, free. No licence fees, no per-transaction platform cut.
• Massive ecosystem. There's a good plugin for almost any problem, and if there isn't, you can build it.
• WordPress underneath. Content, blog and shop on the same system. Better for SEO, easier for editorial teams.
• You own everything. Code, database, hosting. You can leave at any time, to any other developer.

For 95% of Dutch shops doing up to about €5 million in revenue, this is the right call. Only at real enterprise scale — €10M+, international logistics, complex B2B roles, multi-warehouse — does Shopify Plus or Magento Commerce become seriously interesting.

A bit of math for the unconvinced. A Shopify shop doing €500k revenue typically pays €79/month subscription, or €299/month if you grow into Plus. On top of that 1.4 to 2.9% transaction fees if you're not on Shopify Payments. And then the apps — an average shop quickly burns €100 to €300/month on app subscriptions. Add it up: €5,000 to €20,000 per year in platform costs, just for being on Shopify.

The same shop on WooCommerce runs about €30/month hosting. No platform transaction fees. Plugins you either buy once or build yourself. The difference often pays for the rebuild within a year.

The WooCommerce ecosystem — which plugins are actually needed

WooCommerce has a massive plugin ecosystem, which is both its strength and its trap. The strength: there's a good plugin for almost anything. The trap: an average WooCommerce shop in the wild runs 40+ plugins that overlap each other, cause conflicts, and slow the site down. Seen it plenty of times.

Our standard plugin set on a new build is deliberately small:

• WooCommerce itself, with the core extensions for Mollie or Stripe and shipping.
• Yoast SEO or Rank Math for sitemap, breadcrumbs, schema.org and meta-tag control.
• ACF Pro for custom content blocks on product and category pages.
• WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache for caching, only if the host doesn't already handle it.
• Wordfence or iThemes Security for the security layer and login protection.

We add specific functionality where needed:

• WooCommerce Subscriptions if you sell subscriptions or recurring products.
• Smart Coupons for gift cards and rule-based discounts.
• WPML or Polylang for multilingual shops, e.g. NL/EN/DE.
• WooCommerce Bookings for appointment-driven shops, like consultancy or treatments.
• Advanced Shipment Tracking for track-and-trace.

What we explicitly avoid: page builders like Elementor and Divi. Yes, they're popular. They also slow sites down, lock you into a licence, and produce HTML nobody wants to maintain later. Same goes for "all-in-one" plugins doing SEO, caching, security and social all at once — too heavy, too much responsibility in one plugin. And plugins from obscure vendors with no maintenance history just stay out. Every plugin is a potential security hole. Less is almost always more.

Performance — why our WooCommerce shops are fast

The biggest myth about WooCommerce is that it's slow by nature. That's true for a lot of WooCommerce shops in the wild, but not because of WooCommerce. It's because of bad hosting, a bloated theme, and an accumulation of plugins. A properly built WooCommerce shop loads in under 1.5 seconds and scores PageSpeed Insights 90+ on mobile.

How we get there:

• PHP 8.2 or higher with OPcache. Modern PHP is two to three times faster than the PHP 7.x still running on a lot of Dutch hosts.
• MySQL 8 or MariaDB with query cache, tuned for WooCommerce queries. No slow queries on the product page.
• Redis as object cache. Drastically reduces database load on busy pages.
• NGINX or LiteSpeed as web server, not Apache. Better for concurrency.
• WebP image conversion. Usually 30 to 60% smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
• Cloudflare as CDN and WAF. Global speed plus bot/DDoS protection.
• Lazy loading on everything below the fold, critical CSS inline. First paint under a second.
• Monitored queries. No plugin scanning the entire database on every page load.

For B2B shops with large catalogues (5,000+ products) we add search tooling via Algolia or a dedicated ElasticSearch. WooCommerce's built-in search doesn't always scale once the catalogue gets really big. For international shops we add geo-routing via Cloudflare Workers so a German visitor lands directly on the DE version.

WooCommerce in Dordrecht, Breda, Roosendaal and beyond

Our clients sit across the Netherlands. The whole engagement runs remote — video calls, screenshare, your own GitHub. No geographic barrier. Over the years we've built WooCommerce shops for entrepreneurs in:

• Dordrecht — historic merchant city in South Holland, strong in maritime and wholesale.
• Breda — heavy B2B trade, fashion, food and productive industry.
• Roosendaal — logistics hub, perfect for shops with high shipping volume.
• Rotterdam — port-driven e-commerce, food import, B2B platforms.
• The Hague (Den Haag) — government suppliers, professional services, premium brands.
• Amsterdam — D2C brands, fashion, design, international shops.
• Utrecht — tech, SaaS upsell, B2B platforms.
• Eindhoven — tech hardware, design, international B2B.
• Tilburg, 's-Hertogenbosch and Helmond — Brabant manufacturing and wholesale.
• Groningen, Zwolle and Leeuwarden — northern entrepreneurs with strong regional ties.
• Maastricht, Heerlen and Sittard — Limburg and cross-border content (NL/DE/FR).
• Leiden, Delft, Haarlem and Alkmaar — premium retail, consumer brands.

Whether you're in Dordrecht digitising a wholesaler, in Breda running a fashion brand, or in Roosendaal building a logistics platform — the engagement works the same. One point of contact, no agency overhead, no account-manager layer.

Migrating from Shopify or Lightspeed — what actually happens, step by step

A big share of my work is migrations. Most clients don't come to WooCommerce fresh. They come because their current platform doesn't fit any more — too expensive, too limiting, or both. How the path runs:

Week 1 — analysis and plan. You give access to your Shopify export or Lightspeed database. We map products, customers, orders, discounts and SEO rankings. Which URLs hold their ranking? Which product attributes are Shopify-specific and don't need to come along? Which apps are essential and which can we drop?

Weeks 2 to 5 — staging build. Full new WooCommerce install on a staging domain. Products and categories come in cleanly via API or XML/CSV import, with variants and metadata intact. Customers and orders migrate on request — some clients deliberately choose a clean start. Custom theme that surpasses the Shopify design rather than copying it. Test orders through Mollie and one shipping integration.

Weeks 5 to 6 — SEO redirects and testing. Every old Shopify URL gets a 301 redirect to the WooCommerce equivalent. Categories, product pages, blog articles — all in a redirect map that runs in NGINX or via a redirects plugin. Google sees it as an address change, not a fresh start. Rankings carry over.

Week 7 — go-live. DNS switch on a Friday evening. For the first 48 hours I live-monitor errors, payment failures, 404s and performance. Monday morning your new shop runs, with the same rankings and lower monthly costs. The Shopify subscription can be cancelled in month two. Most clients see a conversion bump in the first month — better checkout, better mobile.

What it costs

Honest numbers. No "from €299/month" that turns out to bury half the features behind a higher tier.

A custom WooCommerce shop with us starts at €1,500 and runs up to €10,000–15,000 for fully tailored builds:

• Starter (€1,500–3,500) — custom theme layer on a clean base, around 25 products, iDEAL and credit card, one shipping integration, baseline SEO. Live in 3 to 5 weeks. For founders who want a real owned shop fast, without the Shopify fee.
• Standard (€3,500–7,500) — fully custom theme, 100+ products, stock import, subscriptions or gift cards, NL/EN, accounting integration, marketing pixels. Live in 5 to 8 weeks.
• Custom (€7,500–15,000+) — B2B roles with customer-specific pricing, ERP integration, custom checkout flow, configurators, marketplace features. Timeline by quote.

Fixed price up front, tied to a fixed delivery date. No surprises mid-project. Hosting (around €20 to €50/month at a Dutch host) and SSL are paid directly to the host — they don't show up on my invoice.

The process — concept to live in 4 to 8 weeks

1. Strategy call (free, 30 min). We talk through your products, audience, integrations and goals. By the end you know what it costs and how long it takes.
2. Concept document (week 1). Written scope with sitemap, product structure, integration list, design direction and deliverables. You sign off before any code gets written.
3. Design and build (weeks 2 to 6). Custom theme, product setup, payments, shipping, integrations. Weekly demos on a staging environment — your feedback gets folded in directly.
4. Test and content (weeks 6 to 7). Products loaded, payments verified, mobile and performance checked. You QA on staging.
5. Go-live (weeks 7 to 8). DNS switch on a Friday evening, weekend monitoring, your new shop runs Monday morning.

After go-live: optional monthly retainer for monitoring, updates, small changes and security patches. Or you run it yourself — both options work.

Having a WooCommerce webshop built is, in the end, a choice for ownership and freedom. No more monthly vendor fee. No platform suddenly changing the rules. Book a free strategy call — within 30 minutes you'll know whether WooCommerce is genuinely the right fit for your situation, and what I'd quote for the build.