Migrating to Shopify

Replatforming is one of the few ecommerce projects where the risk is concentrated almost entirely in the first week after launch. Get the preparation right and the switch is uneventful. Get it wrong and you spend months recovering traffic you already had.

This is what to sort out before you migrate, and what differs depending on whether you are coming from Wix, WooCommerce or Magento.

The one thing that matters most

Redirects. If you take nothing else from this article, take this: every URL that currently exists and has any traffic or any inbound link needs a 301 redirect to its equivalent on the new store.

This is where most migrations lose money, and the loss is rarely obvious immediately. Rankings decay over weeks, so a store can look fine for a fortnight and then quietly fall off.

Before you touch anything:

1. Export every URL from your current site. Crawl it rather than relying on the CMS list, so you catch pages nobody remembers.
2. Pull your top pages by traffic from analytics and by impressions from Search Console.
3. Export your backlinks so you know which URLs other sites point at.
4. Map old URL to new URL in a spreadsheet, every row accounted for.
5. Load the map into Shopify's URL redirect tool before launch, not after.

Shopify's URL structure is fixed in ways others are not. Products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, blog posts under /blogs/{blog}/{article}. You cannot reshape this freely, which means URLs will change and the mapping is unavoidable.

What to migrate, and what to leave behind

A migration is a rare opportunity to not carry your mess across.

Bring: products with genuine sales history, customers, order history, live content with traffic, reviews, and your URL structure via redirects.

Consider leaving: products discontinued years ago, thin blog posts written for keyword volume, duplicate category pages, and any custom feature nobody has used since it was built.

Be deliberate rather than automatic. Deleting a product that still gets search traffic costs you; carrying 4,000 dead SKUs costs you differently, in crawl budget and in admin noise.

Data that needs careful handling

Products and variants

Shopify's variant model is straightforward: up to three options per product. Platforms with more flexible attribute systems, Magento especially, often have structures that do not map cleanly. Establish this early, because the answer sometimes changes the shape of the catalogue.

Customers and passwords

Customer records migrate. Passwords do not, because they are hashed and cannot be transferred between platforms. Existing customers will need to reset on first login.

Plan the communication for this. An unannounced forced password reset generates support tickets and looks like a security incident to a nervous customer.

Order history

Historical orders can be imported, and it is worth doing for customer service and for lifetime value reporting. Note that imported orders will not carry every piece of transactional detail.

Reviews

Reviews are frequently forgotten and expensive to lose, both as social proof and as content. Most review apps offer an import path, but check the format before you commit to a provider.

Platform-specific notes

Coming from Wix

Usually the simplest migration, because Wix stores tend to be smaller with less custom logic. Two things to watch.

Wix URL patterns differ substantially from Shopify's, so the redirect map matters even on a small catalogue. And Wix's built-in features, such as bookings or member areas, may need an app or a rebuild on Shopify rather than a like-for-like transfer.

On the other hand, expect a performance improvement almost for free. Shopify's hosting and CDN are typically a step up.

Coming from WooCommerce

The most common migration we handle, and the one with the biggest hidden variable: plugins.

A mature WooCommerce store often runs twenty or more plugins, and each is a piece of business logic somebody depends on. Inventory the lot and decide for each whether it becomes a Shopify app, a theme customisation, or something you stop doing. That audit is usually the single largest piece of scoping work.

Also plan for:

• Content. WordPress blogs are often substantial. Shopify's blogging is more limited, and categories and tags do not map one to one.
• URL structure. WooCommerce permalinks are configurable and frequently customised, so redirect mapping needs care.
• Custom fields. ACF and similar map to Shopify metafields, which is usually clean but rarely automatic.

The trade you are making is control for maintenance. You give up some flexibility and stop maintaining hosting, security patching and plugin conflicts.

Coming from Magento

The most complex, and usually the most rewarding when the reason for moving is total cost of ownership.

Magento stores tend to have large catalogues, complex attribute sets, multi-store setups and years of custom development. Specific issues to plan for:

• Attribute complexity. Magento's configurable products can exceed Shopify's three-option limit. Sometimes the catalogue genuinely needs restructuring.
• Multi-store. Magento's multi-store maps to Shopify Markets, expansion stores, or both. Decide before you build.
• Custom modules. Years of bespoke development rarely transfers directly. Establish which behaviours are genuinely required.
• B2B. If you rely on Magento's B2B features, look carefully at Shopify's native B2B, which sits on the Plus plan.
• Integrations. ERP and PIM connections usually need rebuilding.

We took Gardinex from a headless setup onto native Shopify, and the pattern there is typical of these projects: the technical migration is manageable, and the real work is deciding which accumulated complexity is genuinely required. That case is written up in our Gardinex case study.

A sequence that works

1. Audit. Full URL crawl, traffic and ranking baseline, plugin and feature inventory, integration list.
2. Decide scope. What moves, what is rebuilt, what is retired.
3. Build on a development store. Theme, apps, integrations, with real data imported early enough to expose problems.
4. Map redirects. Every URL, checked line by line.
5. Test. Checkout on real devices, tax and shipping rules, order flow through to fulfilment, integrations end to end.
6. Launch at a quiet moment. Not the week before your peak season.
7. Monitor closely. Search Console for crawl errors, analytics for traffic by page, and your own funnel.

The first fortnight after launch

Watch for these, in this order:

• 404s in Search Console. Every one is a redirect you missed. Fix daily at first.
• Traffic by landing page. Compare against your pre-launch baseline and investigate any page that has dropped sharply.
• Indexation. Confirm the new URLs are being indexed and old ones are resolving.
• Conversion rate. A drop here usually means a checkout or payment configuration issue rather than an SEO one.
• Site speed. Establish a new baseline against the tightened 2.0 second LCP threshold Google introduced in March 2026.

Expect some ranking movement in the first few weeks even on a well-executed migration. Google needs to recrawl and reassess. What you are watching for is recovery within roughly four to eight weeks, not immediate stability.

Common ways migrations go wrong

• Launching without redirects, planning to add them later. By then the damage is underway.
• Migrating during peak season. Any problem is at its most expensive precisely then.
• Treating it as a like-for-like copy. Shopify works differently. Recreating your old site exactly usually means fighting the platform.
• Skipping the plugin audit. Discovering a missing critical feature after launch is a bad week.
• Forgetting non-product pages. Policy pages, landing pages and campaign URLs all carry links.
• No rollback plan. Keep the old site accessible privately until you are confident.

Is it worth doing?

For most stores under real operational strain from their current platform, yes. The gains are usually less about features and more about what stops being your problem: hosting, security patching, PCI compliance, plugin conflicts and the constant low-level maintenance those create.

What you give up is some flexibility, particularly around checkout on the standard plans and around deeply custom catalogue structures.

If you are weighing it up, the useful question is not whether Shopify can do what your current platform does. It is which of the things your current platform does you actually still need.

We have handled migrations from all three platforms. If you would like a candid view on what yours would involve, get in touch.