Shopify migration
Moving to Shopify, without the traffic drop
The risk in this move is not the products. It is the eight hundred URLs Google already knows about, and the order history your support team needs on Monday.
The trigger
Why people make this move
Content and commerce in one WordPress install works until the commerce outgrows it. The usual triggers are checkout performance and plugin conflicts at scale.
Then there is the one that is rarely written down: nobody is left who wants to own plugin updates, security patching and hosting. That maintenance load is the real reason most of these migrations start.
The easy part
What actually moves
Products, variants, collections, customers and orders all have a defined path across. Scripted, run and re-run against a staging store until the diff is zero, never hand-copied.
This part is solved, and it is not where migrations go wrong.
The hard part
What does not survive the move
WooCommerce is open source, so your modifications of anything, including checkout, are yours. On Shopify you are inside their restrictions.
Everything below descends from that one sentence. It is a single trade, not a list of complaints, and it is worth reading as one.
Your URL structure
Shopify forces /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/. Every WordPress permalink changes, with no exceptions and no plugin that fixes it. This is why the redirect map is the migration rather than an afterthought to it.
Page-builder layouts
Elementor, Divi, WPBakery. The words come across. The layout does not, and it has to be rebuilt in the theme.
Plugins
There is no equivalent concept. Each one becomes an app, a theme change, or custom work, and the count is usually the surprise.
Custom post types and ACF fields
No native home. They become metafields or they are dropped, and that decision gets made deliberately rather than discovered at cutover.
Customer passwords
These never transfer, from any platform. Every customer resets on first login, and that has to be in the launch comms.
Subscription data
Rarely transfers cleanly. Usually rebuilt in the destination app, with the billing dates re-anchored by hand.
Product variants past Shopify's ceiling
Three options per product, one hundred variants. Catalogues built around WooCommerce attributes hit this and have to be re-modelled.
Custom functionality, and this is the one that costs money
A custom plugin may have no app equivalent at all, or the nearest app is more limiting than what the store has today. Three outcomes, and one gets picked per feature: find an alternative that does the job a different way, give the feature up, or build a custom Shopify app. Scoping a migration is mostly this decision repeated, not the data transfer.
One that does survive, with a condition
Reviews can be migrated, by export and import. The catch is that it narrows the destination, because only some review apps support importing. So the review app gets chosen during the migration, not after it.
Where traffic is lost
The redirect map is the migration
Crawl and export first
Every indexed URL, captured before anything is touched. You cannot map what you did not write down, and after cutover the old site is gone.
Map old to new, one to one
Every URL gets its own destination. Mass redirects to the homepage are the single most common way a migration loses its rankings.
Publish the redirects before DNS moves
Not after. The window between the switch and the redirects going live is the window Google crawls.
Re-crawl, then fix the chains
A 301 alone is not the job. The sitemap has to stop listing the old URL and the internal links have to stop pointing at it, or Google keeps asking.
Coming from WordPress
Two different jobs wearing one name
Content-only WordPress
Mostly a URL and template exercise. The posts and pages move, the permalinks all change, and the work is in the redirect map and rebuilding the templates.
WooCommerce
The harder of the two by some distance. It brings the attribute model, the plugin stack and the order history with it, and each of those three is its own decision.
The honest version
When Shopify is the wrong answer
Your pricing logic is genuinely complex
Per-customer contract pricing, approval workflows and quote-based buying beyond what Shopify B2B models. The platform will fight you and the apps will not close the gap.
The catalogue is driven by an ERP
Deep, frequently changing product data owned by another system. That is an integration problem first, and the storefront is the easy half.
You have to own the checkout
If the checkout itself carries logic you need to write and keep, Shopify is the wrong place to be. That is the trade at the top of this page, stated as a deal-breaker.
Still worth it
The maintenance load is what people are leaving
Everything above is a list of what you give up, and a page that stops there argues against the thing it is describing. So, plainly: in almost every case Shopify is the better place to be.
WooCommerce is a lot to maintain. Plugin updates, security patching, hosting, and the compatibility check every time any one of them moves. What you lose in the migration is the price of not owning that any more, and for most teams it is worth paying.
How it runs
The five phases
Audit
Every URL, every product, every redirect that already exists on the old site.
Model
What a product actually is on the new platform, and what has no home there.
Build
Theme, apps, integrations.
Migrate
Scripted, run and re-run against staging until the diff is zero.
Cutover
Redirects live before DNS moves, not after.
Thinking about a move to Shopify?
Tell us what you are on now and what is breaking. We will tell you what survives the move, what does not, and whether the trade is worth it for you.