WooCommerce to Shopify, without the guesswork.

Why stores move, and when it isn't worth it

Most owners who switch aren't short of features; they're tired of running WooCommerce: hosting, WordPress and plugin updates, conflicts, security patches and certificates. On Shopify the hosting and platform are managed for you, a TLS certificate is issued free for every domain you connect, and checkout and payments are part of the product rather than plugins you maintain.

That convenience has trade-offs worth weighing honestly:

• Costs shift from hosting to subscriptions. You pay a monthly plan plus any paid apps. Shopify Payments, where it's available, avoids the extra transaction fees that apply when you use a third-party payment provider.
• Less structural freedom. URL prefixes are fixed, products are limited to three options, and the checkout is customised through Shopify's settings, apps and extensions rather than by editing its code.

A move is often not worth it if your site is mainly a content or membership platform that happens to sell, if your products rely on configurators well beyond three options, or if WooCommerce runs smoothly and someone already maintains it well. If speed is the main complaint, fixing performance on your current stack may be the cheaper answer.

What moves across, and what doesn't

Shopify's own WooCommerce migration guide covers the basics. In short:

For orders and the other gaps, apps such as Matrixify, LitExtension, Cart2Cart and Ablestar WooCommerce Importer connect to WooCommerce data. Coverage and pricing differ, so test each on your own data first.

Products and variations

WooCommerce's built-in exporter (Products > All Products > Export) writes one parent row per variable product plus one row per variation. The Store Migration app takes that file unedited. Products with four or more variation attributes import without their variants, so restructure those first: merge attributes, split the product or use an options app. Shopify allows up to 2,048 variants and three options per product.

Shopify downloads images from your live WooCommerce URLs during import, so keep the old site online until it finishes.

Customers and passwords

Passwords can't be moved, because they're encrypted outside Shopify. With Shopify's current customer accounts, people sign in with their email and a one-time six-digit code, so there's nothing to reset. With legacy customer accounts, you invite customers to create a new password. Either way, tell them before launch.

WooCommerce's default customer export lacks full addresses, so you may need an export plugin. Shopify's customer CSV has to match its template exactly, and the Accepts Email Marketing column should say yes only for people who opted in.

SEO titles and descriptions

Yoast and Rank Math store custom titles and descriptions as product metadata. In the WooCommerce exporter, choose Yes, export all custom meta to add plugin metadata as extra columns (named meta: plus the field key), and check your SEO fields are among them. Copy them into Shopify's SEO title (up to 70 characters) and SEO description (up to 320) columns; blanks fall back to the product title and description. Replace placeholders such as Yoast's %%title%%, which mean nothing to Shopify.

Subscriptions and saved payment methods

Subscription contracts are recreated through a subscription app or Shopify's APIs. Saved cards are a separate job: migrating payment tokens works on all plans with your subscription app developer, while moving raw card numbers needs Shopify Plus or Enterprise and Shopify's Professional Services. Stripe, Braintree, PayPal Express and Authorize.net can be connected as a secondary gateway that bills existing contracts only. Wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay and bank details aren't supported by the card-number service, and PayPal billing agreements follow a separate route, so check every payment type before you set a date.

URL changes and keeping your rankings

Shopify's URL structure is fixed: products live at /products/handle, collections at /collections/handle, pages at /pages/handle and posts at /blogs/blog-handle/post-handle. WooCommerce URLs depend on your permalink settings, but common patterns are:

• Products: /product/blue-hoodie/, or /shop/blue-hoodie/ and /shop/hoodies/blue-hoodie/ with a shop base
• Categories: /product-category/hoodies/
• Tags: /product-tag/casual/
• Pages and posts: usually /about-us/, or a date-based or custom structure for posts

Almost every URL changes, so every old URL with traffic or backlinks needs a permanent (301) redirect to its closest match.

Build the redirect map

1. Collect every old URL from your sitemap, Search Console, analytics and a crawl of the live site.
2. Keep Shopify handles identical to your WooCommerce slugs, so most mappings only swap the prefix.
3. Map one to one: each product to its product, each category to its collection. Google advises against sending many old URLs to one unrelated page such as the home page.
4. Point discontinued products to the closest collection.

Import redirects in bulk

In the Shopify admin, go to Content > Menus > View URL redirects, choose Import and upload a CSV based on Shopify's sample template. A store can hold up to 100,000 URL redirects (20 million on Plus). Shopify recommends setting them up before you move the domain.

Know the limits

• Shopify only redirects broken URLs. If an old path still loads a page, the redirect is ignored.
• You can't redirect from fixed paths such as /products, /collections and /collections/all, or from URLs that begin with reserved prefixes, including /cart, /orders, /apps and /shop. That last one matters: WooCommerce's shop page usually sits at /shop/, and some stores use it as a product base. Test these early, and where a redirect isn't possible, update the links you control, such as ads, emails and social profiles.
• URLs with query strings, such as WordPress's plain /?product=111 format, may not redirect as expected.
• Test old URLs with and without a trailing slash, since WordPress URLs often end in one.

Plugins to apps: what replaces what

List every active plugin and decide whether Shopify, an app, the theme or nothing replaces it. Common swaps:

• Yoast SEO, Rank Math: built in. Products, collections, pages and posts have SEO title and description fields, the sitemap.xml is generated automatically, and every store has a default robots.txt. You can edit it, but Shopify warns that mistakes can cost you all your traffic.
• WooCommerce Subscriptions: the free Shopify Subscriptions app or a third-party subscription app.
• Bundle plugins: the free Shopify Bundles app covers fixed bundles and multipacks; look at third-party apps for other types.
• Filter and search plugins: Shopify Search & Discovery (free) for filters, search tuning and recommendations.
• WPML, Polylang and currency switchers: Shopify's markets settings for countries, local currency pricing and international domains, plus Shopify Translate & Adapt (free) for translation.
• Downloadable products: Shopify Digital Products (free).
• Product add-ons: a product options app or custom theme code. Fixed details such as care instructions can live in metafields.
• Review plugins: a review app. Shopify's guide names Judge.me and Ablestar as options that import WooCommerce reviews.
• Caching, security and SSL plugins: not needed, since hosting and certificates are handled for you.

Each app adds a monthly cost and often extra scripts on your storefront, so only replace what you actually use.

A step-by-step migration plan

1. Audit and benchmark. Record top landing pages, rankings for main search terms, conversion rate and average order value, plus every plugin and integration.
2. Decide what moves and how. How many years of orders, whether reviews and posts come across, and which tool handles each.
3. Build in private mode. New Shopify stores start behind a password page, hidden from visitors and search engines.
4. Set up the theme and key pages. Carry over the headings and copy of your best-ranking pages.
5. Import in order: products, then customers, then orders. Turn off staff new-order notifications first, or you'll get an email for every imported order.
6. Check the data. Compare prices, compare-at prices, weights, stock, variants, images and SEO fields with WooCommerce.
7. Organise. Build collections and menus, and publish the draft products to your sales channels.
8. Configure the store: shipping, taxes, payments, checkout, notifications, policies and staff accounts.
9. Run test orders: successful and failed payments, refunds, cancellations and partial fulfilment.
10. Import your redirects.
11. Freeze and catch up. On a quiet day, pause changes in WooCommerce, then import customers and orders created since your first pass (check your tool supports this) and move gift card balances.
12. Switch the domain. Shopify advises disconnecting it from your old platform first to avoid certificate errors. Following its manual connection steps, the A record points to 23.227.38.65, the www CNAME to shops.myshopify.com, and old A and AAAA records pointing at your previous host are removed. It can take up to 48 hours to go fully live.
13. Launch. Turn off private mode and work through the checklist below.

Launch checklist and the first 30 days

Launch day

• The domain shows as connected, it's set as primary, and the padlock appears.
• Private mode is off.
• Your top 50 old URLs each land on the right page in a single redirect.
• A real order goes through end to end, and you can refund it.
• Notification emails read correctly, and staff alerts are back on.
• Analytics, ad conversion tracking and pixels are recording.
• Product feeds and marketplace connections point to the new store.
• Your sitemap (/sitemap.xml) is submitted in Google Search Console. As the domain stays the same, Google's Change of Address tool isn't needed.
• Customers know how signing in works now.

The first 30 days

• Week one: check Search Console's page indexing report and your analytics for 404s every day, and redirect anything you missed.
• Weeks two to four: compare rankings, organic traffic, conversion rate and average order value with your benchmark. Some movement is normal: Google says it can take a few weeks or more for a medium-sized site's new URLs to replace the old ones.
• Update internal links in posts and pages so they point straight at new URLs.
• Keep your redirects; Google recommends at least a year.
• Keep a full backup of the WordPress files and database before you cancel hosting.

What affects the cost and timeline

These are what drive the effort:

• Catalogue size and complexity: the number of products and variants, and how many exceed three options.
• Data scope: years of orders, reviews, blog posts, gift cards and customers.
• Data quality: messy attributes and duplicate customers take time to clean.
• Plugins and custom features: how many need an app, theme code or a custom app.
• Integrations: ERP, warehouse, accounting, marketplaces and email platforms.
• Subscriptions: payment-method migration means coordinating your gateway, your app and possibly Shopify.
• Design: adapting a theme is quicker than a fully custom build.
• Languages and markets: each one adds translation and testing.

Leave time for testing, and avoid launching just before your busiest season. Budget for running costs too: your Shopify plan and any paid apps.

Questions