WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Services

WooCommerce to Shopify
Migration Services

WordPress and WooCommerce stores moved to Shopify
without losing the rankings you already have.

Schedule Your Call

Moving a WooCommerce store to Shopify is usually a decision about what you want to stop maintaining. Plugin conflicts, hosting, security patching, the update that breaks checkout on a Friday. Shopify takes that away and charges you for it, which for a lot of merchants is a straightforward trade.

The migration itself is less straightforward than the tools suggest — not because the data is hard to move, but because WooCommerce stores are really WordPress sites, and WordPress sites accumulate.

What makes WooCommerce migrations different

Your store is a WordPress site. Product data lives in WooCommerce, but it also lives in custom fields added by plugins, in a page builder’s saved layouts, and in content types that exist only because a theme created them. A product export captures the first of those.

The URL structure is unusually variable. Permalink settings, category bases, product bases, attribute archives, paginated category pages, author archives, and tag pages that nobody knew were indexed. This is why the redirect map has to come from a crawl of the live site rather than from the sitemap — WordPress sitemaps routinely omit whole classes of URL that are earning impressions.

Attributes and variations don’t map cleanly. WooCommerce’s global attributes and per-product variations behave differently from Shopify’s three-option variant model. A product with four attributes does not fit, and deciding how it should land is a modelling decision made once, carefully, rather than a setting.

Half your functionality is plugins. Reviews, subscriptions, wishlists, bookings, memberships, quoting. Each is a separate export with a separate destination, and each needs a decision about whether it survives the move at all.

What we do

Build and verify the redirect map. From a full crawl of the live site, every URL that earned an impression in the last twelve months, and your backlink profile. Every URL gets a destination; every destination is tested before launch, in both trailing-slash forms.

Remodel the catalog. Attributes and variations mapped onto Shopify’s variant and option structure, with a trial migration on a representative subset early — so the products that don’t fit surface while there is still time to decide what to do about them.

Migrate the plugin data. Reviews to a Shopify reviews app with their structured data intact. Subscriptions planned separately, because they always need a plan. Custom fields to metafields, so the data your theme depends on is still there afterwards.

Handle the content. Posts to Shopify’s blog, pages rebuilt as sections, and an honest recommendation about anything built in a page builder — which is usually that it needs rebuilding rather than porting.

Rebuild the storefront. An Online Store 2.0 theme, built so your team can merchandise without a developer. More on how we approach Shopify design and development.

What the tools do and don’t

Shopify’s Store Importer moves products, customers and orders. For a straightforward catalog it does that well, and there is no reason to do it by hand.

It does not build your redirect map. It does not decide how a four-attribute product becomes a three-option variant. It does not migrate reviews, subscriptions, or the custom fields your old theme was reading. It does not tell you that the category page ranking for your best term has no equivalent on the new site.

That gap is the migration. The transfer is the part that was already solved.

Should you migrate at all?

Some honest cases where the answer is no.

If hosting is the complaint, fix the hosting. Many WooCommerce performance problems are hosting and plugin bloat, not WooCommerce. Both are cheaper to solve where you are.

If you need deep customization of checkout, WooCommerce gives you more freedom than Shopify does. Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility is more capable than it used to be and more constrained than editing PHP.

If subscriptions are core to the business, price that work honestly before committing. It is frequently the largest line in the project.

Start with what you actually have

Tell us roughly how many products, which plugins are load-bearing, and whether subscriptions are involved. We’ll tell you what the move actually looks like — including if it isn’t worth making.

Schedule Your Call

More on how we run migrations generally on the ecommerce migration services page, or read the migration checklist. Still deciding? WooCommerce vs Shopify is the honest comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a WooCommerce to Shopify migration take?
Six to ten weeks end to end for a conventional catalog, including the storefront build. A bare data transfer is faster, but it is not a migration — it is the easy third of one. What extends timelines is rarely Shopify. It is WordPress: content spread across pages, posts and a page builder, product data in custom fields added by three different plugins, and a URL structure nobody has reviewed since launch.
What happens to our blog and WordPress content?
Posts move to Shopify's blog reasonably well. Everything else needs a decision, because WordPress sites accumulate content types Shopify has no equivalent for — custom post types, page-builder layouts, and landing pages built with a plugin that won't exist after the move. Some sites keep WordPress for content and run Shopify for commerce. That's a legitimate architecture and occasionally the right one, though it means maintaining two systems.
Will our product reviews survive?
Only if you migrate them deliberately. Reviews live in a plugin, not in WooCommerce itself, so they are invisible to a standard product export and they do not come across by default. This matters beyond the social proof: reviews carry your review structured data, so losing them has a visible cost in search results. They need their own export and a destination app on the Shopify side.
What about our subscriptions?
This is usually the hardest part of the migration and it deserves its own plan. Recurring billing is tied to your payment gateway and your subscriptions plugin, and those relationships do not transfer. In practice most subscription migrations involve re-enrolling customers on the new platform, which is a customer-communication project as much as a technical one. If you run subscriptions, raise it in the first conversation — it changes the shape of the whole engagement.
Do we lose our SEO?
Not if the redirect map is built properly, which is the single largest factor. WordPress URL structures are highly variable — permalink settings, category bases, product bases, attribute archives — so the inventory has to come from crawling the live site rather than from the sitemap. Expect a dip of 10-20% for four to six weeks, then recovery. A dip still deepening at week six means something is wrong with the redirects.
Can we do it ourselves?
For a small, conventional catalog with a simple permalink structure and no subscriptions — genuinely yes, and Shopify's Store Importer is a reasonable tool for it. We would rather tell you that than sell you a project you don't need. It stops being self-serviceable when the variant model needs remodelling, when reviews and subscriptions are involved, or when you have enough organic traffic that getting the redirects wrong is expensive.