Updated September 2026
We've migrated stores to Shopify from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and a few custom platforms that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place. Some migrations took a week. Some took months. The difference was almost never the size of the catalog. It was how well the merchant understood what was about to change.
Most migration guides focus on the technical steps: export your data, import it into Shopify, set up redirects, go live. That part is real, and Shopify helps with it: products, customers, historical orders, gift cards, blog posts and pages can all be brought over with CSV files, Shopify's Store Migration app or third-party migration apps. But it's the straightforward part. What actually trips people up are the decisions and surprises that come after the data has moved.
If you're planning a move, here's what we'd tell you over coffee before you start.
Your URLs are going to change
Every platform structures URLs differently. On WooCommerce you might have /shop/blue-widget; on Magento, /blue-widget.html. Shopify uses its own fixed structure: products at /products/blue-widget, collections at /collections/lamps, pages at /pages/about-us, blog posts under /blogs/. You can choose the handle at the end, but not the folder in front of it.
So every product, collection, page and post on your current site needs a 301 redirect to its new Shopify address. Skip it or do it sloppily, and anyone following an old link from Google, a blog, a social bio or a backlink lands on a "page not found", and the search rankings those pages had built up go with them.
Shopify's URL redirects live under Content → Menus → URL redirects, and you can import them in bulk from a CSV. Standard plans allow up to 100,000 redirects. The real work is the mapping spreadsheet. For a few hundred pages it's an afternoon; for thousands it takes proper planning.
Do this before you go live, not after. After launch, check the old URLs again for a few weeks. Google Search Console will report 404s, but with a delay, so don't rely on it alone. Submit your new sitemap there too, and if the domain is changing, use Search Console's Change of Address tool.
Expect a temporary SEO dip
Even with good redirects, most migrations lose some organic traffic at first while search engines crawl the redirects and reindex the new pages. Shopify's SEO migration guide puts recovery at anywhere from a few weeks for small sites to one to six months for larger ones, depending mostly on how many pages you have and how much of your traffic comes from non-branded searches.
The mistake is panicking and changing more during that period. Don't redesign pages, rewrite product descriptions and restructure URLs at the same time as migrating. Move the content as it is, get stable, then improve.
Timing matters too. Shopify recommends migrating at least six months before your busy season, or straight after it. Moving in October when your year depends on Black Friday is asking for trouble. Our beginner's guide to Shopify SEO covers what to tidy up once you're settled.
Customer passwords don't migrate
Nobody expects this one. You can import customer records, but not their passwords: they're encrypted by your old platform and can't be moved.
How much that matters depends on which kind of customer accounts you use. With Shopify's current customer accounts, customers sign in with their email and a one-time code, so there's no password to reset. They just sign in. With the older, legacy accounts, which Shopify now marks as deprecated, imported customers have to be invited to create a new password.
Either way, tell customers before it happens. A heads-up email before the switch, a short note after launch explaining how to sign in, and a banner for the first week. Don't let them discover it at checkout.
Shopify covers a lot natively
Shopify's built-in feature set is broader than most platforms'. Product management, discounts, abandoned checkout emails, analytics, email marketing with Shopify Email, a blog, gift cards and customer accounts are all included without installing anything. Merchants coming from WooCommerce or Magento are often surprised by how far they get before they need an app.
Apps come in for the specific stuff: advanced reviews, loyalty programs, product customization, back-in-stock alerts. You'll probably end up with a handful. Before you migrate, list what each current plugin does and find its Shopify equivalent, native or app, so the monthly budget is clear from the start. What a store really costs to run helps with that list.
Shopify's checkout is opinionated, and that's mostly good
Shopify's checkout is fast and handles address entry, shipping rates, taxes and payments without you building or maintaining any of it. Most merchants find it works better out of the box than the custom checkout they were looking after before.
The trade-off is control. On any plan you can brand the checkout with your logo, colors and fonts, and apps can add blocks to the Thank you and Order status pages. Apps that customize the information, shipping and payment steps themselves are only available on Shopify Plus. What you can't do on any plan is inject your own code into the checkout.
For most stores that's fine: it's one less thing to maintain. But if your current checkout does something your business depends on, like custom fields, delivery date pickers or special payment rules, check how that carries over before you commit.
What's actually better
The admin is fast. Coming from Magento or an old WooCommerce install, the difference in how quickly you can find and edit products and process orders is obvious straight away.
Hosting and security are handled. No more SSL renewals, server updates, or a site going down because a plugin conflicted with a PHP update.
Payments are simpler. In countries where Shopify Payments is available and it's your only provider, you pay card processing rates but no extra Shopify transaction fee. Third-party providers add a transaction fee that depends on your plan.
The free themes are genuinely good now, and Online Store 2.0 themes let you build pages from sections without touching code.
Before you start
- List every feature, plugin and integration you depend on, and find the Shopify equivalent for each. That avoids the "wait, we used to have that" moment three weeks after launch.
- Build the redirect spreadsheet first. It's the most important technical step and the one that does the most long-term damage if it's rushed.
- Decide on customer accounts and write the emails that explain how customers will sign in.
- Pick your moment. Not during your busiest season; ideally six months before it.
- Freeze other changes. Redesigns and rewrites can wait until traffic is stable.
If your store does serious volume, has thousands of products, complex integrations or years of SEO history, professional help pays for itself. We migrate stores to Shopify and we've done enough of these to know where the surprises hide. For a lighter overview of starting fresh versus moving an existing store, see moving to Shopify.