How to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify – the ultimate guide

If you want to know how to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify successfully, you’re in the right place. What follows is a summary of all our experience (and that of some amazing teams we’ve worked with) boiled down into a high-level plan. Let’s get going.

Why do merchants consider migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify?

Before we get into the guide, let’s take a moment to discuss why many merchants are making the move from WooCommerce to Shopify.

The brands we talk to, and help, are usually looking for a more robust solution as they are scaling their eCommerce businesses. Shopify provides an entire platform built exclusively for commerce so it can often offer better technology and tools to support merchants’ growth.

It also tends to be a much more reliable solution, resolving issues with downtime, broken plugins and store management that can come with WooCommerce.

Here are the leading reasons:

• Simplified store management: No hosting, security, or plugin conflicts to manage. Less downtime or broken features
• Purpose built for eCommerce – quicker to ship features, less reliance on developers.
• Reliable, scalable hosting included: Shopify takes care of performance and uptime.
• Better support: 24/7 customer service vs WooCommerce’s reliance on third-party providers.
• All-in-one ecosystem: Built-in payments, marketing, and sales channels.
• User-friendly dashboard: Easier for non-technical store owners and teams.

If you want to dig deeper into this, we have an in-depth guide comparing guide to Shopify vs WooCommerce.

If you do decide to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify then we’re excited for you! In addition to the benefits, there are some risks to consider along the way (data, SEO etc.) if you don’t plan it carefully. So this guide will give you a high-level path to ensure you have a successful, profitable migration.

Migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify – the high-level plan

So, you’ve decided going from WooCommerce to Shopify might be a good move for you. Let’s dive into the major steps to consider, making sure this is a roaring success.

Review your current WooCommerce store

Of course, you can migrate your WooCommerce store to Shopify to match the current design and features very closely. However, this is a great time to think about how you can build in some good UX improvements to your store.

To do this, start considering, and documenting the following:

• What’s working well that you want to retain / evolve
• What’s not working and needs to be addressed
• What’s holding growth back and should be developed

Write everything down with the associated current KPIs so you are clear what your baseline measurements are. This gives you a good start to planning the blueprint for your new Shopify store.

Create the blueprint for the new Shopify store

Now you know the high-level strategy for your Shopify store, you can turn this into a set of requirements – the more specific you can be the better. For example, let’s say you want to increase your cart to checkout ratio, we would recommend documenting the following:

• Current % rate across different devices / locales etc.
• Hypotheses for how to improve – e.g. show free delivery incentive on cart slide out / page.
• Target % rate across the same dimensions as first step.
• How you will achieve this.

Build out these same points for all key points in your store so you have a complete blueprint for your new Shopify store.

Create your Shopify account and store

Head to Shopify and select your plan and start your free trial.

From here, you can add your starter theme so you have a basic framework to display products, collections and content.

Clean up and migrate test data

Before you start migrating test data to Shopify, this is a perfect moment to clean up your current data (think carefully about back-ups before starting this work). Tidying up categories, products, blogs will help for a smoother migration and a stronger result at go-live.

It’s best to start brining across the data early so you can see any potential mismatches. One example we see very often is messy code being pulled across from product copy. Another is the use of short and long descriptions in WooCommerce that Shopify themes don’t generally accommodate out of the box.

Here is a starter list for the data you should pull across and check / test:

• 🛒 Products & product categories
• 📋 Customer accounts and data
• 📦 Order history
• 📝 Blog posts and content pages
• 🖼️ Images and media
• 🔗 URLs and redirects for SEO
• 💳 Payment and shipping settings

There are some great migration services to help with this such as LitExtension, or you can do via CSV.

Once you’ve pulled your data across, start reviewing the front end and back end to make sure everything is visible and functions as you expect.

Set up payment methods

Configuring payment methods is a crucial step in launching a fully functional Shopify store. Shopify supports a wide range of gateways, including Shopify Payments, PayPal, Klarna, and others — depending on your market and customer needs.

If eligible, Shopify Payments is usually the best choice, offering major credit card and digital wallet support (Apple Pay, Google Pay) with low fees and a unified dashboard for payouts, chargebacks, and analytics. It also simplifies your checkout by reducing third-party dependencies.

For international brands, enabling local payment methods can significantly boost conversion rates. Shopify makes it easy to tailor these based on customer location and checkout behaviour.

During migration, you’ll need to manually set up all payment gateways — saved payment credentials won’t transfer due to PCI compliance. Test each method thoroughly before launch, including refunds, authorisation, and failure scenarios.

Lastly, if you use third-party services for financing, subscriptions, or Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), ensure these are fully integrated and tested ahead of launch, especially if they require apps or custom scripts.

Shipping and Markets settings

Now it’s time to set up your shipping and markets configurations. These settings are readily available in Shopify’s settings. Take your time planning and setting the different countries and shipping rates you offer.

Plan and Set up SEO

Setting up SEO is one of the most crucial steps to a perfect migration. Shopify has a totally different URL structure to WooCommerce so make sure to map the category and product structures (to name just two) carefully.

Create a comprehensive 301 redirect plan to make certain every old URL is redirected to the appropriate place in the new store. Shopify has a redirect manager available out of the box and you can import your redirects into it via a CSV file.

Design

This is of course one of the most exciting and involved parts of your project. This part will take a large part of the project’s timeline, so we recommend doing this in parallel with the other important tasks, e.g. pulling in product and collection data.

Build or update your theme using the strategy you created at your north star. We’ve found this often gets over-looked or diverted from. But this is a huge opportunity to think more broadly than aesthetics and consider user journeys, conversion rates, cross-sell / up-sell and page load speed (to name just a few).

It is important to keep the structure of content that performs well in SEO consistent to be certain to mirror this where needed.

Finally, don’t just build for today but for the next three years – make certain the design will be ready to accommodate your future growth plans.

Testing

There are several things you need to test before you go live with your new store, here a few key things to do:

• Check user journeys: home > collections > products > cart > checkout etc
• Place an order with multiple payment methods
• Test refunds, cancellation, order editing
• Check data is passing to your WMS correctly
• Check apps are working as expected
• Test integrations with analytics, email tools etc.

Launch

Once you are happy you are ready to launch, you’ve done a lot of the hard work. Here are the steps needed to make your new site live:

• Re-import new data since your last migration (e.g. new orders, products etc)
• Remove the password in your Shopify store
• Update the DNS as guided in the Shopify platform in Settings > Domains

Congratulations your new site is live! Now it’s time to re-test everything. Also, make sure to have a post-live plan to measure performance, bugs, and customer feedback. This will ensure your launch delivers the best performance possible and helps you grow for the years to come.

Need help? If this seems a bit much to do on your own, please explore our WooCommerce to Shopify migration services, we’re ready to help.

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