Key takeaways
- The data transfer is the easy part. What costs money and breaks rankings is everything around it: redirects, customer logins, plugin rebuilds, and tracking.
- A realistic migration budget: under $1,000 DIY, $500–$2,000 with migration apps, $3,000–$15,000+ with a developer, $15,000–$40,000+ for complex stores.
- Passwords, saved payment methods, wishlist data, and Elementor layouts do not transfer. Plan for each before cutover, not after.
- Skip the 301 redirect map and you can lose 20–40% of organic traffic in the first 30 days. This is the single most skipped step.
- Some stores should not migrate at all. This guide starts with the decision test, not the sales pitch.
Every week, someone emails us a version of the same story: their WooCommerce store works, technically. It also wakes them up at 2 AM when a plugin update breaks checkout. They're tired of paying a developer retainer to keep the lights on. They want Shopify's "it just works" life.
We build on both platforms. WooCommerce and Shopify. So this isn't a pitch for either side — it's the playbook we actually follow when a client asks us to move their store, including the parts where we tell them not to migrate.
Should you even migrate? The 10-minute decision test
Most migration guides start with step one. That's backwards. Migration is surgery: expensive, disruptive, and pointless if the patient is healthy. Run this test first.
- Add up your real WooCommerce cost. Not the "$0 because WordPress is free" fantasy. Managed hosting, the security plugin, backups, the page builder license, the caching layer, and the developer retainer for when things break. Our clients typically land at $100–$400/month before selling anything, plus whatever the last emergency cost.
- Count your active plugins. Under 15 well-maintained ones? Your store is probably fine. Over 30, with three doing jobs you don't understand? That's plugin debt, and it's the number one reason stores migrate — not features, not speed, not "scaling." They're buying relief.
- Ask who owns the technical risk. If a plugin conflict takes checkout down on a Friday night, whose weekend is ruined? If the answer is "mine," Shopify's managed hosting is worth real money to you. If you have a developer on staff who likes this stuff, that advantage shrinks.
- Check your custom functionality. Membership systems deeply wired into WordPress, complex B2B pricing, a content operation that lives and dies by the WordPress editor — these are reasons to stay. Shopify will feel like a smaller box.
- Look at your calendar. Never migrate within 8 weeks of your peak selling season. If Black Friday is your Christmas, migrate in February, not October.
Here's the honest version of the sales pitch: most stores don't migrate for features. They migrate because they're tired of being their own IT department. That's a legitimate reason — just be honest with yourself that it's the reason.
If you ran the test and the answer is "yes, migrate," keep reading. If you're still on the fence, our Shopify vs WooCommerce breakdown goes deeper on the platform decision itself.
The 3-year cost math nobody shows you
Migration guides quote the one-time project cost. But the decision is really about the next three years of running the store. Here's the honest comparison, using Shopify's current US list prices (Basic $39/mo, Grow $105/mo, Advanced $399/mo billed monthly — annual billing knocks roughly 25% off) against what we see WooCommerce stores actually spend.
| Cost | WooCommerce (typical, per year) | Shopify Basic (per year) |
|---|---|---|
| Platform / hosting | $240–$1,200 managed hosting | $348–$468 (plan) |
| Security, backups, caching | $200–$600 in plugin licenses | $0 (included) |
| Developer maintenance | $1,200–$6,000 retainer or emergencies | $0–$500 (tweaks, not survival) |
| Apps / plugins | $300–$1,000 | $600–$3,600 (apps add up — this is Shopify's hidden line item) |
| Payment processing | ~2.9% + 30¢ (your gateway's rate) | 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic via Shopify Payments |
| Realistic annual total | $2,000–$8,000+ | $1,000–$4,500 |
Two things to notice. First, WooCommerce's range is wider because the cost is yours to control and yours to suffer — a lean, well-run store is cheap; a plugin-heavy store with emergencies is not. Second, Shopify's app bill is the number everyone underestimates. Replacing 30 WooCommerce plugins with Shopify apps at $10–$30/month each is how a $39 plan becomes a $200/month habit. Audit your app list yearly. Kill mercilessly.
The migration itself is a separate one-time line. Budgeting frameworks from agencies that do this daily put it at: under $1,000 DIY, $500–$2,000 app-assisted, $3,000–$15,000+ for a professional migration with theme work and SEO, $15,000–$40,000+ for complex catalogs and integrations. Two stores with the same product count can land in different tiers — functionality and plugin debt drive the price, not SKU count.
What transfers, what doesn't, and what hurts
This is the section most guides gloss over with "products, customers, and orders migrate seamlessly!" Here's the real version.
| Data | Moves? | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Products + variants | Yes | Shopify allows up to 2,048 variants per product (raised from the old 100 cap) — but still max 3 option types per product. A WooCommerce product with 4+ attributes (size, color, material, fit) needs restructuring first. |
| Customers | Records yes | Passwords do not transfer. Every returning customer resets on first login. Send a heads-up email or your support inbox will tell you about it. |
| Order history | Yes, with tools | Shopify's free Store Migration app skips orders. You need LitExtension ($59–$499 by volume) or Matrixify ($20–$200/mo) for those. |
| Product reviews | Manually | Export from your WooCommerce reviews plugin as CSV, import into Judge.me or Loox. No native path. Everyone forgets this until launch week. |
| Blog posts + pages | Yes | Content moves; design doesn't. Elementor/Divi layouts rebuild from scratch in the Shopify theme. |
| Subscriptions | It's a project | WooCommerce Subscriptions doesn't map cleanly to Recharge or Skio. Active subscribers get re-onboarded — plan the customer email and the manual cleanup. |
| Gift cards + loyalty points | Manually | The worst offender. Custom balances almost never migrate automatically. Build a manual transfer process before cutover. |
| Wishlist data | Usually no | Most WooCommerce wishlist plugins have no clean export. Customers rebuild from scratch. Tell them. |
| URL structure | Changes | /product/name/ becomes /products/name/; /product-category/x/ becomes /collections/x/. Every changed URL needs a 301. See below. |
The pattern: the catalog moves easily. The relationships — logins, subscriptions, loyalty, saved cards — are what cost you. Budget your planning time accordingly.
4 ways to do the migration, ranked honestly
- Manual CSV export/import. Free, total control, costs you a weekend. Works for under ~500 simple products. Variant restructuring is manual, images often need re-uploading, and orders/reviews don't come over. Best for: tiny catalogs with no order history worth keeping.
- Shopify's free Store Migration app. Native, no third-party risk, and free. The catch: it handles products and blog posts only — no customers, no orders, no reviews. Best for: small stores starting mostly fresh.
- LitExtension or Matrixify. LitExtension ($59–$499 depending on volume) moves products, variants, customers, orders, and categories together, with a free demo migration to preview. Matrixify ($20–$200/mo) is the Excel-native choice — best when you have metafields, custom data, or complex product structures. Both beat manual work on any catalog over a few hundred SKUs. Best for: most real stores.
- Hire it out. A done-for-you migration runs $5,000 for a mid-tier project up to $75,000 for complex Plus builds with custom integrations. Worth it when the store does serious revenue and you have no in-house team; overkill for a 200-product store. If you're shopping for help, our guide to reading agency quotes applies here too — the same padding tricks show up in migration quotes.
Whichever route you pick, do a demo migration first on a handful of products. Every tool offers one. The stores that skip it discover broken HTML in product descriptions and mangled variant images after they've already pointed the domain.
The 4-week plan (the honest version)
The "migrate in a weekend" stories assume you have nothing else going on. Real merchants run a store while moving it. Here's the version that survives contact with reality.
Week 1 — Audit and decide. Inventory everything: product count, customer count, order count, review count, every active plugin and what job it does. Crawl the current site and export every URL — you'll need the full list for redirects. Pick your Shopify plan (Basic at $39/mo is enough for most migrating stores; check our Shopify plans guide before paying for Grow) and a theme. Map each WooCommerce plugin to its Shopify replacement: native feature, app, or custom work.
Week 2 — Build the new store. Set up Shopify on a temporary myshopify.com domain — your real domain connects at the very end. Configure shipping zones, taxes, and payment gateways. Install the theme and the core apps (reviews, email, search). Build one product completely and run a test checkout end to end. If checkout feels wrong now, it will feel wrong at scale.
Week 3 — Move the data. Products first, then customers, then orders, then reviews, then blog posts and pages. Verify every product after import: pricing, weights, inventory counts, variant logic, images. This is tedious and non-negotiable — automated imports lie by omission.
Week 4 — Redirects, then cutover. Build the full 301 redirect map before touching DNS. Point the domain (this is the actual cutover moment). Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console. Reinstall every tracking pixel — GA4, Meta Pixel, conversion APIs — because none of it carries over. Reconnect email flows and test them. Send the customer comms email. Then run smoke tests on checkout, account creation, search, and the blog like a paranoid person, because you should be.
The SEO redirect playbook (do not skip this)
Skip this section and you can lose 20–40% of organic traffic in the first 30 days. That's not a scare tactic; it's what happens when Google finds your old URLs returning 404s.
The core problem is structural. WooCommerce and Shopify simply use different URL patterns, and there's no setting that makes them match. So you build a redirect map: a two-column spreadsheet of old path → new path, imported into Shopify's URL redirect manager (or bulk via Matrixify).
Redirect priority, in order:
- Product pages. Every single one gets a 1:1 redirect. These carry your rankings and your revenue.
- Category/collection pages. 1:1, consolidating where you restructured categories.
- Blog posts that rank. Pull your top pages from Search Console before migration — those are what you're protecting. Everything else can redirect to the closest equivalent.
- Custom landing pages. Manually, one by one. These are usually your paid-traffic destinations; broken ones burn ad spend silently.
- Tag and author pages. Nice to have. Author pages you can usually skip.
After cutover, submit the new sitemap immediately. Expect a traffic dip in weeks 2–6 while Google recrawls — that's normal. What isn't normal is traffic that dips and never comes back by month 3. That means the redirects were wrong or the metadata didn't carry over, and every week you wait makes it harder to diagnose.
The redirect map is built before the domain moves, not after. Teams that design first and "figure out redirects later" discover conflicts they can only fix by redoing work.
What actually breaks on launch day
This is the list that separates a smooth cutover from a week of firefighting. None of it is in the marketing copy.
- Customer logins. Passwords don't transfer. A big chunk of returning customers will hit the login page and bounce unless you emailed them first. Send the heads-up 24 hours before cutover, and again at launch.
- Saved payment methods. Gone. Apple Pay and Google Pay tokens reset too. First post-migration purchase requires re-entering card details — expect a conversion dip on returning-customer orders for a week or two.
- Abandoned cart flows. Your WooCommerce flows die the moment you cut over. The Shopify versions must be live and tested before launch, or there's a 24–48 hour gap where recovering carts get nothing.
- Ad tracking. Pixels get reinstalled, conversion APIs get reconnected. Your historical data stays in the ad platforms, but you're starting a new tracking stream — don't panic when attribution looks weird for two weeks.
- Email flows. Klaviyo or Mailchimp reconnects to the new store, metrics get remapped (placed order, started checkout, viewed product), every flow gets tested. The post-purchase flow is the one everyone forgets.
- Shipping rules. WooCommerce shipping plugins love complex conditional logic that doesn't translate. Test every scenario manually: zones, weights, free-shipping thresholds, local pickup.
- Gift card balances. Said it above, saying it again: manual transfer process, ready before launch, or you're issuing credits by hand for a month.
The 30-day support spike (budget for it)
Even well-planned migrations triple support volume in the first month. "Where is my order" tickets spike because customers can't find their old accounts. Password-reset confusion peaks in week one. Someone will insist their loyalty points vanished (they didn't — they're in your spreadsheet, but try explaining that at scale).
Plan for it like you'd plan for a sale: draft the FAQ before launch, pin a banner explaining the new login process, and keep whoever can issue manual credits close to the inbox for two weeks. The stores that suffer aren't the ones with problems — problems are guaranteed — they're the ones that didn't staff for them.
When to time it
Migrate in your slowest quarter. For most stores that's Q1. Never within 8 weeks of peak season — if the holidays are your Super Bowl, a September migration is how you spend December debugging instead of selling. Our Black Friday prep checklist exists precisely because too many stores try to change platforms and run promos simultaneously. Pick one.
The bottom line
A WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration is a $500 to $75,000 project that takes 30–60 days end to end, where the data transfer is the easy 10% and the redirects, rebuilds, and launch-day breakages are the other 90%. Do the decision test honestly, budget for the support spike, build the redirect map before you touch DNS, and time it for your slow season.
And if the decision test told you to stay on WooCommerce? That's a valid answer. A lean, well-maintained WooCommerce store with someone technical minding it is a fine place to sell things. The platform isn't the business.
Thinking about a move and want a second pair of eyes on your plugin list and redirect risk before you commit? Get a free site audit — we'll tell you straight whether migration is worth it for your store, or whether a cleanup gets you 80% of the benefit for 10% of the cost. Ready to talk project? Book a call — and if you're weighing plans and pricing first, our pricing and services pages lay out exactly what we do.
