WooCommerce to Shopify: what survives the move

WooCommerce to Shopify is the most common migration we’re asked about, and the pattern behind it is consistent: the store outgrew WordPress. Plugin conflicts consume a day of work each week, every update gets postponed because it might break the site, and the hosting bill keeps climbing because a bigger server is compensating for the architecture. Shopify’s proposition, that the vendor operates the platform, is most persuasive at exactly this moment.

The migration itself is routinely undersold. “There’s an importer” is accurate but incomplete. This is what survives the move, what needs rebuilding, and what disappears silently unless someone verifies it.

Every Shopify limit below is Shopify’s own and links to its documentation. We checked all of them on 13 July 2026.

What migrates cleanly

• Products, mostly. Simple and variable products map to Shopify products and variants. Note the limits: Shopify raised the old 100-variant cap and since October 2025 allows 2,048 variants per product for every merchant, but a product still gets at most three options, and three options is exactly the limit complex WooCommerce catalogs exceed.
• Customers: names, emails, addresses. This part is a CSV export and import, once you’ve handled marketing-consent state.
• Historical orders, via import apps or the API, with enough caveats (statuses, partial refunds, tax rounding) that we treat imported orders as reference data, not accounting truth.

What does not migrate: passwords

Customer passwords are stored as one-way hashes, and Shopify does not take them. Its customer import documentation says passwords cannot be migrated from another store and that imported customers have to be invited to create new ones. Every customer therefore resets or re-registers. For a store that depends on repeat purchases, plan that invitation as a re-activation campaign, scheduled before cutover rather than improvised after it.

What needs rebuilding, not copying

• The plugin stack. Each WooCommerce plugin needs a decision: a Shopify app, a Shopify Function, a theme feature, or the conclusion that its purpose is no longer known. This inventory is the real scope of the project.
• Checkout customizations. Shopify’s checkout is customizable only within defined boundaries: Basic and above have the checkout and accounts editor, while apps that customize the information, shipping and payment pages, and the Checkout Branding API, require Shopify Plus. Whatever you built into WooCommerce’s checkout beyond those boundaries is redesigned, not ported.
• Multilingual setups. WPML or Polylang constructions map onto Shopify Markets plus translation apps, a different model rather than a format conversion.
• The content site around the store. WordPress is a better CMS than Shopify; blogs and landing pages need a destination: Shopify’s blog, a headless setup, or a WordPress that stays for content only.

What happens to the rankings

SEO fails first in low-budget migrations, because the damage shows up weeks later where nobody connects cause and effect. The URL structure changes by design: /product-category/shoes/ becomes /collections/shoes/, every product path changes, and Shopify’s subdirectory names cannot be edited, so the old paths cannot be reproduced. The rankings survive only with mechanical discipline:

1. Export a complete URL inventory from the live store; crawl it, don’t trust the sitemap alone.
2. Map every URL that has traffic or backlinks to its exact new home. Category pages especially; they usually hold the rankings.
3. Ship the 301 redirects at cutover. Rankings decline for as long as the redirects are missing.
4. Benchmark organic traffic before, so that “did the migration hurt us” can be answered from a chart.

When the answer isn’t Shopify

If what’s driving you out of WooCommerce is catalog complexity or B2B (contract pricing, approval chains, variant structures that don’t fit three options), you may hit the same limits on Shopify, and Magento’s model might fit better. That decision is most of what our migration assessments exist to settle, and the replatform-or-fix question is worth asking honestly before either.

With the URL inventory done first, the redirect map shipped at cutover, and passwords handled as a campaign, this migration is routine. Skip those steps and it turns into a quarter of lost rankings and a support queue full of customers who can’t log in. If you’re planning one, we will review the plan with you.