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 shop 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 to compensate for the architecture. Shopify’s proposition (the platform is managed by the vendor) 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.

What migrates cleanly

• Products, mostly. Simple and variable products map to Shopify products and variants. Note the limits: Shopify lifted the old 100-variant cap (up to 2,048 per product for all merchants as of late 2025), but products are still limited to 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 one-way hashes, and Shopify accepts no imported hash from any platform. Every customer will need to reset or re-register. For a shop that depends on repeat purchases, plan it as a re-activation campaign well before cutover night.

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. Whatever you built into WooCommerce’s checkout, Shopify’s checkout is customizable only within defined boundaries (broader on Shopify Plus). Anything beyond them has to be redesigned from scratch.
• 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 shop. 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 additionally can’t serve arbitrary URL structures. The rankings survive only with mechanical discipline:

1. Export a complete URL inventory from the live shop; 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’ll review the plan with you on a free call.