WooCommerce to Shopify migration: the 6-day plan we run

Every WooCommerce owner who calls us about migrating asks the same three questions in the same order. How long will my store be down. Will I lose my Google rankings. What is this going to cost.

Here are the real answers, then the plan we actually run.

Downtime is zero. The new store is built and tested on a separate Shopify URL while your WooCommerce site keeps taking orders. The only moment anything changes for a customer is the DNS switch at the end, which takes minutes and happens when you say so.

Rankings survive if, and only if, someone builds a redirect map. This is the part that goes wrong on most migrations, and it is the reason people tell horror stories. More on it below, because it is the single highest-risk piece of work in the whole project.

Cost depends on catalogue size and how much custom work your current theme is doing. A straightforward store with a few hundred products and a standard checkout is a different job from a 12,000-SKU catalogue with wholesale pricing tiers. We quote a fixed price after a 30 minute call, and the price on that quote is what you pay on launch day.

Now the plan.

Day 1: the audit that decides everything

Before anything moves, we pull three lists from your existing store.

Every URL that has ever ranked. Not your sitemap. Your actual Search Console export, sorted by impressions, going back 16 months. This becomes the redirect map, and it is why migrations succeed or fail.

Every product, variant, and customer record. Including the ones you forgot. Draft products, out-of-stock items that still hold reviews, customers with store credit.

Every piece of functionality your theme or plugins are quietly providing. This is where migrations blow their budget. A WooCommerce store running 25 plugins is running 25 pieces of behaviour that someone assumed would "just come across." Bundled products, role-based pricing, PDF invoices, a custom shipping calculator. Each one is either a Shopify native feature, an app, or custom development, and you want that decision made on day one rather than discovered in week three.

We hand you this list before writing a line of code. It is usually the first time anyone has shown the owner exactly what their store does.

Days 2 to 3: data migration

Products, variants, images, collections, customers, and order history move across. The mechanics are unglamorous and mostly automated, but three things need a human:

Variant structure. WooCommerce attributes and Shopify options are not the same shape. WooCommerce lets you have unlimited attributes; Shopify allows three options per product. A store selling shirts by size, colour, fit, and sleeve length needs a decision, not a script.

SKU integrity. If your SKUs are inconsistent, migration is when it surfaces. Better to fix it here than to discover your inventory sync is broken a month after launch.

Customer passwords do not transfer. They cannot. Shopify does not accept password hashes from another platform, and no migration tool changes that. Your customers get an invitation to set a new password. Plan the email that goes with it, because a silent password reset generates support tickets.

Order history comes across as records, which is what you need for customer service and accounting. It does not recreate subscriptions or payment methods; those are separate migrations with their own plan.

Days 3 to 5: the theme

Two paths here, and the right one depends on what your WooCommerce theme is doing.

If your current design is essentially a standard layout with your branding on it, a well-chosen Shopify theme configured properly gets you there faster and cheaper, and it will be more stable long term.

If your store has genuinely custom merchandising, a configurator, a comparison table that drives sales, a bundle builder, then that gets rebuilt in Liquid. Rebuilt, not ported. WooCommerce is PHP and Shopify is Liquid, and pretending otherwise produces the worst of both.

You get a staging URL within 48 hours of this phase starting. Not a mockup, the actual store, with your actual products in it, that you can click through.

Day 5: the redirect map

This is the work that protects your traffic, and it deserves its own day.

Every URL from that Search Console export needs a destination on the new store. WooCommerce and Shopify have incompatible URL structures, so almost nothing maps automatically:

/product/blue-widget          ->  /products/blue-widget
/product-category/widgets     ->  /collections/widgets
/shop/                        ->  /collections/all
/?p=1234                      ->  /products/blue-widget
/wp-content/uploads/...       ->  the Shopify CDN equivalent

Every one of those is a 301, meaning "this moved permanently, transfer the ranking." A 302 does not transfer ranking. A 404 discards it.

The rule we work to: if a URL had a single impression in the last 16 months, it gets a redirect. Not a redirect to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404 and ignores. A redirect to the closest equivalent page.

We know exactly how much this matters because we watched a site skip it. A Shopify store we later took over had migrated the year before with no redirect map. Thirty URLs, every one returning 404, months after the move. Search Console was still showing impressions for pages that no longer resolved, which means Google was still trying to send that store customers and the store was turning them away.

Day 6: launch

The order on launch day matters.

1. Payments, shipping, and tax tested with a real transaction
2. Redirect map uploaded and spot-checked
3. Analytics and pixels moved over, verified firing
4. DNS switched
5. New sitemap submitted to Search Console
6. WooCommerce kept running, unpublished, for a fortnight

That last one is not paranoia. It is the cheapest insurance in the project. If something is missing, the source of truth is still there.

What actually goes wrong

Four things, in the order we see them.

Nobody exported the URL list before the old store was decommissioned. Once the WooCommerce install is gone, so is your record of what ranked. Do this first, before anything else, even if the migration is months away.

App equivalents were assumed rather than checked. Your WooCommerce subscriptions plugin has a Shopify equivalent. It does not necessarily support your exact billing logic. Check during the audit, not during launch week.

The theme got rebuilt pixel-for-pixel. Copying a five year old design onto a new platform means paying to carry forward every compromise the old platform forced on you. Migration is the cheapest moment you will ever get to fix your product page.

Rankings dropped and nobody looked for six weeks. Expect a dip in the first two to three weeks while Google recrawls. It should recover. If it has not recovered by week four, something in the redirect map is wrong, and you want to find that in week four rather than in the next quarter's revenue report.

Is under ten days realistic

For a standard catalogue with a well-chosen theme, yes. That is the timeline we quote and hold.

It is not realistic if you have 20,000 SKUs, a custom ERP integration, a wholesale channel with per-account pricing, or subscriptions that need to keep billing without interruption. Those are real projects and anyone quoting you six days for them has not read your requirements.

The honest version: most stores are simpler than their owners think, and a few are considerably more complicated. The 30 minute audit call tells us which one you are, and you get that answer before you commit to anything.

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We are a Shopify Select Partner and have migrated stores from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, and Kajabi. Every migration includes the redirect map, full source code handover, and 30 days of support after launch.

Book a free 30 minute migration call, or get a fixed quote. If you would rather see the state of your current store first, the free store audit covers speed, technical SEO, and what will and will not carry across.