Shopify To WooCommerce Migration

Moving a live shop between platforms is the kind of job that looks simple until you are halfway through it. The product data is the easy part. What catches people out is the checkout that silently stopped taking American Express, the 400 product URLs that now return 404, and the six apps that were quietly doing something important.

This is the full process, in the order you should do it, with the parts that go wrong flagged before you reach them. If you have not decided yet, read our comparison of whether WooCommerce is as good as Shopify first, because moving is a lot of work to do for the wrong reason.

Should you move from Shopify to WooCommerce at all?

Four reasons come up again and again, and they are all good ones.

Transaction fees. Shopify charges a percentage on every order if you do not use Shopify Payments, on top of what your payment gateway already takes. WooCommerce charges nothing, on any plan, forever. On a store turning over £40,000 a month that difference alone pays for very good hosting several times over.

Checkout control. Shopify keeps the checkout locked down unless you are on Shopify Plus, which starts at a level most independent stores will never justify. In WooCommerce the checkout is yours: add a field, remove a step, change the order of things, or replace it entirely.

The app bill. Six apps at $15 a month is $1,080 a year, and it rarely stops at six. Most WooCommerce equivalents are a one-off purchase or a cheaper annual licence, and a good number are free.

Ownership. A WooCommerce store is files and a database that you can move to any host that runs PHP and MySQL. Nobody can change your terms, price you into a higher tier, or decide your product category is no longer welcome.

Three reasons to stay, and they are also good ones. If you have no appetite for maintaining anything, Shopify genuinely removes that work. If you are on Shopify Plus with a custom checkout that took months to build, you are rebuilding all of it. And if your store is your only income and you are the only technical person, changing platforms during your busy season is a risk with no upside.

What transfers, and what does not

Being clear about this at the start saves the argument later. Here is the honest breakdown.

The image row is the one that bites hardest. Shopify’s own export documentation is explicit that product CSVs carry URLs rather than files, and that those URLs only keep working while the original store is publicly reachable. Stores that close their Shopify account the week they launch often find every product image gone a month later. Keep Shopify open and paid for at least 30 days after launch.

What does a Shopify to WooCommerce migration cost?

Less than most people expect for the move itself, and more than most people expect for the rebuild around it.

Then the running costs, which is where the saving shows up. WooCommerce is free. You pay for WooCommerce hosting, your payment gateway, and whichever extensions you actually need. There is no platform fee and no transaction fee on top of the gateway, which is the difference that compounds.

Before you start: the pre-migration checklist

Half of a good migration happens before anything is moved.

Export a full list of your current URLs. Crawl the live Shopify store and save every product, collection, page and blog URL. This becomes your redirect map, and it is far easier to capture now than to reconstruct afterwards.

Record your current rankings and traffic. Take a snapshot from Search Console and your analytics. Without a baseline you cannot tell the difference between a normal post-migration dip and something genuinely broken.

List every app and what it does. Not the name, the job. "Reviews" is not enough; you need to know whether the reviews live in Shopify or inside the app, and whether they can be exported.

Write down your tax and shipping rules. These almost never migrate cleanly and they are easy to get subtly wrong. A screenshot of every zone and rate is worth the five minutes.

Sort out hosting first. WooCommerce is heavier than a blog because carts, checkouts and account pages cannot be cached. Get the hosting right before you move anything, not after your first slow Saturday.

Migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce, step by step

1. Set up WordPress and WooCommerce

Install WordPress on your new host, then install WooCommerce from the plugin directory and run the setup wizard. Do this on a staging site or a temporary domain, never on the domain your live store is using. Our guide to starting a WooCommerce store covers the initial configuration in more depth.

2. Pick your migration route

WooCommerce’s own migration documentation recommends its Migrate & Import Shopify to WooCommerce extension, which connects to the Shopify Admin API and brings products, customers, orders, coupons, pages and posts across in one pass. The alternative is an automated service such as LitExtension or Cart2Cart, both of which offer a free demo migration so you can check the output before paying. Manual CSV is free and fine for a small catalogue with no order history worth keeping.

3. Move the products

Run the import, then check a sample by hand rather than trusting the summary screen. The things that break quietly are variant-to-image associations, product attributes that arrive as plain text rather than as attributes, and stock levels that import as zero. Sorting a Shopify CSV in a spreadsheet before importing it is a reliable way to scramble which image belongs to which variant, so do not.

4. Move customers and orders

Customers first, then orders, so the orders can attach to the right accounts. If your route cannot carry passwords, this is the moment to draft the email telling customers they will need to reset on first login. Send it on launch day, not a week later when they have already tried and failed.

5. Rebuild the design

Your Liquid theme does not come with you. Either buy a WooCommerce theme that is close to your current look, or rebuild in a block theme. Keep your heading structure and body copy as they were: those are carrying the keyword relevance your product pages already earned, and rewriting everything at the same time as changing every URL makes it impossible to work out what caused what.

6. Set up payments, shipping and tax

Install your payment gateway and put a real card through it. Then refund that order, because a gateway that takes money and cannot refund it is a problem you want to find on a Tuesday rather than on Black Friday. Rebuild shipping zones and tax rates from the notes you took earlier, and test a checkout to each zone you sell into.

7. Rebuild what your apps were doing

Work down the list you made. Most things have an obvious equivalent; subscriptions, bundles and anything that modifies the checkout are where you will spend the time.

Redirects, and whether you will lose your rankings

This is the section that decides whether the migration costs you money. Shopify and WooCommerce use completely different URL structures, so every single URL on your store is about to change.

Note the third row. Shopify serves the same product at more than one URL depending on how it was reached, so your redirect map needs to cover the collection-scoped versions as well as the plain ones. Crawling the live store rather than exporting a product list is the only reliable way to catch them.

Three rules, all of which are more important than they sound:

Use 301, not 302. A 301 is permanent and passes the ranking signals. A 302 says the move is temporary and Google will keep the old URL in its index.

Never redirect everything to the homepage. It feels tidy and it is the single most damaging thing you can do. Google’s own guidance on site moves with URL changes is to map like for like; a mass homepage redirect is treated as a soft 404 and the ranking value of those pages evaporates. Map each URL to its closest equivalent, and where there genuinely is not one, let it 404 honestly.

Keep the redirects forever. They are a few kilobytes of configuration. Removing them in a year to tidy up undoes the whole exercise.

Expect a dip. Even a perfect migration usually sees traffic wobble for two to six weeks while Google recrawls and reassigns the signals. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console on launch day and watch the coverage report rather than the rankings, because coverage tells you whether the redirects are being followed.

Replacing your Shopify apps

Every app stops working the moment you leave. Here is where the common ones land.

One warning. On Shopify, apps are sandboxed and cannot easily break the store. On WordPress, plugins run in the same space as everything else, so a badly written one can take the site down. Install fewer, keep them updated, and pick a host that handles the updating and cleans up when something does go wrong. Our guide to ecommerce website security covers the rest of the hardening.

Launch day, and the week after

Do it on your quietest day. For most stores that is a Tuesday morning, not a Friday afternoon and certainly not in November.

The order of operations on the day: put the new store on the live domain, load the redirects, place a real test order and refund it, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, then send the password reset email if you need one. Keep the Shopify account open and paid for at least a month so image URLs and any missed data are still reachable.

In the first week, check three things daily. Are orders arriving and are the confirmation emails actually being delivered, rather than sitting in a spam folder. Is Search Console reporting the redirects as followed rather than as errors. And is the site holding up under real traffic, because a checkout that was fine with two testers can behave very differently with forty concurrent shoppers.

How long does a Shopify to WooCommerce migration take?

The data move is hours. The project is weeks. Here is roughly how it lands.

Notice that the data column barely moves while the project column triples. That is because the slow parts are never the import: they are rebuilding what the apps did, reproducing the theme, and testing checkout properly. Budget accordingly, and run the import at least twice, once as a rehearsal and once for real, so launch day is the second time you have done it rather than the first.

Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify?

Past a certain volume, comfortably. Below it, not necessarily. The variable that decides it is the transaction fee, because it scales with your revenue while hosting does not. A rough shape for a store turning over £30,000 a month:

The honest summary is that you trade a platform fee and a transaction fee for a hosting bill and a bit of responsibility. The hosting bill is flat; the transaction fee is not, which is why the gap widens as you grow. Our full comparison of WooCommerce against Shopify works through the numbers properly, and if you are still shortlisting, our roundup of Shopify alternatives covers the rest of the field.

What hosting does a migrated WooCommerce store need?

This is the part people underestimate, usually once. A blog can be cached almost entirely: the same HTML goes to every visitor, so the server barely works. A store cannot. Carts, checkouts, account pages and anything logged-in have to be generated fresh every time, which means PHP and the database are doing real work on every request that matters most.

Four things worth having, and the reason for each:

A server-level cache. Not a caching plugin. LiteSpeed answers a cached page without starting PHP at all, which leaves the PHP capacity free for the requests that genuinely need it, which on a store are the ones attached to money.

Object caching with Redis. WooCommerce hammers the options table and runs the same queries repeatedly. Answering those from memory rather than from MySQL is the single biggest difference on a busy catalogue.

Enough PHP workers. Every simultaneous checkout occupies one. Run out and customers queue, then leave. This is what actually breaks on a good day, and it is invisible until it happens.

Backups you can restore yourself. A store that loses four hours of orders has lost money it cannot reconstruct. Daily is the floor; hourly is worth paying for once orders matter.

All four are standard on FastCow WooCommerce hosting, including on the entry plan, and the migration itself is done by our engineers at no cost. If you would rather see the mechanics of a host move first, our migrations page sets out how it works.

Mistakes that cost real money

Closing the Shopify account too early. Product image URLs stop resolving and any data you missed is gone. Thirty days minimum.

Skipping the redirect map. The traffic you spent years earning goes to 404 pages. This is the single most expensive mistake on the list.

Testing checkout with a coupon. A 100% discount code does not exercise the payment gateway. Use a real card and a real refund.

Rebuilding the copy at the same time. Change the platform or change the content, not both. Otherwise you cannot tell which one caused the traffic drop.

Putting a store on hosting meant for a blog. Carts and checkouts cannot be page-cached, so a store puts far more load on PHP and the database than the traffic numbers suggest. If you are moving hosts as well as platforms, our guide to migrating WordPress to a new host covers that side.

Frequently asked questions