WooCommerce to Shopify, with the rankings intact.
The data moves easily. What breaks a WooCommerce migration is the plugin stack you forgot you depend on, and a redirect map nobody checked. We plan for both before anything is exported.
Tell us about your WooCommerce store.
On this page
- 01Products, customers and orders migrate reliably. That is the easy half and it is the half most migration quotes describe.
- 02The hard half is plugin functionality with no Shopify equivalent: bespoke pricing rules, custom fields, membership logic, anything a developer bolted on years ago.
- 03WooCommerce URLs do not match Shopify's. Every product, category and page needs an explicit 301, or you lose the rankings you were migrating to protect.
- 04Subscriptions and any stored payment relationship need their own plan. They rarely transfer cleanly and they are the thing customers notice.
- 05Audit the plugin list first. It tells you what the migration actually costs, long before anyone touches a CSV.
Your store is not WooCommerce. It is WooCommerce plus thirty plugins.
This is the single reason WooCommerce migrations go wrong. The catalogue is not the store. The store is the catalogue plus every behaviour a plugin quietly provides, and a lot of that behaviour has become load-bearing without anyone writing it down.
Typical examples we find in the first week: role-based or quantity-based pricing, custom product fields feeding a fulfilment process, a bespoke shipping calculator, membership gating, an ERP or accounting sync, and invoice or document generation someone wired up in 2019.
Each of those needs a decision before the migration, not during: is there a Shopify app that does it, do we build it, do we change the process, or do we drop it? Answer that list up front and a WooCommerce migration is predictable. Skip it and you will find out on launch week.
So we start by auditing the plugin list and mapping each active plugin to one of those four outcomes. That map, more than the catalogue size, is what determines the timeline and the price.
Where the rankings go.
WooCommerce lets you shape URLs almost freely. Shopify does not: products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, and you cannot flatten that away. So essentially every indexed URL changes.
That makes the redirect map the most valuable deliverable of the whole project. Ours is built from your actual indexed URLs, taken from Search Console and your sitemap rather than from a guess about your structure, and every one is tested after launch rather than assumed.
Two things that routinely get missed. Category and tag archives: WooCommerce generates a lot of them and some earn real traffic, so they need mapping to collections rather than being dropped. And blog content: WordPress post URLs almost never match Shopify's blog structure, and content is often where a store's links live.
Plan for a temporary dip while Google reprocesses. Done properly it is weeks and it recovers. Done without a complete map, it is permanent, and there is no way to undo it after the old site is gone.
Four phases.
Audit
Plugin inventory with a decision against each, catalogue shape, indexed URL export, integrations, subscription and payment relationships. Ends with a scope and a price, not an estimate.
Build
Theme, catalogue import with variants and metafields, replacement of the plugin behaviour you decided to keep, integrations reconnected, redirect map generated.
Verify
Redirects tested URL by URL, checkout tested against real payment and tax configuration, data reconciled by count, staff trained on the new admin before anything is switched.
Launch and watch
Cut over, resubmit sitemaps, then watch Search Console coverage and 404s daily for the first weeks. The old store stays available until the new one has proven itself.
Six answers.
Will I lose my Google rankings?
Not if every indexed URL has a 301 to its true equivalent. Expect a temporary dip of a few weeks while Google reprocesses; that is normal and it recovers. Permanent loss comes from incomplete redirect maps, chains, and redirecting everything to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404.
What about WooCommerce Subscriptions?
This needs its own plan and it is the part to worry about. Subscription records can be recreated on a Shopify subscription app, but the stored payment relationship sits with your gateway and does not simply move. Depending on gateways, some subscribers may need to re-authorise. Decide the communication plan before launch, because this is the one thing your customers will feel.
Can you move our blog and reviews?
Yes, and you should. Blog content usually carries a meaningful share of a WooCommerce site's links and rankings, so it moves with redirects like everything else. Reviews migrate into whichever Shopify review app you choose; keeping them matters, because review count is often doing quiet conversion work.
How long does it take?
Driven by the plugin map, not the product count. A store with a standard plugin set moves in weeks. One with bespoke pricing logic, a membership area and an ERP sync is a months-long project, because those are rebuilds rather than migrations. The audit tells you which you are.
Should we migrate at all?
Migrate for a business reason: maintenance and security are consuming real budget, the store breaks at traffic peaks, or nobody on the team can safely change it. Do not migrate because WooCommerce feels dated. Our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison works through the crossover honestly, including when staying is right.
Do we keep the same domain?
Yes, and you should. Keeping the domain means you keep the domain-level authority and only the paths change, which is a far smaller ask of Google than a domain move. Changing platform and domain at the same time doubles the risk and makes it impossible to tell which change caused a problem.
Send us your active plugins.
That list plus your product count is enough for us to tell you whether this is a weeks-long migration or a months-long rebuild, and roughly what it costs, before anyone signs anything.
Why work with Digital Heroes
115 people across five studios in New York, Delhi, London, Sydney and Lucknow, shipping ecommerce, web, software and mobile work for founder-led brands. Senior engineers only, no account-manager relay, and the same team from kickoff to launch.
- Shopify Premier Partner, the tier Shopify reserves for agencies with a sustained delivery record on Plus builds
- Tier 1 registered supplier on the United Nations Global Marketplace, which requires audited company documentation
- Top Rated Plus on Upwork, the bracket for the top 3% of talent by client outcomes
- 397 public five-star-weighted reviews across four Fiverr gigs, from clients in 36 countries
- DUNS verified business, No. 650878346, so procurement can check us before signing
- Listed by Clutch in Top 1000 Global B2B Companies and Top Web Designers 2024
- Verified profiles on GoodFirms, DesignRush, Digital.com, AppFutura and TopDevelopers
- 2,000+ brands built across 55+ countries, with $50M+ in client revenue scaled
Published .
