Most stores leave WooCommerce for the same reasons: hosting and plugin updates that break things, a slow checkout on mobile, security patches nobody owns, and developer hours spent keeping the site alive rather than improving it. Shopify removes that layer. The work in a migration is not the data transfer itself — tools handle that — but the decisions about how WordPress-specific structures map onto Shopify's data model.
What moves, and what it becomes
| WooCommerce | Shopify | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Simple products | Products | Title, description, price, SKU, weight and images move directly |
| Variable products | Products with variants | Up to three options and 2,048 variants per product |
| Custom attributes and ACF fields | Metafields and metaobjects | Create definitions first, or data lands as unstructured text |
| Product categories and tags | Collections and tags | Automated collections can replace manual category assignment |
| Customers | Customers | Addresses move; passwords do not |
| Orders | Orders (archived) | Imported without notifications or stock changes |
| Posts and pages | Blog articles and pages | Shortcodes and page-builder markup must be cleaned |
| Coupons | Discounts | Rebuild logic rather than import blindly |
| Reviews | Review app | Shopify has no built-in review system; import via the app |
Variable products
WooCommerce lets a product use any number of attributes for variations. Shopify allows three options per product — typically size, colour and material — and since October 2025 up to 2,048 variants per product (previously 100). If a product varies on a fourth dimension, split it into separate products linked through metafields, or move that choice to a personalisation app. Decide this per product type before the import, not after.
Plugins
List every active plugin with the job it does: SEO, reviews, wishlists, product bundles, B2B pricing, shipping rules, invoicing, email marketing. For each, decide whether Shopify does it natively, an app covers it, or it needs custom development. Many stores find that half of their plugins existed to work around WordPress itself — caching, security, backups, image optimisation — and simply disappear. B2B pricing that relied on a role-based plugin now maps to Shopify B2B, available on every plan since April 2026 with up to three catalogues (unlimited on Plus).
Customers and passwords
Customer records with addresses move; passwords cannot, because the two platforms hash them differently. With Shopify's new customer accounts this barely matters — customers sign in with a one-time code sent by email. Send existing customers a short note at launch so the change is not a surprise.
Subscriptions
If you run WooCommerce Subscriptions, plan this part early. Active subscriptions need a Shopify subscription app, and whether existing payment methods can move depends on your payment provider: some tokens can be migrated between Stripe accounts, others require customers to re-enter their card. Our Shopify subscriptions guide covers the apps and cancellation rules.
URLs and SEO: where traffic is lost
A default WooCommerce store uses /product/blue-mug/ and /product-category/kitchen/. Shopify uses /products/blue-mug and /collections/kitchen, and blog posts move from the root or /blog/ to /blogs/news/. Every URL with traffic or backlinks needs a 301 redirect to its exact counterpart — never a blanket redirect to the homepage.
- Collect URLs from your sitemap, a full crawl, Search Console and backlink data — not only from the WooCommerce export.
- Include category archives, tag pages with traffic, paginated URLs, image attachment pages and old campaign landing pages.
- Import the redirect map into Shopify before the domain switches, then test a sample by hand.
- Keep titles, meta descriptions and headings of pages that rank; rewriting them during a migration adds avoidable risk.
- Check product, breadcrumb and organisation structured data in the new theme.
- Watch Search Console daily for 404s and indexing issues for the first four weeks.
Our guide to migrating without losing rankings goes deeper on the redirect map, and what actually breaks in a migration lists the issues that appear after launch.
The migration in five steps
- Audit: products and attributes, plugins, integrations, URLs and current organic performance.
- Build: the Shopify store with theme, payments, shipping, tax, legal pages and apps, while WooCommerce stays live.
- Test imports: products, customers and orders in several passes, reconciling counts and spot-checking records.
- Redirects and QA: the full 301 map, test orders, every integration checked end to end.
- Cutover: a delta import of the latest orders and customers, the domain switch at a quiet hour, then monitoring.
Import tools such as Shopify's Store Importer, Matrixify or the Shopify API handle the transfer. The judgement calls above are what make it clean — and what we put in writing before the work starts. See our WooCommerce to Shopify migration service for scope and process.