WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: A Step-by-Step Checklist

WooCommerce is flexible, but many growing brands eventually tire of plugin conflicts, hosting bills and security patches. Shopify removes most of that overhead so you can focus on selling. The challenge is moving without losing data, customers or search rankings.

This is the checklist our team follows on every Shopify migration project.

Phase 1: Audit and plan

• Inventory your data: products, variants, categories, customers, orders, reviews, coupons, gift cards and blog posts.
• List every plugin and decide its Shopify equivalent — a native feature, an app, or custom theme code.
• Export a full URL list from your sitemap and Google Search Console. This becomes your redirect map.
• Benchmark performance: current conversion rate, average order value, top landing pages and organic traffic.

Phase 2: Set up the Shopify store

• Choose a plan and configure taxes, shipping zones, payment gateways and currencies.
• Pick a theme (or design a custom Shopify theme) and build product, collection and cart templates.
• Recreate legal pages, navigation menus and email notification templates.

Phase 3: Migrate the data

1. Products — titles, descriptions, images, SKUs, prices, inventory, variants and metafields.
2. Customers — names, emails, addresses and marketing consent.
3. Orders — historical orders for reporting and customer account history.
4. Reviews — import into your chosen review app so social proof survives.
5. Blog content — articles, authors and featured images.

Always run a test import first and spot-check at least 20 products across different types.

Phase 4: Protect your SEO

• Create 301 redirects from every old WooCommerce URL (/product/…, /product-category/…) to its Shopify equivalent (/products/…, /collections/…).
• Carry over page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text.
• Add structured data for products and reviews.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console after launch.

Phase 5: Test before you switch

• Place test orders with every payment method and shipping zone.
• Check discount codes, tax calculations and order emails.
• Test on real mobile devices — most of your shoppers are on phones.
• Verify analytics, Meta Pixel and Google Ads conversion tracking.

Phase 6: Launch and monitor

Point your domain to Shopify during your lowest-traffic hours, send customer activation emails, and watch Search Console, 404 reports and conversion rate closely for the first 30 days.

Need a hand?

A careful migration protects years of SEO work and customer trust. Webyant has moved stores of every size to Shopify with zero data loss. Talk to our Shopify experts about your migration.