Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is mostly not a data problem. Products export cleanly. What takes the time is rebuilding a storefront that lives inside a page builder, replacing plugins with apps, and redirecting every URL on a site where the prefix changes by a single letter. This guide covers all three.
A WooCommerce to Shopify migration moves products, customers, orders and blog content out of WordPress, rebuilds the storefront in Shopify's Liquid theme system, replaces plugins with Shopify apps, and redirects every URL. The data is the easy part. The theme rebuild, plugin replacement and redirect mapping account for most of the work and nearly all of the risk.
This is the part that surprises people. WooCommerce exports products to CSV in a few clicks, so the migration feels like it should be quick. Then you discover the homepage was built in Elementor, the subscriptions live in a plugin holding payment tokens, and the SEO metadata is in Yoast rather than in the product records.
Solo Media Group is a Platinum-tier Shopify migration agency with 75+ replatforms delivered since March 2018. Two of our named WordPress migrations — Time4Learning and Wild Planet Foods — are referenced further down with the clients' own words.
WooCommerce gives you complete control. The cost of that control is that you own everything underneath it — and the bill arrives in categories rather than as a single line.
| Cost line | On WooCommerce | On Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting and CDN | Yours — managed WooCommerce hosting commonly runs $30 to $300+ per month by traffic | Included |
| SSL certificates | Yours to provision and renew | Included |
| Security patching | Yours — core, theme and every plugin | Included |
| PCI compliance scope | Largely yours | Largely Shopify's |
| Backups and staging | Yours to configure and test | Included |
| Uptime and scaling for traffic spikes | Yours to plan and pay for | Included |
| Plugin licences | Annual, per plugin, and they renew | App subscriptions, but far fewer needed |
| Developer retainer for maintenance | Effectively mandatory at scale | Optional, and spent on features instead |
Add your own figures to that table before deciding. The comparison people usually make is a $39 Shopify plan against a $20 hosting bill, which is not the comparison that matters. The one that matters is the whole right-hand column against the whole left-hand column, including the developer hours currently spent keeping the site upright rather than improving it.
If your store is stable, your team can ship, and you have engineering capacity that knows the codebase, migrating is an expensive way to solve nothing. WooCommerce is genuinely more flexible than Shopify for unusual product models and content-led businesses where the store is a secondary function. Migration is justified by a constraint you can name out loud. If you cannot name one, spend the budget on a redesign or on fixing your hosting instead.
Products, customers, orders and blog posts migrate with standard tooling. What does not transfer: your theme and any page builder layouts, plugin functionality and most plugin-stored data, SEO metadata held in Yoast or Rank Math, product reviews, subscription state, structured data, and customer passwords. Each of those is a separate workstream.
| Asset | Transfers? | What it actually needs |
|---|---|---|
| Products, variants, images | Yes | Standard export and import; verify variant option counts first |
| Customers | Yes | Accounts and addresses migrate; passwords do not |
| Customer passwords | No | Shopify sends account activation invitations. Plan the email. |
| Orders | Yes | Complete history including refunds and fulfilment status |
| Blog posts and pages | Yes | Plus a redirect for every single URL |
| Theme and templates | No | Rebuilt in Liquid. WordPress themes cannot be ported. |
| Page builder layouts (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery) | No | Rebuilt as Shopify sections. See below — this is the big one. |
| Plugin functionality | No | Each plugin mapped to an app, rebuilt, or retired |
| Plugin-stored data | Rarely | Stays in the WordPress database unless explicitly exported |
| SEO metadata (Yoast, Rank Math) | No | Separate CSV export, mapped into Shopify's SEO fields |
| Structured data / schema | No | Theme-generated on Shopify, or rebuilt via app |
| Product reviews | No | Exported from the review plugin into a Shopify review app |
| Subscriptions | No | Rebuilt on a Shopify subscription platform — hardest single item |
| Coupons | No | Recreated as Shopify discount codes and automatic discounts |
| WordPress users and roles | Partly | Customers map to customers; admin users to staff accounts |
| Custom post types and taxonomies | No | Mapped to metaobjects and metafields — custom work |
| htaccess redirects | No | Existing redirect rules imported into Shopify's redirect table |
If your WooCommerce site was built with Elementor, Divi, WPBakery or a similar page builder, none of that layout transfers. Page builders store layouts as their own markup inside WordPress. On Shopify the equivalent is theme sections in Liquid, so every page built visually has to be rebuilt as a configurable section. This is the single most underestimated line in a WooCommerce migration.
It is also the item most likely to blow a fixed timeline, because the page count is usually higher than anyone remembers. A brand that describes itself as having “about ten pages” typically has forty once you count landing pages, campaign pages and old promotions still receiving traffic.
Count them during scoping. Then decide which are worth rebuilding, which should be consolidated, and which should be retired with a redirect. A migration is the cheapest opportunity you will ever get to delete pages nobody reads, and most brands waste it by rebuilding everything.
The upside is real. Rebuilt as Shopify sections, those layouts become reusable and editable by your marketing team without a developer. Where a layout genuinely needs logic no theme section can carry, that becomes custom app work — but it rarely does.
WooCommerce products sit at /product/item-name/ and Shopify products sit at /products/item-name. The prefix differs by a single letter, and it still requires a 301 redirect on every product — Google treats /product/ and /products/ as entirely different URLs. This catches out more WooCommerce migrations than any other redirect issue.
| WooCommerce URL | Shopify destination |
|---|---|
/product/blue-widget/ | /products/blue-widget |
/product-category/widgets/ | /collections/widgets |
/product-category/widgets/small/ | /collections/small-widgets |
/shop/ | /collections/all |
/product-tag/sale/ | /collections/sale |
/about-us/ | /pages/about-us |
/2024/03/post-title/ | /blogs/news/post-title |
/blog/post-title/ | /blogs/news/post-title |
/?s=widgets | /search?q=widgets |
/cart/ · /checkout/ · /my-account/ | Shopify equivalents; cannot be redirected to |
/product-category/widgets/small/ becomes a single collection — a decision about collection architecture, not a mechanical mapping./%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/, every blog URL carries a date that Shopify will not reproduce.Export any existing rules from .htaccess as well, and reconcile them against a live crawl and Search Console data. Shopify Plus permits up to 20,000,000 redirects against 100,000 on standard plans. Our Shopify Plus migration services page covers redirect strategy across every source platform.
WooCommerce merchants usually have years of blog content, and it is often their strongest source of organic traffic. There are three options and most guides only mention one.
| Option | Trade-off | When to choose it |
|---|---|---|
| Migrate to Shopify /blogs/ | One platform, one admin, one bill. Shopify's blogging tools are more basic than WordPress and every URL changes. | Most stores. Content is straightforward and volume is manageable. |
| Keep WordPress on a subdomain | Easiest technically. blog.yourstore.com is treated as a separate site, so authority is not shared as directly. | Large content operations with editorial workflows Shopify cannot match. |
| Keep WordPress at /blog/ via reverse proxy | Preserves URLs and keeps content on the primary domain. Adds infrastructure you must maintain — which is often the thing you were escaping. | High-value content libraries where changing URLs is too risky. |
Whichever you choose, plan it as a first-class workstream rather than an afterthought. Blog posts need their metadata migrated from Yoast, their internal links updated to point at new Shopify URLs, and a redirect each. Internal links are the step most often skipped, and a library of posts pointing at dead product URLs undoes much of the work.
If you run WooCommerce Subscriptions, treat it as its own project. Subscription state, billing cycle position, next renewal dates and stored payment tokens all have to move to a Shopify subscription platform such as Stay.ai or ReCharge, and payment tokens in particular are constrained by what your gateways will allow.
Get this wrong and the failure is not a broken page — it is a customer charged twice, or not charged at all, or a renewal that silently stops. We scope subscriptions separately, migrate them to staging first, and reconcile every active subscriber against the source system before cutover. Wild Planet Foods and Time4Learning both involved subscription platform work alongside the migration.
Eight to twelve weeks for a typical WooCommerce store. Our free 100-point migration checklist sets out every step across nine phases, including the nine that become irreversible after cutover.
Crawl the live site and export every URL with traffic or backlinks. Inventory plugins, page-builder pages, custom post types and integrations. Count variable products by attribute count. Export .htaccess rules.
Blog approach chosen. Page-builder pages triaged into rebuild, consolidate or retire. URL map drafted and signed off. All three before design begins.
Concepts, then full page design in Figma, built around reusable Shopify sections rather than one-off layouts.
Products and variants, then customers, then orders, then blog content. Verified at each stage. Your live store keeps trading throughout.
Each plugin mapped to an app, rebuilt or retired. Reviews, subscriptions and SEO metadata handled as their own imports.
Development against approved designs, then cross-device, cross-browser, checkout and integration testing.
DNS cutover in your lowest-traffic window. Redirects live with the store. Sitemap resubmitted the same day. Account activation emails sent to customers.
Daily Search Console checks through the first fortnight: coverage, 404s, index status, and rankings on your top revenue URLs.
WooCommerce migration projects at Solo Media Group start at around $20,000 and are quoted as a line-item estimate. Shopify is billed separately and directly — plans run from $39 per month on Basic to $2,300 per month for Plus on a three-year term. Most WooCommerce stores do not need Plus on day one.
We will tell you honestly whether you need Plus. If you are on WooCommerce today, the Advanced plan is frequently the right landing point, with Plus later once expansion stores, checkout extensibility or B2B become real requirements. Our Shopify Plus cost guide covers budgeting, and cheaper migration routes exist — DIY tooling and freelancers are legitimate for simple catalogs, and we would rather you used one than overpaid us for a store that does not need this level of work.
Both migrations included the two things WooCommerce merchants worry about most: subscriptions, and SEO through the transition. As a Platinum-tier Shopify migration company we are rated 5.0 from 37 reviews on the Shopify Partner Directory, and the tier is verifiable on Shopify's own site.
Products are the easy part. Page-builder rebuilds, plugin replacement and redirect mapping are the project. A quote that only asks your product count has not scoped the work.
Titles and meta descriptions live in the SEO plugin, not in the product records. They do not travel with a product export, and a store launching with empty meta tags loses rankings for reasons nobody diagnoses for weeks. If you have already migrated and traffic dropped, a migration SEO audit checks this within the first 48 hours.
Some exist only because WooCommerce could not do natively what Shopify does out of the box. Triage before you go shopping for apps — the app bill after migration is often a fraction of the plugin bill before it.
Redirects catch external traffic. Internal links inside blog posts and pages should point at the new URLs directly, not bounce through a redirect chain.
Passwords cannot migrate. Every customer needs an activation invitation, and if that email is an afterthought your support inbox absorbs the consequences during launch week.
Eight to twelve weeks for a typical store, usually faster than a Magento migration because the data model is simpler. The variables are the number of page-builder pages to rebuild, the number of plugins to replace, and whether subscriptions are in scope.
Your theme and any page-builder layouts, plugin functionality and most plugin-stored data, SEO metadata held in Yoast or Rank Math, product reviews, subscription state, structured data, coupons, custom post types, and customer passwords. Products, customers, orders and blog posts do transfer.
Not if redirect mapping is complete before launch and metadata is migrated deliberately. WooCommerce products sit at /product/ and Shopify products at /products/ — a one-letter difference that Google treats as two entirely different URLs, so every product needs a 301.
No. Page builders store layouts as their own markup inside WordPress, and Shopify uses Liquid theme sections instead. Every visually built page has to be rebuilt as a section. It is the most underestimated line in a WooCommerce migration, and a good moment to retire pages nobody reads.
You have three options: migrate it to Shopify's /blogs/ system, keep WordPress on a subdomain, or keep WordPress at /blog/ behind a reverse proxy. Migrating suits most stores. Whichever you choose, blog metadata, internal links and a redirect per URL all need handling.
Yes, but it is the hardest part of the project. Subscription state, billing cycle position, renewal dates and stored payment tokens have to move to a platform such as Stay.ai or ReCharge, with gateway constraints on the tokens. We scope it separately and reconcile every active subscriber before cutover.
Yes. Passwords cannot be migrated from any platform. Shopify sends account activation invitations, and that email should be planned as part of your launch communications rather than discovered on launch day.
Not automatically. Titles and meta descriptions live in the plugin rather than in your product records, so they need a separate CSV export mapped into Shopify's SEO fields. Skipping this is why some migrated stores launch with empty meta tags.
Our projects start at around $20,000, quoted as a line-item estimate. Simple catalogs can move for far less using DIY tooling or a freelancer, and we will tell you if that is the better route. Shopify plans are billed separately, from $39 per month on Basic to $2,300 for Plus on a three-year term.
Usually not on day one. Most WooCommerce stores land well on Advanced, moving to Plus later if expansion storefronts, checkout extensibility or native B2B become real requirements. Anyone selling you Plus before understanding your requirements is selling you a plan, not a solution.
No. The new store is built on a staging store while your WooCommerce site keeps trading. The only cutover is a DNS switch, scheduled for your lowest-traffic window, and WooCommerce can stay available as a backup afterwards.
It depends on what you count. A Shopify plan looks more expensive than a hosting bill, but WooCommerce also carries hosting, CDN, SSL, security patching, backups, staging, plugin licences and developer maintenance. Compare the full stack, including the developer hours currently spent keeping the site upright.
