WordPress to Shopify Migration (2026): Moving Your Blog, Pages and SEO

Moving a WordPress site to Shopify means exporting your posts and pages, importing them into Shopify's blog and pages, re-uploading images, and redirecting every old URL before you switch your domain. Shopify has no built-in WordPress importer, so most brands use an import app. If you only want to sell a few products, you may not need to migrate at all: Shopify's free WordPress plugin adds its checkout to your existing site. This guide covers both routes. Running WooCommerce? Start with our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide.

Should you migrate WordPress to Shopify, or connect Shopify to WordPress?

Migrate if selling is now your main job and WordPress is slowing you down. Connect Shopify to WordPress if publishing is still the main job and you want to add a store without rebuilding your site.

There are three ways to combine the two, and they suit very different businesses. The chart below shows which one fits.

The lightest option is the official Shopify plugin for WordPress, built by Shopify and free to install from WordPress.org. According to Shopify's developer documentation, it works as a sales channel: you manage products in Shopify and drop products and collections into WordPress posts and pages, and shoppers buy through Shopify's checkout. It's officially supported on WordPress's default block themes, and other themes may need extra work. It needs a Shopify plan to sell, according to Shopify's plugin page.

A headless build, with WordPress serving content and Shopify handling commerce, gives you the most control. It also means two platforms to maintain and a custom front end to pay for.

What transfers from WordPress to Shopify, and what doesn't?

Posts, pages, images and SEO titles can move with an import app. Themes, page-builder layouts, plugins, comments and forms have to be rebuilt or replaced.

WordPress's built-in export (Tools > Export) produces a WXR XML file of your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, custom fields and users, according to WordPress.org's documentation. Shopify can't read that file directly, so you'll use an app.

Keep your WordPress hosting for at least a month after launch. You'll want the original files if an image or post didn't come across cleanly.

How do you migrate blog posts from WordPress to Shopify?

Export your posts to CSV with a WordPress export plugin, run them through an import app that pulls in the images and builds redirects, then check every post before launch.

Here's the process Matrixify's WordPress tutorial describes, which is the method we use most:

1. Export from WordPress with the free All Export plugin. Pick the fields you need (title, content, excerpt, date, slug, status, categories, tags, author, featured image and your Yoast fields) rather than exporting everything, which can corrupt the file.
2. Don't open the CSV in Excel. Saving it there can break its structure.
3. Run a dry run in Matrixify with your old site's URL. It converts the file into an import template and downloads your images into a folder.
4. Upload the images to Shopify Files without renaming them, so the rewritten links still match.
5. Review the template, then import it. The template includes a Redirects sheet for the old post URLs.
6. Check the import results for failed rows, fix them and re-import.

Match the app plan to your blog's size. Matrixify's Basic plan ($20 per 30 days) handles 50 blog posts per file, Big ($50) handles 500, and Enterprise ($200) has no limit, according to its Shopify App Store listing. A blog with 300 posts needs the Big plan for at least a month.

What breaks during a blog import?

Three things cause most of the clean-up:

• Shortcodes and page builders. Content built with Elementor, Divi or WPBakery stores layout as shortcodes. Import apps convert these to plain HTML, which usually loses the design. Plan to rebuild your most-visited posts and pages as Shopify theme sections.
• Internal links. Links between your own posts still point to the old WordPress URLs. Redirects will catch them, but updating them to the new URLs keeps your site fast and clean.
• Multiple authors. Shopify's admin only lists staff accounts as authors, and the number of staff accounts depends on your plan. Imports can carry an author's name, and brands with many guest writers often show author details through a metafield.

What happens to your WordPress URLs on Shopify?

Every post and page URL changes, so each one needs a 301 redirect to its new address, set up before you point your domain at Shopify.

WordPress lets you put posts at the root of your domain. Shopify doesn't: posts live under /blogs/ and the blog's name, and pages live under /pages/. Category and tag archives become tag pages on the blog. The diagram below shows where each type of WordPress URL lands.

Shopify's redirect rules shape how you build the map, according to Shopify's help center:

• Redirects only work from broken URLs. If an old path still loads a page on Shopify, the redirect is ignored.
• You can import redirects in bulk from a CSV under Content > Menus > URL redirects.
• Standard plans allow up to 100,000 redirects, and Shopify Plus allows up to 20 million.
• Redirects can point to a full URL, so if other sites link to your old /wp-content/uploads/ images, you can send those links to the same files on Shopify.
• URLs with query strings may not redirect as expected. If your WordPress site uses ?p=123 style links, test them.

Never send old URLs to your homepage in bulk. Google treats that as a soft 404, and the rankings those pages earned are lost. Our 100-point Shopify migration checklist covers the redirect checks you can't undo after launch.

How do you keep your Yoast or Rank Math SEO on Shopify?

Carry over your SEO titles and meta descriptions with the import, keep each post's slug the same after /blogs/, and rebuild the technical pieces Yoast used to handle for you.

• Titles and descriptions. Export the Yoast or Rank Math title and description fields with your posts, and map them to each article's search engine listing.
• Slugs. Keep the last part of every URL the same. /my-post/ becoming /blogs/news/my-post is a cleaner move for Google than a new slug.
• Sitemap. Shopify builds sitemap.xml automatically. Submit it in Google Search Console on launch day.
• Robots.txt. Shopify's default file works for most stores. It can be edited through the theme if you need custom rules.
• Structured data. Check that your theme outputs Article schema on blog posts. Many themes don't, and Yoast was doing it for you.
• Monitoring. Watch Search Console's indexing and 404 reports daily for the first two weeks and weekly for 90 days.

Our Shopify migration SEO audit covers this before and after launch: a crawl comparison, redirect checks, metadata mapping and 30 days of monitoring.

How much does a WordPress to Shopify migration cost?

Anywhere from an app subscription and your own time to $20,000 or more, depending on how many posts you have, how much design needs rebuilding, and whether you sell products.

Shopify's plans start at $29 a month billed yearly ($39 monthly) for Basic, then $79 for Grow and $299 for Advanced on yearly billing, and from $2,300 a month for Shopify Plus, according to Shopify's pricing page.

Four things raise the price: the number of posts and pages, how much of the site was built with a page builder, custom post types that need to become metaobjects, and whether a product catalog moves at the same time. Book a discovery call for a scoped estimate.

How long does a WordPress to Shopify migration take?

A small blog can move in a week or two. A full site with a redesign, custom content types and a store usually takes 6 to 12 weeks.

Most of the time goes into three steps: rebuilding page layouts in the Shopify theme, building and testing the redirect map, and checking imported posts one by one. The import itself takes minutes.

When should you stay on WordPress?

Stay if your site earns money from content, ads or memberships rather than product sales, or if you rely on WordPress features Shopify can't replace.

Shopify is built to sell. Its blog is simpler than WordPress, with no categories, no custom post types without metaobjects, and basic comments. If you publish several times a week with a team of writers, run a membership site, or make most of your money from ads or affiliate links, WordPress is likely the better home, and the Shopify plugin can add a store to it.

Why choose Solo Media Group for a WordPress to Shopify migration?

Solo Media Group is a Shopify Platinum Partner, the top tier of Shopify's partner program, with 75+ replatforms and new builds since March 2018. Solo is rated 5.0 from 38 reviews on the Shopify Partner Directory.

Wild Planet Foods, the sustainable seafood brand, moved from WordPress to Shopify with us, with a redesign focused on clearer product information, subscriptions and accessibility. Wild Planet case study

Call us if your blog drives organic traffic you can't lose, you have more than a few hundred posts, your site was built with a page builder, or you're adding a product catalog at the same time. See our Shopify Plus migration services.

WordPress to Shopify FAQs