WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: The Complete 2026 Guide

A WooCommerce to Shopify migration moves products, customers, and past orders cleanly, but not custom functionality, active subscriptions, review history, or your URL structure. Plan four to twelve weeks, a data tool between free and a few hundred dollars, a quoted theme rebuild, and treat the redirect map as the highest-risk item in the whole project.

What a WooCommerce to Shopify migration actually moves

Shopify’s migration hub lists what it accepts: products, customers, historical orders, gift cards and store credit, blogs, and pages. Import order matters — products, then customers, then orders. For WooCommerce, Shopify’s migration documentation points you at a Store Migration app, in early access, that takes a product CSV exported straight out of WooCommerce.

Two documented warnings: importing historical orders emails every staff member unless you disable notifications first, and there is no data mapping support for customer CSV imports — your file matches Shopify’s headings exactly or it is rejected.

Product structure is the other gate. Shopify raised the variant ceiling to 2,048 per product in October 2025, but the option ceiling did not move: “Shopify only allows for 3 product options. Products with greater than 3 options won’t have their options imported.” Anything configured along four or more axes — metal, stone, carat, setting, engraving — does not import as a product. It becomes an app build.

What does not come across

This list decides whether the project is four weeks or four months.

• Custom functionality. Anything in a child theme’s functions.php, a bespoke plugin, or a snippet on a woocommerce_ hook does not port. Shopify’s equivalents — Liquid, metafields, Functions, Flow, apps — are capable, but each behavior is rebuilt from the requirement, not translated from the code.
• Active subscriptions. Stored payment tokens are generally not portable between platforms or gateways, so recurring billing cannot be imported. The routes are a gateway-level token migration arranged with your processor, or customer re-authorization — the model managed vendors such as Bold Subscriptions build around. That churn is often the largest single cost in the migration.
• Complex configurators and bundles. See the three-option ceiling. Configurators built as WooCommerce add-ons become a custom app, a line-item-property build, or a paid app with its own monthly fee.
• Review history. Shopify’s documentation says plainly that you cannot export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce. Years of ratings are also years of review structured data, so this is an SEO item, not just a content one.
• URL structures. Shopify’s paths are fixed: /products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/. WooCommerce’s /product/ and /product-category/ paths, and any custom permalink scheme, cannot be reproduced. Every ranking URL changes.
• Integrations built against WordPress hooks. ERP syncs, warehouse feeds, custom price rules, WP-Cron jobs, and anything reading the database directly gets rewritten against Shopify’s Admin API and webhooks.
• Page-builder content. Shortcodes and builder markup do not render in Liquid. Long-form pages are rebuilt.
• Customer credentials. Records import; passwords do not. Customers set new ones — a support spike in week one.

The real tool options and what they cost

The data tool is the cheapest line in the budget and the one people fixate on. Matrixify’s redirect capacity is the underrated feature: 10,000 redirects on the $20 tier, 100,000 on the $50 tier, so the redirect map is imported as a job.

Realistic timeline and total cost

The platform fee is the only number you can look up. Shopify’s published pricing lists Basic at $39/month monthly or $29 annually, Grow at $105 or $79, Advanced at $399 or $299; Plus starts at $2,300/month on a three-year term or $2,500 on one year.

Then the payment line. Keep a gateway that is not Shopify Payments and Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee on top of your processor’s: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus, waived on Plus where Shopify Payments is the sole provider. At $5M a year, 2% versus 0% is $100,000, so the gateway decision belongs in the migration plan.

Everything else is a quote. Price these separately before you sign:

1. Theme rebuild — your design reproduced in Liquid using sections and blocks.
2. Custom functionality rebuild — one line item per behavior on the “does not come across” list.
3. Integration rewrites — ERP, PIM, 3PL, feeds, anything touching order or inventory data.
4. Replacement apps — monthly subscriptions for reviews, subscriptions, bundles, search, and B2B pricing that used to be plugins.
5. Re-authorization campaign, redirect map and QA, and running both platforms during the overlap.

On timeline, a small catalogue on a stock theme with an automated tool is a few weeks. A store with real customization, live integrations, and a design worth preserving is a quarter; 2026 agency guides put mid-market migrations in the eight-to-sixteen-week range. A three-week quote covers the data move only.

The SEO risk, and the redirect map that mitigates it

Every ranking URL changes. That is the whole risk in one sentence, and the redirect map is the only thing between it and your organic revenue. Shopify supports redirects properly.

You create them under Content > Menus > URL redirects and bulk-import them from a CSV using Shopify’s sample template. The store limit is 100,000 redirects, or 20,000,000 on Plus. The documented constraints matter: you can only redirect from URLs that return a 404, you cannot redirect paths prefixed /apps, /cart, /orders, /services, or /shop, and wildcards are not part of the feature.

Build the map from three inputs, merged and deduplicated:

1. A full crawl of the live store: paginated category pages, tag archives, indexed attribute-filter URLs, old blog posts.
2. Search Console — every URL with an impression in the last sixteen months, not just the ones with clicks.
3. Analytics and your backlink tool — every URL with a session in the last year or an external link pointing at it.

Map one to one wherever a destination exists. Never blanket-redirect a category tree to the homepage; that is the most common way stores lose rankings in a replatform. Where no equivalent exists — a filtered URL, a dead tag archive — choose between a 301 to the nearest collection and a 410. Load the map into staging, crawl staging against it before DNS moves, re-crawl production the morning after cutover, then watch Search Console weekly for eight to twelve weeks. Expect a dip while Google recrawls; the map decides whether it is temporary.

Pre-migration checklist

1. Inventory every plugin and custom snippet; mark each keep, replace, or drop, and price a Shopify equivalent for every “keep”.
2. Count products with more than three options. That number is your configurator budget.
3. Export the full URL inventory from crawl, Search Console, analytics, and backlinks.
4. Decide the payment gateway and price its transaction fee against annual volume.
5. Model re-authorization churn, and confirm how review history is preserved.
6. Take a full WooCommerce backup, database and files, and keep it after cutover.
7. Run a test migration into a development store and count records against source totals.
8. Turn off staff order notifications before importing historical orders.
9. Reconcile tax, shipping, and discount logic by hand; these rarely survive an automated pass.
10. Write the rollback plan and cutover runbook, and freeze catalogue changes during the final pass.

Most stores migrate to escape symptoms, not WooCommerce

Read back the reasons stores give for leaving: pages are slow, checkout fails under load, the site went down on launch day, nobody owns the maintenance. Those are hosting problems, plugin problems, and unowned operational work — WooCommerce is what they are attached to, not what causes them. A store that fixes the underlying cause keeps its customizations, order history, review history, integrations, and URLs, and skips the redirect exercise above.

Do Amore ran that comparison with real numbers. The Shopify Plus rebuild modelled at roughly $940K; they stayed on WooCommerce and saved $251.5K over three years against a fragmented stack. Engagement-ring pages went from 5.9 s to 0.9 s and order edits from 8.1 s to 0.67 s, in a zero-downtime migration that kept every custom plugin intact.

“With Urumi, we avoided a costly move to Shopify. We get Shopify’s speed and scale while keeping the ease and open-source flexibility of WooCommerce.” — Krish Himmatramka, Founder, Do Amore

That is not an argument against migrating. Shopify is the right answer for a business with no engineering appetite, a catalogue that fits three options and standard fulfillment, and a preference for zero infrastructure responsibility. If that is you, use the guide above. But if your store is slow and custom rather than slow and simple, price the fix before you price the rebuild.

One thing worth checking before you commit

The case for migrating usually contains a sentence like “we cannot keep maintaining this.” That is a real constraint and it is the reason hosted platforms exist. It is also the input that has moved most in the last two years.

The work that makes a WooCommerce store expensive to own — reading code to find why checkout is slow, reproducing it, writing and testing the fix, keeping dependencies current — is the work AI agents now do against an open codebase, with a human reviewing the diff. Shopify ships AI too, and Sidekick is useful, but its ceiling is the platform surface rather than its own capability: what the platform does not expose, no agent reaches. The redirect map you built in the section above is the example already in front of you — Shopify’s redirect documentation states that fixed paths such as /products and /collections cannot be redirected, so that constraint survives any AI you point at it. Migrating removes the maintenance burden by removing your access to the thing that needs maintaining. That is a coherent choice — just price it knowing the alternative got cheaper.

The evidence is genuinely mixed: METR found experienced developers 19% slower with AI on tasks in repositories they already knew, while believing they were faster. Log your own hours for a quarter before you treat either number as yours.

How Urumi handles this

Urumi is the platform layer under WooCommerce stores doing $1M–$50M GMV, where slow checkout and downtime cost real money: horizontal auto-scaling across multi-zone Google Cloud, a 99.99% uptime SLA, a WooCommerce-aware cache, isolated staging per branch with one-click rollback, and fully managed APM. Three AIs sit on top. Revenue AI watches checkout, cart, pricing, and payments around the clock, prices every regression in dollars, and ships the fix as a PR. Migration onto the platform is zero-downtime in 24–48 hours with customizations intact.

grüum grew revenue 13.3% year over year on Urumi while absorbing 16× baseline load with zero incidents through peak weeks. Already have a team or an agency? They ship faster with the grunt work covered. Full picture at Urumi’s managed WooCommerce hosting.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a WooCommerce to Shopify migration take?

A small catalogue on a stock theme using an automated tool takes a few weeks. A store with custom functionality, live integrations, and a design worth preserving runs closer to a quarter; published 2026 agency guides put mid-market projects at eight to sixteen weeks. Rebuilding custom behavior, not moving data, sets the timeline.

Will I lose my SEO rankings if I move from WooCommerce to Shopify?

You will if you do not build a complete redirect map, because Shopify’s URL paths are fixed and every product and category URL changes. With a one-to-one map imported before DNS cutover, most stores see a temporary dip while Google recrawls. Shopify supports 100,000 redirects per store, or 20,000,000 on Plus.

Can you migrate WooCommerce subscriptions to Shopify?

Not directly. Stored payment tokens are generally not portable between platforms and gateways, so active recurring billing cannot be imported as data. The options are a gateway-level token migration arranged with your processor, or a re-authorization campaign where subscribers re-enter payment details. Model that churn first.

How much does it cost to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify?

The data tool is the cheap part: free for CSV or Shopify’s Store Migration app, from $59 with LitExtension, or $20–$200 per 30 days with Matrixify. The real cost is the theme rebuild, custom functionality rebuild, integration rewrites, and replacement apps, plus the platform fee — $39 to $399 a month on standard plans, or from $2,300 on Plus.

If the symptoms driving your migration are speed, stability, and unowned maintenance, read how Do Amore avoided a $940K rebuild and why WooCommerce slows down under load first.

Last reviewed September 2026. Competitor details come from their public pages on the dates linked; check them before you buy.