Magento to Shopify Migration: The Complete UK Guide

Magento was built for a different era of ecommerce: one where owning your stack was worth employing the people to run it. If you are reading this, you probably know the other side of that bargain. Six-monthly upgrade projects that cost real money and deliver nothing a customer can see. Security patches that cannot wait. An agency retainer that exists mostly to keep the lights on. We have migrated brands off Magento 1 and 2, and this guide is the honest version of what that involves, including the parts that are harder than the sales pitch suggests.

Why brands leave Magento

The pattern is consistent across every Magento store we have audited. First, the platform bill is only the visible cost: self-hosting means you are paying for infrastructure, PCI compliance scope, security patching and a developer on call, whether anything is being improved or not. Second, Magento's upgrade cycle is relentless: point releases arrive roughly quarterly, security patches more often, and skipping them is not an option for a store taking card payments. Third, if you are on Adobe Commerce, the licence alone runs to tens of thousands a year. And if you are still on Magento 1, which reached end of life in June 2020, you are running an unpatched platform in production, and your card acquirer would like a word.

What migrates cleanly, and what does not

Most of a Magento store maps to Shopify concepts, but not one to one, and the differences are where migrations go wrong. This is the honest mapping we work from.

The SEO part: keeping your rankings

Shopify enforces its own URL shapes: products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, content under /pages/ and /blogs/. Your Magento URLs, whatever structure they use, will change. That is not the risk. The risk is doing the mapping carelessly. Before any build work we crawl the existing site and export every URL earning impressions from Search Console, then map each one to its Shopify destination and load the 301 redirects natively into Shopify. Metadata, structured data and canonical logic are rebuilt to parity or better. Two Magento-specific traps deserve attention: layered navigation generates thousands of faceted URLs, and some of them rank; each needs a deliberate keep, redirect or retire decision. And internal links should be updated to point at final URLs directly, because a site that leans on its own redirects leaks crawl efficiency. Done properly, organic traffic holds through the switch: we crawl-compare before and after launch and report organic performance against the pre-migration baseline for thirty days.

How the data actually moves

The workhorse of most Shopify migrations is Matrixify, which imports products, customers, orders and redirects from structured spreadsheets at serious scale, alongside custom API scripts where the data needs transformation on the way through. We stage it: catalogue and content first, while the theme is being built and QA'd against real data, then a delta migration of customers and orders during a short content freeze in launch week, so nothing created in the gap gets lost. One-click cart-to-cart tools exist and are tempting; treat them with caution. They move data, but they do not make decisions, and a migration is mostly decisions: which attributes become metafields, which categories become automated collections, which of your nine customer groups still matter.

Apps, payments and integrations

Nothing in your Magento extension folder installs on Shopify, and this is usually good news. Payment moves to Shopify Payments in most UK cases, often at better effective rates than a gateway bolted onto Magento, with Shop Pay as the conversion bonus. Email platforms like Klaviyo re-point to the new store with history intact. ERP, OMS and fulfilment connectors almost always have first-party Shopify equivalents. Discount logic is the one to respect: Magento cart price rules can encode years of promotional archaeology, and the right move is to rebuild the handful that still earn, using Shopify's native discounts and Functions, rather than recreate the museum.

Checkout: the quiet conversion upside

Magento checkouts are usually custom, which means usually maintained, tested and broken by upgrades. Shopify's checkout is the same battle-tested flow used across the platform, extended rather than rebuilt on Plus, and it brings Shop Pay: Shopify's own research puts Shop Pay conversion meaningfully ahead of guest checkout. For most stores we migrate, checkout conversion improves without any optimisation work at all, which is a strange thing to be able to promise from a replatforming project.

Timeline: what six to twelve weeks looks like

Six weeks is realistic for a clean catalogue with standard integrations. Twelve covers B2B complexity, multi-region rollouts, headless builds or heavy ERP work. Distrust anyone quoting a fortnight, and equally anyone who cannot tell you what makes it longer.

What decides the cost

We would rather tell you what moves the number than print a number that is wrong for your store. The drivers are catalogue complexity (variant structures, attribute sprawl, image volume), the integration surface (ERP, OMS, marketplaces, custom middleware), B2B requirements, international structure, and how much of the front end you want redesigned rather than rebuilt to parity. What we can say with confidence: the total cost of ownership almost always falls after migration, because the invisible Magento overheads, hosting, patching, upgrade projects and firefighting, simply stop.

How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take?

Six to twelve weeks from audit sign-off to launch for most UK retailers. Catalogue size and cleanliness, B2B features, multi-region requirements and custom integrations are what push it toward the longer end. The launch itself is a controlled window with a content freeze and a delta data migration, not a big-bang weekend.

Will we lose SEO rankings when leaving Magento?

Not if the migration is done properly. Rankings are lost through lazy redirect mapping, not through replatforming itself. Every indexed URL is mapped to its new home with a 301, metadata and structured data are rebuilt to parity, and faceted navigation URLs get deliberate decisions. We monitor organic performance against your pre-migration baseline for thirty days after launch.

Can our order history move to Shopify?

Yes. Orders import as archived records with their line items, totals and dates, so customer service and reporting keep their history. Shopify assigns new order numbers; the original Magento numbers are preserved on each order as metadata. Imported orders are records only, and never re-charge a customer.

What happens to customer accounts and passwords?

Customer records, addresses and order history migrate. Passwords do not, on any platform migration, because password hashes are deliberately incompatible. Customers set a new password on their first login to the new store. The practical fix is communication: a planned relaunch email sequence that makes the reset feel like part of the launch rather than a fault.

One more thing worth stealing from how we run these projects: a migration is the single best moment your business will ever get to fix its measurement. The data layer is being rebuilt anyway, so GA4, server-side tracking and conversion APIs get implemented properly from day one rather than bolted on later. You arrive on Shopify with cleaner numbers than you left with, and every future decision gets easier. That, more than the platform itself, is what our clients say changed.

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