WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: The Complete Guide

The honest guide to moving from WooCommerce to Shopify: the real cost of 'free', what happens to your blog, subscriptions and SEO, what migrates and what gets rebuilt, and the timeline UK retailers should actually expect.

WooCommerce runs a huge share of the world's online stores, and for good reason: it is free, it lives inside WordPress, and it will do almost anything if you bolt enough plugins onto it. The problem is that sentence's second half. Every WooCommerce store we have migrated reached the same moment: the plugin stack that made it flexible became the thing that made every update a gamble, and the team spent more time keeping the shop standing than growing it. This guide is what we tell those businesses in the first meeting, written down.

In short: a WooCommerce to Shopify migration moves products, customers, orders, coupons and content onto Shopify in four to ten weeks for most stores. Variable products become variants, customer passwords cannot migrate (true of every platform move), active subscriptions need gateway-level planning, and your blog needs a deliberate decision: migrate it or keep WordPress alongside. Permalink structures change, so the 301 redirect map carries your SEO. The trade is WordPress's flexibility for Shopify's stability, checkout and near-zero maintenance.

Why stores outgrow WooCommerce

It is rarely one thing. It is renewal season for a dozen plugin licences, a hosting bill that climbs with traffic, an update to WordPress core that quietly breaks the checkout on a Friday, and the realisation that the 'free' platform has a monthly cost in maintenance retainer and anxiety. WooCommerce is genuinely good at flexibility. But flexibility is a liability when what the business needs is a shop that simply works at scale, converts well on mobile and does not need a developer to change a banner.

The real cost of 'free': WooCommerce versus Shopify
Cost line	WooCommerce	Shopify
Platform	Free	Subscription
Hosting	You pay, and scale it yourself	Included
Plugins and licences	Renewals across the stack, often hundreds per year each	Fewer apps doing more, and much is native
Maintenance	Updates, conflicts and backups: yours	Platform's problem
Security	WordPress attack surface, your responsibility	Handled by the platform
Checkout	Gateway plugins, themes permitting	One battle-tested checkout with Shop Pay

What migrates, and what gets rebuilt

WooCommerce to Shopify: the mapping
WooCommerce	Shopify	Watch out for
Simple and variable products	Products with variants	Attribute sprawl needs tidying before import, not after
Product categories and tags	Collections	Thin tag archives usually should not survive the move
Customers	Customers	Passwords never migrate; plan the reset communication
Orders	Imported as archived orders	History preserved for service and reporting; nothing re-charges
Coupons	Discount codes	Complex rule stacks are rebuilt with Shopify discounts and Functions
Yoast / SEO plugin metadata	Title and description fields	Export it and map it, or lose years of title tweaking
WordPress blog	Shopify blog, or WordPress kept alongside	A real decision; see below
Subscriptions	Subscription apps (Recharge, Skio and similar)	The hard part is billing tokens; start this first
Page builder layouts (Elementor etc.)	Theme sections	Layouts do not port; content is re-authored into sections

Subscriptions deserve their own plan. Active subscribers are billing agreements held at your payment gateway, not rows in WooCommerce. Gateways like Stripe support migrating stored payment methods between processors on request, and the major Shopify subscription apps run assisted imports, but the sequencing matters and it takes weeks, not days. If you sell subscriptions, this workstream starts on day one, and no customer should ever need to re-enter a card.

The blog decision

Your WordPress blog is often where your organic traffic actually lives, so it gets a deliberate choice, not an afterthought. Option one: migrate posts into Shopify's blog, redirect the old permalinks, and run one platform. This is our default for most stores; Shopify's blogging is plainer than WordPress but perfectly capable, and consolidation simplifies everything from analytics to maintenance. Option two: keep WordPress running for content on a subdomain while Shopify runs the shop. This preserves editorial workflows and heavy content structures, at the price of running two platforms. What we do not recommend is the accidental version of option two, where the old blog is left half-alive and slowly rots. Decide, redirect, and monitor.

SEO: carrying your rankings across

WooCommerce permalinks (/product/, /product-category/, and whatever custom structure you chose in 2019) give way to Shopify's fixed shapes: /products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/. The migration lives or dies on the redirect map: we crawl the site, pull every URL with impressions from Search Console, and 301 each one to its precise new home, loaded natively into Shopify. Yoast metadata is exported and mapped onto the new products and collections so years of title refinement are not lost. Thin content is culled on purpose: tag archives and near-empty category pages that WordPress generates by default usually should not survive, and pruning them during a migration is free. We then watch crawl stats and organic performance against the pre-move baseline for thirty days.

How the data moves

For straightforward stores, Shopify's own Store Importer will carry products, customers and orders directly from WooCommerce, and it is genuinely fine at that scale. For anything with real complexity, we export with WordPress tooling and import with Matrixify, which gives control over the transformation in the middle: attribute tidying, metafield mapping, collection logic, and a delta pass during launch week so orders and customers created after the first import are not lost. The pattern is the same as every migration we run: catalogue and content early, build and QA against real data, freeze briefly, delta, launch.

Payments, shipping and the checkout upgrade

Payment simplifies: Shopify Payments covers most UK cases at predictable rates, existing gateways mostly have Shopify equivalents if you need them, and Shop Pay comes with the platform: Shopify's own research consistently shows it converting well ahead of guest checkout. Shipping logic moves from plugin configuration to Shopify's native rates plus apps where genuinely needed. The one-page, mobile-first checkout is the same one used across millions of stores, which is precisely the point: it is the most tested piece of ecommerce software on earth, and you never patch it.

Timeline: four to ten weeks

Typical phases for a WooCommerce to Shopify migration
Phase	What happens
1. Audit and plan	Crawl, plugin and integration inventory, redirect strategy, subscription plan if relevant
2. Data specification	Product, metafield and collection mapping; Yoast metadata export
3. Build	Theme built on Shopify OS 2.0 against real migrated data
4. Integrations	Payments, shipping, email, subscriptions, analytics connected and tested
5. Launch window	Content freeze, delta migration, redirects live, DNS cutover
6. Post-launch	Thirty days of organic and crawl monitoring against baseline

Four weeks suits a clean store with standard plugins. Ten covers subscriptions, heavy content operations, custom plugin logic that needs rebuilding as apps or Functions, and B2B. The same rule as Magento applies: be suspicious of anyone quoting a weekend, and of anyone who cannot explain what makes it longer.

How long does a WooCommerce to Shopify migration take?

Four to ten weeks for most UK stores, from audit to launch. Subscriptions, custom plugin functionality and large content operations are what extend it. The cutover itself is a short, controlled window with a content freeze and a final delta import, so trading barely notices.

Do customer passwords transfer from WooCommerce?

No, and no honest agency will tell you otherwise: password hashes are incompatible between platforms by design. Customers keep their accounts and order history and simply set a new password on first login. A planned relaunch email makes this a non-event.

Can we keep our WordPress blog after moving to Shopify?

Yes. Either migrate the posts into Shopify's blog and redirect the old permalinks, which is our default recommendation for most stores, or keep WordPress running on a subdomain for content while Shopify handles commerce. Both work; the mistake is not deciding and leaving the old blog to decay.

Will our reviews, coupons and subscriptions migrate?

Reviews export from your reviews plugin and import into a Shopify reviews app. Coupons are rebuilt as Shopify discounts, which is usually an opportunity to retire the archaeology. Active subscriptions migrate via your payment gateway and a Shopify subscription app with assisted import; it is the workstream to start first, and done properly no customer re-enters a card.

And the same closing advice we give every migrating brand: the replatform is the one moment you get to rebuild measurement without extra cost, because everything is being wired anyway. GA4 with a proper data layer, server-side tracking and clean conversion APIs from day one. Most stores leave WooCommerce with analytics they do not trust; there is no reason to arrive on Shopify the same way.