Shopify captured nearly 9,000 WooCommerce stores in a single 90-day period last year. That's 100 stores per day choosing to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify. If you're reading this, you're probably thinking about becoming one of them.

WooCommerce still powers roughly 33% of all ecommerce sites globally — over 4.5 million active stores. But the platform's biggest strength (infinite flexibility through plugins) is also what pushes merchants out. Hosting bills that creep up every year. Security patches you have to apply yourself. Plugin conflicts that break your checkout on a Tuesday afternoon with no warning. Shopify eliminates all of that, and the migration itself is simpler than most merchants expect. Most stores can complete the full switch in a weekend.

What Transfers When You Migrate WooCommerce to Shopify?

Before you touch a migration tool, understand what transfers cleanly and what needs manual work.

Transfers automatically with migration tools:

Products (titles, descriptions, images, variants, SKUs, prices)
Customer records (names, emails, addresses, order history)
Historical orders
Blog posts (basic content — formatting may need cleanup)
Product categories → Shopify collections

Doesn't transfer — requires manual setup:

Customer passwords. Encryption makes this impossible on any platform. Every customer will need to reset their password or accept an account activation email.
Custom fields and metadata. WooCommerce custom post types and ACF fields don't have a 1:1 Shopify equivalent. You'll need to recreate them as Shopify metafields.
Product reviews. Most migration tools skip reviews entirely. You'll need a separate import into whatever review app you choose on Shopify.
Plugin functionality. Your WooCommerce plugin stack doesn't carry over. You'll need to find Shopify app equivalents for each function — subscriptions, wishlists, advanced filtering, etc.
Theme and design. WooCommerce themes are PHP-based; Shopify uses Liquid. You're picking a new theme, not porting the old one.
Discount rules and coupons. Complex coupon logic from WooCommerce plugins rarely transfers. Rebuild these in Shopify's native discount system or with an app.

Pick Your Migration Tool

Three tools handle the bulk of WooCommerce-to-Shopify migrations. Each works differently.

LitExtension is the most hands-off option. It automates the entire transfer — you connect both stores, select what to migrate, and it handles the rest. The "Smart Update" feature lets you sync new orders and products that come in while you're testing Shopify, so you don't lose data during the transition window. Pricing is per-entity (you pay based on how many products, customers, and orders you're moving). A store with 1,000 products and 5,000 customers typically runs $100–$200.

Cart2Cart works similarly to LitExtension — automated, no technical knowledge required, supports 80+ platform combinations. It offers a free demo migration so you can verify results before committing. The catch: custom product data (like engraving text or personalization fields) often gets skipped. Always run the demo first and check edge cases.

Matrixify takes a different approach. It's a Shopify app that imports data via Excel or CSV files. You export from WooCommerce, format the data to match Matrixify's templates, and upload. It's fast — 100,000 SKUs in 2 hours — but requires comfort with spreadsheets. The learning curve is steeper. Pricing starts at $20/month. If you have a large catalog with complex data, Matrixify gives you the most control over how data maps to Shopify fields.

For most stores under 5,000 products, LitExtension or Cart2Cart will save you time. For large catalogs or stores with heavily customized data, Matrixify is worth the extra effort.

How Do You Set Up URL Redirects to Preserve SEO?

Stores that skip 301 redirects during migration lose 30–60% of their organic traffic immediately. WooCommerce and Shopify use completely different URL structures. WooCommerce formats product URLs as yourdomain.com/shop/category/product-name/. Shopify uses yourdomain.com/products/product-name. Without redirects, every inbound link, every Google ranking, and every bookmarked page breaks overnight.

That traffic doesn't come back on its own.

Here's what to do:

Export every URL from your WooCommerce site. Use Screaming Frog or your XML sitemap to get a complete list of product pages, collection pages, blog posts, and any other indexed URLs.
Map each old URL to its new Shopify equivalent. Create a spreadsheet with two columns — old path and new path. Products, collections, pages, and blog posts all need mapping.
Import redirects into Shopify. Go to Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects. You can upload a CSV file with all your redirect pairs at once. For stores with thousands of URLs, this bulk import saves hours.
Verify redirects work. After importing, spot-check at least 20 URLs across different page types. Use a bulk redirect checker to validate the full list.

With proper redirects in place, expect a minor traffic dip (5–10%) in the first week. Rankings typically stabilize within 4–6 weeks.

Preserve Your SEO Metadata

Most migration tools transfer product titles and descriptions but skip SEO metadata — meta titles, meta descriptions, and image alt text. These are the fields Google already associates with your pages, and losing them means losing ranking signals even if your redirects are perfect. Before you deactivate your WooCommerce store, export these three things:

Meta titles and descriptions — export from your SEO plugin (Yoast, RankMath, or All in One SEO). These plugins store SEO data separately from product content.
Image alt text — export alt attributes for all product photos.
Canonical URLs — note any pages where you've manually set canonical tags.

After migration, update Shopify's SEO fields for each product and page to match. This is tedious for large catalogs. Matrixify can handle this through its spreadsheet import if you include the SEO columns. For smaller stores, the Shopify admin's bulk editor works fine.

Submit your new Shopify sitemap to Google Search Console immediately after launch. Request a re-crawl of your most important pages. For a full post-migration SEO checklist, see our Shopify SEO checklist. Make sure your old WooCommerce site is fully offline — two live versions of your store creates a duplicate content problem that tanks both.

Rebuild Your Payment and Shipping Setup

Payment gateways and shipping rules don't migrate. This is actually a good thing — it forces you to set up clean configurations instead of carrying over years of patched-together WooCommerce settings.

Payments: Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe) is the default and eliminates transaction fees on Shopify plans. If you're in a region where Shopify Payments isn't available, you'll connect a third-party gateway. If you use COD, enable it under Settings → Payments → Manual payment methods.

Shipping: Recreate your shipping zones and rates in Settings → Shipping and delivery. If you were using a WooCommerce shipping plugin for real-time carrier rates, check if the same carrier offers a Shopify app. Most major carriers (UPS, FedEx, DHL, local couriers) have native Shopify integrations.

Taxes: Shopify handles automatic tax calculation for most regions. Review Settings → Taxes and duties to confirm rates match what you had in WooCommerce. If you sell internationally, Shopify Markets handles multi-country tax rules — something that required 2-3 WooCommerce plugins to achieve.

The Migration Timeline (Be Realistic)

Most merchants underestimate the testing phase and overestimate the data transfer phase. Here's a realistic timeline:

Day 1–2: Preparation. Export all WooCommerce data. Build your URL redirect map. Choose your Shopify theme and configure basic settings (logo, colors, navigation). Pick and install essential Shopify apps to replace your WooCommerce plugins.

Day 3: Data migration. Run the migration tool. This takes 1–8 hours depending on store size. For Matrixify users, add time for spreadsheet formatting.

Day 4–5: Verification and fixes. Check 50+ products for accuracy — prices, images, variants, descriptions. Verify customer records imported correctly. Test every payment method. Place test orders. Check mobile display. This is the step people rush. Don't.

Day 6: URL redirects and SEO. Import your redirect CSV. Verify redirects work. Update SEO metadata for top-traffic pages first. Submit sitemap to Search Console.

Day 7: Go live. Point your domain to Shopify. Deactivate WooCommerce. Monitor traffic, orders, and checkout completion rates closely for the first 48 hours. If you need help choosing a plan before launch, our guide to choosing the right Shopify plan breaks down the options.

Total cost for a self-managed migration: $100–$300 for the migration tool, plus whatever Shopify apps you need. Hiring an agency runs $2,000–$10,000 depending on store complexity. For most stores with under 2,000 products, the self-managed route works fine.

After the Switch: The First 30 Days

The migration isn't done when the site goes live. The first month is when you catch the things you missed.

Send account activation emails to your customers in batches — not all at once. A flood of "reset your password" emails looks like spam. Send 200–500 per day over a week or two.

Monitor Google Search Console daily for the first two weeks. Look for crawl errors, 404 spikes, and indexing issues. If Google reports a surge of broken pages, you missed some redirects — fix them immediately.

Compare your Shopify conversion rate to your last 30 days on WooCommerce. If it's significantly lower, the issue is usually the new theme (unfamiliar layout, different checkout flow) rather than the migration itself. Give customers 2–3 weeks to adjust before making major changes.

Track page load speed. One of the biggest benefits of moving to Shopify is faster hosting with a global CDN. If your new store isn't faster, you've probably installed too many apps. Remove anything you're not actively using.

The merchants who save 20–30% in operational overhead after migrating to Shopify aren't saving it on day one. They save it over the next 6–12 months by not paying for managed hosting, not dealing with security patches, and not troubleshooting plugin conflicts at 11pm. The migration is a weekend of work. The payoff compounds for years.