WooCommerce to Shopify: The Complete Migration Checklist

Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify comes down to seven stages: audit, data export, import and validation, theme build, app and payment mapping, 301 redirects, and DNS cutover with post-launch QA. Done in that order, a typical store moves in four to eight weeks without losing orders, customers, or rankings. Here’s the checklist we run on every project.

The complete checklist at a glance

1. Audit your WooCommerce stack: plugins, integrations, custom code, revenue-critical features.
2. Pick a migration window outside your peak season and freeze major catalog changes.
3. Export products, customers, orders, coupons, and content.
4. Set up the Shopify store: plan, staff accounts, taxes, shipping zones, payment providers.
5. Import data and validate it against record counts from WooCommerce.
6. Build or port your theme; rebuild key landing pages.
7. Map every plugin to a Shopify app, a native feature, or a decision to drop it.
8. Build the 301 redirect map from a full crawl plus Search Console data.
9. Re-point email, reviews, subscriptions, and analytics integrations.
10. Run pre-launch QA: test orders, refunds, notification emails, mobile.
11. Cut over DNS with a low TTL; launch redirects the same hour.
12. Post-launch: submit the sitemap, watch 404s, reconcile orders for two weeks.

The rest of this post expands the steps that go wrong most often.

How do you export your WooCommerce data?

You have three routes: WooCommerce’s native CSV exporter (fine for products, weak for orders), export plugins, or a migration app like Matrixify or LitExtension that connects both platforms directly. For orders and customers, we usually reach for a migration app — CSV round-trips get messy fast.

What to migrate: products with images, variants, and attributes; customers with their marketing consent status intact; order history (the last two to five years is usually enough); coupons still worth honoring; and your pages and blog content.

One hard fact to plan around: customer passwords cannot migrate. WooCommerce and Shopify hash them differently, so every customer will need to activate a new account. Time the invite emails with your launch announcement so it reads as an upgrade, not a breach.

What about apps, payments, and subscriptions?

Map every active plugin to its Shopify equivalent before you build. Common translations: Yoast becomes Shopify’s built-in SEO fields plus an app if needed; Elementor pages become theme sections; review plugins export to a review app via CSV.

Subscriptions deserve their own line. WooCommerce Subscriptions maps to Shopify’s native subscriptions, Recharge, or Skio — but the billing tokens are the hard part. If you’re on Stripe, the payment tokens can usually be transferred through Stripe’s migration process, which takes weeks of lead time. Start that conversation first, not last.

Set up Shopify Payments early, keep PayPal connected, and run a real test charge on each method before launch.

How do you protect SEO during the move?

WooCommerce lets you shape URLs freely — /product/, /product-category/, dated blog permalinks. Shopify uses fixed prefixes: /products/, /collections/, /pages/, and /blogs/. That means nearly every URL on your site will change, and every indexed URL needs a 301 redirect to its new home.

Crawl your site, pull top pages from Search Console, map each URL to its Shopify equivalent, and import the list before launch. Carry over your titles, meta descriptions, and product copy as-is — content parity plus redirects is what keeps rankings. The full process is in our 301 redirects guide.

How does the DNS cutover work?

A few days out, lower your domain’s TTL to 300 seconds so the switch propagates fast. On launch day: run a final sync of any orders and customers created since your main export, confirm redirects are loaded, point your A record and CNAME at Shopify, verify SSL issues correctly, and place a live order with a real card.

Keep your WooCommerce hosting alive but hidden for about 30 days as a reference copy. And schedule the cutover for a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning — never a Friday.

What should post-launch QA cover?

Work the list in the first 48 hours: a test transaction on every payment method, a refund, shipping rates by zone, tax calculation, and every notification email (confirmations should now come from Shopify, not WooCommerce). Re-point Klaviyo flows to Shopify triggers, confirm GA4 and ad pixels fire exactly once, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, and check the 404 report daily for the first week.

Then reconcile Shopify orders against bank deposits for two weeks. Quiet reconciliation is how you know the migration actually worked.

All of this goes smoother with clean inputs — see our guide to preparing product data for migration.

FAQ

Do customer passwords transfer from WooCommerce to Shopify? No — the password hashes are incompatible, so customers must reactivate their accounts. Send activation invites timed with your launch announcement.

Can I keep my WooCommerce blog URLs? No. Shopify forces the /blogs/handle/post-title structure, so 301 each post to its new URL. Rankings typically follow within a few weeks when redirects are in place at launch.

How long should I keep WooCommerce running after launch? About 30 days as a read-only reference for order lookups and data spot-checks. Then take a final backup and cancel the hosting.

Ready to make the switch?

We’ve run this checklist for stores from a few hundred SKUs to 75,000+, and the sequence is always what saves the launch. If you’d rather hand off the risky parts — data, redirects, cutover — start with our platform migrations service or talk to us about your timeline.