Migrate from WordPress to Shopify: A Shopify Agency’s Guide

Introduction

Most failed migrations don’t fail on migration day. They fail three weeks later, when a developer finally opens Google Search Console and finds half the old rankings gone.

We run a Shopify agency, so we sit on both sides of this move constantly. Store owners come to us either mid-panic after a bad DIY attempt, or before they’ve touched anything, asking us to plan it properly. The pattern is always the same. Moving the data is easy. Protecting your traffic, your order history, and your search rankings while you do it is where stores actually win or lose.

This guide covers the full process to migrate from WordPress to Shopify: every step, the real costs, and the mistakes we watch other teams make.

Migrate from WordPress to Shopify: The Step-by-Step Guide

Here’s the full process to migrate from WordPress to Shopify, in the order we run it for clients.

Step 1: Audit and Back Up Everything First

Before you touch anything, take a full backup of your WordPress site and its database. Then count what you actually have: products, variants, customers, order history, blog posts, and landing pages.

Pull a list of your top-performing URLs from Google Search Console. This becomes your redirect map later, and skipping it is the single most common reason migrations lose search traffic.

Step 2: Set Up Your Shopify Store

Create your Shopify account and configure the basics: store name, staff accounts, currencies, and tax regions. Don’t connect your real domain yet. Build on Shopify’s temporary myshopify.com address until launch day.

Pick your plan based on where you expect to be in a year, not just today. Shopify’s current published plans run Basic at $29 to $39 a month, Grow at $79 to $105, and Advanced at $299 to $399. Plus starts near $2,300 a month for high-volume businesses.

Step 3: Export Your WordPress and WooCommerce Data

From your WordPress admin, export products, customers, and orders. This is the data core of any project to migrate WordPress to Shopify. WooCommerce’s built-in exporter handles products well. Orders and customers usually need a plugin or your migration tool’s own connector.

Flag these before you export, since they don’t move cleanly on their own: product images embedded inside descriptions, SEO metadata from plugins like Yoast, and product reviews.

Step 4: Import Your Products, Customers, and Orders

You have three realistic routes to migrate WordPress to Shopify, and the right one depends on store size.

• Shopify’s own Store Migration app, free, straight from Shopify’s App Store. Fine for smaller catalogs with straightforward products, and it’s the option Shopify documents directly in its official migration guide.
• A migration app like LitExtension, Cart2Cart, or Matrixify. The practical choice for mid-size stores. These map products, customers, orders, coupons, and reviews with far less manual cleanup than a raw CSV.
• A Shopify migration partner. The right call once you have custom fields, subscriptions, B2B pricing tiers, or a catalog in the thousands.

Watch Shopify’s product option limit here. Shopify supports a maximum of three options per product, like size, color, and material. A fourth option won’t import cleanly. This catches more merchants off guard than the platform’s much larger 2,048-variant ceiling ever does. Import order matters too. Bring in products first, then customers, then historical orders, because Shopify links them in that sequence.

After every import, spot-check variant counts, prices, inventory levels, and customer opt-in status before moving on.

Step 5: Decide How You’re Moving Your Blog and Content

This is where a full WordPress to Shopify move differs from a WooCommerce-only migration. WordPress often carries a blog, landing pages, and gated content that a store-only export leaves behind.

Shopify’s blog import doesn’t pull straight from WordPress’s native XML export. You’ll need to reshape your posts into Shopify’s CSV format, or run them through a migration app that supports blog content specifically. Decide this before your developer starts the theme build, not after. Your blog’s URL structure affects your redirect map.

Step 6: Rebuild Your Theme and Pages

Your WordPress theme, whatever page builder built it, won’t transfer. This is usually the single biggest line item in a budget to transfer WordPress to Shopify, more than the data move itself.

Rebuild your key pages, home, collection, product, cart, and policies, inside a Shopify theme. Match your brand, and where it matters for rankings, your existing page structure. This is also where custom functionality gets rebuilt. Think WooCommerce plugins for subscriptions or bundles, now recreated as Shopify apps or custom code.

Step 7: Replace Your Plugins with Shopify Apps

Go through your active WordPress plugins one by one and find their Shopify equivalent: reviews, upsells, email capture, loyalty, search. Most have a direct app-store match. A few, especially anything custom-built, will need a developer to rebuild from scratch.

Step 8: Configure Payments, Shipping, and Taxes

Set up Shopify Payments or your preferred gateway, configure your shipping zones and rates, and set your tax settings for every region you sell into. Run a real test transaction, start to finish, before you consider this step done.

Step 9: Build Your Redirect Map and Set Up 301s

This is the step that decides whether your rankings survive the move to migrate from WordPress to Shopify. Every URL that currently earns traffic or backlinks needs a 301 redirect to its new Shopify equivalent.

Shopify’s redirect tool supports up to 100,000 redirects on standard plans and 20 million on Plus. It also accepts bulk CSV import, so you’re not creating them one at a time. A few paths, like /cart, /products, and /collections, are reserved and can’t be redirected. Plan your new URL structure around that. Our Shopify SEO checklist covers what else to verify beyond redirects.

Step 10: Test Before You Go Live

Test checkout, forms, account creation, and every redirect on a small sample before the domain switch. Clear your browser cache between tests, since cached redirects can make a broken link look fine when it isn’t.

Step 11: Switch Your Domain and Go Live

Point your domain’s DNS to Shopify, or transfer it in fully. Propagation can take a few hours. Keep your old host active for a short overlap window so nothing 404s while DNS catches up.

Step 12: Resubmit Your Sitemap and Monitor

The moment you’re live, submit your new Shopify sitemap in Google Search Console so it crawls your new structure quickly. Watch your indexing and crawl reports daily for the first two weeks. Then check your Shopify store speed, because a rebuilt theme is exactly where performance quietly regresses if nobody optimizes it.

Best Tips from Shopify Experts for WordPress to Shopify Migration

Here’s what separates a clean migration from a messy one. It’s pulled from our own project work, and from merchants working through this live in the Shopify Community.

• Map every URL before you build anything. In one Shopify Community thread on recovering lost rankings, the culprit was a leftover “noindex, nofollow” tag a developer forgot to remove. Redirects alone don’t save you if Google can’t see the new pages.
• Don’t trust a migration app’s redirect claim blindly. Some tools, like Cart2Cart, advertise an option to preserve your SEO URLs during import. It helps, but verify the actual redirect list afterward. Don’t assume the tool caught every page.
• Resubmit your sitemap the same day you launch, not a week later. Community advice on this is consistent. The faster Google recrawls your new structure, the faster rankings stabilize.
• If you’re at WooCommerce Enterprise-level, look for Shopify Plus. Some merchants outgrow standard Shopify within a year of migrating. If that sounds like you, it’s worth understanding Shopify vs Shopify Plus before you commit to a theme and app stack you’ll rebuild again soon.
• Budget time for plugin-to-app translation, not just data. A store with 20 active plugins usually has 20 decisions to make, not one.

Short on bandwidth to run all twelve steps in-house? This is also work we take on directly, as Shopify development services. Agency founders can hand it off fully white-labeled through our white-label Shopify services instead, under your own name.

How Much Does Transferring WordPress to Shopify Cost?

Three separate costs stack up when you transfer WordPress to Shopify, and most first-time budgets only account for one of them.

The Shopify subscription itself. Basic runs $29 to $39 a month, Grow $79 to $105, and Advanced $299 to $399, based on Shopify’s current pricing. Payment processing fees stack on top, and those fees drop as you move up plans.

The migration tool or app. Self-serve tools like LitExtension start around $59 for smaller stores looking to migrate WordPress to Shopify. Pricing scales up with your product, order, and customer counts. Shopify’s own Store Migration app is free. It just offers less hand-holding, and no support line if something breaks mid-import.

Theme rebuild, app replacements, and redirect mapping. A small store under a few hundred products, with a fairly standard build, usually lands a developer-led project to migrate from WordPress to Shopify in the low thousands. Larger catalogs, custom functionality, or subscription logic push that number up.

If you need a free quote for your entire WordPress to Shopify migration, get in touch with us at Enstacked and we’ll get back to you.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the part that actually matters once you migrate WordPress to Shopify: you get your time back. No more plugin updates at midnight, no more hosting tickets, no more wondering if this week’s PHP update will break checkout.

The work to transfer WordPress to Shopify is temporary. What you’re really buying is fewer 2am emergencies for years afterward.

One last practical tip: keep your old WordPress backup for at least six months after launch, even after everything looks stable. It’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.

Want a team that’s done this before to handle the move to migrate from WordPress to Shopify? You can hire Shopify developers who run this exact playbook every week. Either way, plan the redirects before you plan the theme. The rest gets a lot easier from there.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)