WooCommerce to Shopify: a checklist before you switch

WooCommerce is WordPress plus plugins. Shopify is a platform with its own ideas of product, collection, customer, discount, and checkout. What looks like a CSV is rarely what carries SEO and day-to-day work afterwards. Use this list before you set a date. We run Shopify migration as a project with that scope, not as an import button.

Catalog

• Products, variants, and SKUs. Variations look like Shopify variants until you have add-on fields, bundles, or products assembled by a plugin.
• Categories become collections. A category that only existed to drive a menu item should not automatically become a thin collection page.
• Images, alt text, and the order customers actually see.
• Inventory: one location, several locations, or an ERP that has to be the source of truth after the switch.

URLs and SEO

Every important URL on the old site needs one answer: a 301 to the new page, or a deliberate decision to let it die. WooCommerce product permalinks are rarely identical to Shopify’s /products/handle. Without a redirect map you lose the pages that already rank. Title, meta description, and the visible heading do not move themselves. Blog posts that get visits should either come across or redirect to the closest page that still exists. Do not redirect everything to the homepage. That does not keep the rankings.

Customers, orders, and accounts

Customers can be moved. Order history can be imported so support can see old purchases, but old orders do not become new Shopify orders with shipping and payment. Passwords cannot be moved. Tell customers before they hit login and think the account is gone. Newsletter consent has to match what you are allowed to send after the switch.

Plugins become apps — or something Shopify already does

List every plugin and put one of three labels on it: Shopify can do this, an app has to take over, or you drop it. Payments, shipping, tax, reviews, search, subscriptions, and B2B are the lines that surprise people. Tax and invoicing for local businesses is a scoping question, not a detail in week three. The apps you end up with belong in the budget — see what a Shopify store costs when you add the numbers up.

Content and legal pages

• Pages: shipping, returns, terms, and the privacy policy.
• Menus and footer, so old internal links do not point at nothing.
• Markets, if you sell outside one country. Language and currency are a setup, not a translation you do at the end.

Before DNS cuts over

1. Buy a product in each important variant, with the shipping and payment you promise.
2. Check 20 redirects, including the ones in Google Search Console that have impressions.
3. Check that product feeds, ads, and email use the new URLs.
4. Agree who is on call for the first two days.
5. Freeze content on the old site so you do not migrate a version that is already stale.

A small catalog with a theme you do not care about can move in weeks. Subscriptions, several warehouses, or a plugin that has become the business — that plugin is the real project. Set the date from the redirect map and the test purchases, not from how fast the products export.