How do I move my online store from WooCommerce to Shopify?

Plan before you move anything

• List what must come across: products and variants, images, categories, customers, order history, reviews, blog posts and pages.
• Note what the old store does through plugins, such as shipping rules, GST invoices, wishlists or subscriptions, and find the Shopify equivalent for each.
• Export a full list of your current URLs so you can redirect them later.
• Pick a quiet period for the switchover, not a sale or festive season.

Migration steps

1. 1Back up your old store, including the database and media files.
2. 2Create your Shopify store and import products, customers and orders using Shopify's own migration tools, a migration app, or CSV files.
3. 3Check a sample of products carefully: variants, prices, stock, images, descriptions and SEO titles.
4. 4Set up your theme, navigation, collections, payment gateways, shipping rates and taxes.
5. 5Create URL redirects from every old product, category and page URL to its new Shopify URL.
6. 6Place several test orders with each payment method.
7. 7Point your domain to Shopify, then check that old links redirect correctly.

Protecting your SEO

Shopify uses its own URL structure, such as /products/ and /collections/, so your old URLs will change. Without redirects, links from Google and other sites will show errors and rankings can drop. Bring across page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text, submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console, and watch for crawl errors in the weeks after launch.

Things that often get missed

• Customer passwords cannot usually be moved, so customers may need to reset or reactivate their accounts; plan a friendly email.
• Product reviews often need a separate import through a reviews app.
• Email, analytics and ad tracking need to be reconnected to the new store.