WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: Hand Off the Hosting, Keep the Customers and the Rankings

Simplicity at scale. A growing WooCommerce store asks for more hosting, more plugins, more testing before every update, and more attention to security, and that work lands on the owner or a developer on retainer. Shopify bundles hosting, security, checkout, and payments, and it now offers 2,048 variants per product (since October 2025) and B2B features on every paid plan (since April 2026), which removed two common reasons to stay.

The subscription is higher than a hosting bill: $39 a month for Basic, $105 for Grow, $399 for Advanced, and from $2,300 for Plus, plus apps, and a transaction fee of 0.2 to 2 percent by plan if you keep a gateway other than Shopify Payments. Against that, set hosting, premium plugin renewals, and the developer hours that maintenance takes. For stores with real upkeep costs the totals are often close, and we lay out both columns before you decide.

Most stores moving from WooCommerce start on Grow or Advanced, and the choice turns on volume, since each step up trades a larger subscription for lower payment rates. Basic works for small catalogs. Plus is for brands that need custom checkout logic, expansion stores, or enterprise B2B. The plan can change later without another migration.

A variable product becomes a Shopify product with up to three options and as many as 2,048 variants. Attributes that are not used for variations, and custom fields added by plugins, become metafields that the theme can display and filter on. A product with four or more variation attributes is split or handled with a product options app, and we settle that in the mapping.

Posts move into Shopify's blog with their authors, publish dates, images, and SEO fields, and their URLs change to the /blogs/ pattern with redirects from the old ones. Shopify's blog is simpler than WordPress, which is fine for most stores. If content is a major traffic source, keeping WordPress for the editorial side is a valid setup and we will help you weigh it.

Yes, with care. The subscription products, schedules, and next billing dates are rebuilt in a Shopify subscription app. Saved payment methods transfer when your processor supports moving tokens, which we confirm at the start; where it does not, subscribers are asked to re-enter a card through a campaign designed to keep as many as possible.

No. WordPress password hashes cannot be imported, but Shopify's customer accounts do not use passwords: a customer enters their email, receives a one-time code, and is signed in with their order history in place. A short note in the launch email explains the new sign-in.

Shopify uses fixed prefixes, so /product/ becomes /products/ and categories become /collections/, and that makes the redirect map the most important document in the project. We export every indexed URL, map each to its new address, import the 301s in bulk, and crawl them before launch. With that in place rankings typically hold, and a faster storefront often helps them afterward.

No. Your WooCommerce store stays open while the Shopify store is built. On launch day we bring over the latest orders and customers, switch DNS at a quiet hour, and keep the old site reachable until the last order is confirmed.

Four to eight weeks for most stores, longer with subscriptions, wholesale, or a large content library. A professional migration with a customized theme usually falls in the low to mid five figures, and enterprise projects run higher; what drives it is the theme, the number of apps and integrations, and how much plugin behavior has to be rebuilt. You get a fixed quote once the audit is complete.