In brief
- Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify carries products, customers, orders, content and SEO fields; only customer passwords cannot move, because they are stored as one-way hashes.
- Every WooCommerce URL changes on Shopify, so a one-to-one 301 redirect for each product, category, post and page is what protects rankings.
- In August 2026, 76.5% of Shopify sites passed Core Web Vitals on mobile against 39.5% of WooCommerce sites, according to HTTP Archive data.1
- A migration run by Mufatech Studio is fixed-price from $890, reviewed in a private preview before payment, and the old store keeps selling until cutover.
What moves, and what doesn't
Almost all store data has a direct home in Shopify. The gaps are predictable, which is why they can be planned before any money is spent.
| WooCommerce | On Shopify | What to plan |
|---|---|---|
| Simple and variable products | Moves | Shopify allows 3 options and up to 2,048 variants per product.4 Products with 4+ variation attributes need options merged or split. How to restructure them. |
| Images and alt text | Moves | Imported from your current URLs, so keep the old site online during the move. |
| Categories and tags | Changes shape | Categories become collections, which are flat. Hierarchy moves into menus. |
| Custom fields (ACF) | Moves | Each field group becomes a metafield or metaobject definition. |
| Customers and addresses | Moves | Marketing consent moves with each customer. |
| Customer passwords | Cannot move | Hashed passwords never transfer on any platform. Customers get an account invitation. |
| Order history | Moves | Imported as historical orders, usually as the final step after launch. |
| Coupons and gift cards | Recreated | Active codes and balances are recreated; usage history stays behind. |
| Reviews | Via review app | Imported into Judge.me, Loox or Yotpo with ratings and dates. |
| Blog posts and pages | Moves | WordPress comments do not carry over natively. |
| SEO titles and descriptions | Moves | Copied from Yoast or Rank Math into Shopify's SEO fields. |
| URLs | Redirected | Shopify paths are fixed, so every old URL gets a 301. |
| Active subscriptions | Depends | Move only if your payment provider can migrate stored payment tokens. |
| Plugin features | Built in or app | Mapped one by one. The free scanner lists replacements for the plugins it detects. |
What you stop doing
The biggest change is not a feature. It is the list of jobs that disappear from your week.
- Patching plugins against live exploits. Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress ecosystem vulnerabilities in 2025, and for heavily exploited ones the weighted median time to first exploit was 5 hours.2
- Keeping 58 plugins compatible with each other. That is the average across 6,000+ WooCommerce stores Metorik sampled in 2026.3
- Upgrading PHP. About 38% of reporting WordPress sites run a PHP version that no longer receives security fixes, by our calculation from WordPress.org and php.net data.5
- Tuning hosting, caching and CDN for speed. Shopify runs the infrastructure; the theme and apps you choose still matter.
- Carrying PCI DSS scope for your checkout. WooCommerce's documentation says PCI compliance is ultimately the store owner's responsibility;10 Shopify states it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant for all stores on the platform.11
The full evidence, with every source, is in The real risks of running a WooCommerce store in 2026.
What your customers notice
Customers mostly notice two things: a faster store and a different checkout.
A checkout that removes common reasons to leave
Baymard Institute's 2026 survey of 1,083 US online shoppers asked why they abandoned a purchase in the previous three months. 19% did not trust the site with their card details, 18% were asked to create an account, and 17% found checkout too long or complicated.8 Across 50 studies, Baymard puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%.8
Shopify's checkout offers guest checkout and Shop Pay, which remembers a shopper's details across Shopify stores. Shopify says Shop Pay converts as much as 50% better than guest checkout, based on a study it ran with a Big Three consulting firm in April 2023.9 That is Shopify's own claim with an undisclosed sample, so treat it as direction rather than a promise for your store.
A faster store on mobile
Shopify sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile nearly twice as often as WooCommerce sites.1 In Google-commissioned research, a 0.1-second mobile speed improvement was associated with an 8.4% increase in retail conversions.12
A one-time account invitation
Returning customers set a new password once through an invitation email. Order history stays attached to their account.
What happens to your Google rankings
Rankings fall after a migration for one main reason: old URLs start returning 404. Shopify uses fixed URL paths, so your structure will change even if product names stay the same.
| Page type | Typical WooCommerce URL | Shopify URL |
|---|---|---|
| Product | /product/linen-shirt/ | /products/linen-shirt |
| Category | /product-category/shirts/ | /collections/shirts |
| Blog post | /how-to-wash-linen/ | /blogs/journal/how-to-wash-linen |
| Page | /about-us/ | /pages/about-us |
A migration that protects rankings does four things: a one-to-one 301 for every product, category, tag, post and page; SEO titles and meta descriptions copied from Yoast or Rank Math; image alt text kept; and 404 monitoring for the first weeks. Redirecting everything to the homepage looks tidy and throws away the rankings each page earned.
Speed helps after the move too. Core Web Vitals are a page experience signal in Google Search,6 and Shopify sites pass them on mobile nearly twice as often as WooCommerce sites.1
How the move works
- Scan. The free scanner sizes your catalog, detects plugins and counts redirects in about 20 seconds.
- Plan and fix the price. A read-only connection adds orders, customers, coupons and shipping. You get a written plan and a fixed price.
- Build privately. We build a Shopify store in our partner account, import your data and set up redirects and the theme.
- Review before you pay. You click through a password-protected copy of your new store and check the QA report, count by count.
- Transfer and launch. You take ownership, choose a Shopify plan, and we run the final sync of recent orders and switch the domain.
Your WooCommerce store keeps selling the whole time. Small and medium catalogs typically go from plan to launch in two to four weeks; the scan tells you where your store sits.
What it costs
There are two costs: the one-time migration and the ongoing platform. On the ongoing side, compare your Shopify plan and apps against what you pay today for hosting, premium plugin licences, a security service and developer hours. The research page covers published total cost of ownership studies and who paid for them.
| Migration package | Scope | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Up to 1,000 products, low complexity | from $890 |
| Growth | Up to 5,000 products, reviews and custom fields | from $1,490 |
| Pro | Up to 15,000 products, multilingual, subscriptions | from $2,990 |
| Custom | Larger catalogs, marketplaces, B2B | Quote |
One cost people miss
A store built by a partner and transferred to you is not eligible for Shopify's new-merchant promotions or free trials.7 We say this up front so the total is clear.
What you get when we move your store
- Free readiness scan before anything else
- Fixed price in writing, no hourly billing
- A 301 for every product, category, post and page
- SEO titles, descriptions and alt text carried over
- QA report comparing every record count
- Preview your new store before you pay
- Theme set up in your brand
- Your WooCommerce store keeps selling until cutover
When to stay on WooCommerce
A migration is the wrong move for some stores. Stay, or at least wait, if:
- Commerce is a side feature of a content site. If most traffic is articles and the shop is small, WordPress is doing its main job well.
- You run a multi-vendor marketplace. Shopify has no native multi-vendor model; marketplace apps exist but deserve a careful fit review.
- Your checkout needs deep custom logic and Shopify Plus is out of budget. Custom fields on Shopify's checkout steps require Plus.
- You already have a developer on retainer, a lean plugin list and fast Core Web Vitals. Then most of the risk in this guide is already handled.
If the scan shows one of these, the report says so. We would rather lose a sale than migrate a store that should not move.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a WooCommerce to Shopify migration take?
Small and medium catalogs typically take two to four weeks from signed plan to launch, most of it spent on data mapping, theme setup and testing. Stores with subscriptions, several languages or tens of thousands of products take longer.
Will I lose my SEO rankings?
Not if every old URL gets a one-to-one 301 redirect and SEO fields are migrated. A short fluctuation while Google processes the redirects is normal; a lasting drop almost always traces back to missing redirects.
Can I keep my order history?
Yes. Orders are imported as historical orders with their line items, totals and customers, usually after launch so the newest orders are included.
Do my customers need new passwords?
Yes. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes and cannot be transferred by any platform. Customers receive an invitation to activate their account on the new store.
What happens to my WooCommerce plugins?
Each is mapped to a Shopify feature, a Shopify app or nothing at all. Caching, security and image optimisation plugins are simply no longer needed.
Can my store keep selling during the migration?
Yes. The Shopify store is built privately while WooCommerce keeps taking orders. A final sync brings over recent orders and stock just before the domain switches.
Sources
- HTTP Archive. Core Web Vitals Technology Report data, August 2026, mobile origins, based on the Chrome UX Report. Percentages calculated from published counts.
- Patchstack. State of WordPress Security in 2026. security vendor
- Metorik. How Many Plugins Does the Average WooCommerce Store Use? 2026, 6,000+ stores. WooCommerce analytics vendor
- Shopify. The product variant limit is now 2048 for all merchants, October 2025.
- WordPress.org PHP version statistics (fetched 16 Sep 2026) and php.net supported versions.
- Google Search Central. Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results.
- Shopify. Client transfer stores: limitations.
- Baymard Institute. Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026, including a 2026 survey of 1,083 US adults.
- Shopify. Shop Pay, footnote on an April 2023 study with a Big Three management consulting firm. commissioned by Shopify
- WooCommerce. PCI-DSS compliance and WooCommerce. published by WooCommerce
- Shopify. Is Shopify PCI compliant? published by Shopify
- Google, 55 and Deloitte. Milliseconds Make Millions, 2020, 37 brands and 30 million sessions. commissioned by Google
Mufatech Studio migrates stores to Shopify. The figures come from the sources listed; where we calculated a percentage, the page says so.