How to Migrate from Shopify to WordPress (+ WooCommerce)

Shopify is fast to launch, but as a store matures the trade-offs surface: transaction fees on top of your payment processor, escalating app subscriptions, a rigid theme system that fights custom layouts, and content living on a subdomain-style URL structure you can't fully control. Moving to WordPress with WooCommerce hands you the underlying code, a $0 platform license, roughly 60,000 plugins, and content marketing tooling that Shopify's blog simply can't match. Done carefully, the switch also lets you consolidate your store and your content on one domain instead of stitching Shopify to a separate CMS.

The catch is that Shopify and WooCommerce are structurally different systems. Shopify hosts everything for you and hides the database; WooCommerce is self-hosted software you install on your own web host. Products, URLs, checkout, and app functionality don't transfer automatically, and a sloppy migration can tank organic traffic overnight. This guide walks through exactly what moves, what breaks, and the step-by-step process to migrate while preserving your SEO and rankings.

If your catalog is large, your revenue is meaningful, or you're nervous about downtime, this is the kind of project where our website migration services exist to de-risk the launch. But the process below is the same one a capable in-house team can follow.

Why businesses move from Shopify to WooCommerce

The reasons are usually a mix of cost, control, and content. Understanding your own motivation matters because it shapes which decisions you make later.

• Fees compound. Shopify charges a monthly plan fee plus, unless you use Shopify Payments, an extra 0.5%–2% per transaction. WooCommerce is free software; you pay only for hosting, a domain, and any premium plugins, with no per-sale platform cut.
• App sprawl gets expensive. A typical Shopify store runs 6–15 paid apps for reviews, upsells, subscriptions, and SEO. Many equivalents in the WordPress ecosystem are one-time purchases or free.
• You want real ownership. WooCommerce gives you database and file access, custom PHP, and the freedom to move hosts. Shopify's Liquid templates and locked checkout limit deep customization unless you're on Shopify Plus.
• Content and SEO. WordPress is a publishing platform first. Advanced taxonomy, flexible URL structures, and plugins like Yoast or Rank Math give content-driven brands far more room to grow organic traffic.

What transfers, what changes, and what breaks

Set expectations before you touch anything. Very little migrates by magic, and knowing the gaps up front prevents nasty surprises on launch day.

• Products, customers, and orders can be exported from Shopify as CSV files, but WooCommerce expects different column headers, so the data needs mapping or a migration tool rather than a raw import.
• URLs will change. Shopify forces prefixes like /products/, /collections/, /pages/, and /blogs/news/. WooCommerce defaults to /product/, /product-category/, and clean post slugs. Every changed URL needs a 301 redirect or you lose the ranking equity tied to it.
• Design does not carry over. Your Shopify theme is Liquid-based and cannot run on WordPress. You rebuild the look with a WordPress theme (or a page builder), which is also the moment to improve it.
• Apps don't transfer. Every Shopify app must be replaced with a WordPress/WooCommerce plugin equivalent — reviews (e.g., to a WP review plugin), email flows, subscriptions, and loyalty all need re-selection and reconfiguration.
• Checkout and payments are rebuilt. You'll install and re-authenticate gateways like Stripe or PayPal via their WooCommerce extensions, and re-test the full purchase flow.
• Discount codes, gift cards, and metafields often need manual recreation; these are common items to overlook.

Step 1: Set up hosting and install WordPress + WooCommerce

WooCommerce needs a home. Choose a host suited to WordPress ecommerce — managed WordPress or a reputable VPS — with PHP 8.1+, sufficient memory, and daily backups. Install WordPress, then add the free WooCommerce plugin and run its setup wizard to configure store address, currency, tax, and shipping zones.

Do this build on a staging domain or subdomain, never on your live storefront. You want the new store fully assembled and tested before a single customer sees it. Pick and configure your theme now, and install your core plugins: an SEO plugin (Yoast or Rank Math), a caching plugin, a security plugin, and a redirect manager. If your store has genuinely custom requirements — a configurator, B2B pricing, or an ERP/CRM sync — this is the stage to scope custom development and CRM integration rather than forcing it later.

Step 2: Export from Shopify and import into WooCommerce

From your Shopify admin, export Products, Customers, and Orders as CSV (Products > Export; Customers > Export; Orders > Export). Download product images too, since CSV rows reference image URLs that will disappear when you close Shopify.

• For small catalogs (under a few hundred SKUs), use WooCommerce's built-in Product CSV importer and manually map Shopify's columns (Title, Body HTML, Variant Price, SKU) to WooCommerce fields.
• For larger or complex stores, a dedicated migration tool (Cart2Cart, LitExtension, or the official "Import Shopify to WooCommerce" plugin) moves products, variants, categories, customers, and order history with far less manual cleanup.
• Recreate blog content and pages. Shopify blog posts and pages export imperfectly; plan to move your posts into WordPress and rebuild key landing pages, preserving titles, headings, and body copy.

After import, audit everything: variant pricing, inventory counts, images, category assignments, and product descriptions. Expect to fix formatting artifacts and reassign a portion of products by hand.

Step 3: Map and build your 301 redirects

This is the single most important step for protecting rankings, and the one most rushed migrations get wrong. Because Shopify and WooCommerce use different URL prefixes, nearly every URL changes, and each old URL needs a permanent 301 redirect pointing to its new equivalent.

• Crawl your live Shopify site with a tool like Screaming Frog to capture a complete list of indexed URLs, then export it.
• Build a spreadsheet mapping each old URL to its new WooCommerce URL — for example, /products/blue-widget to /product/blue-widget, and /collections/sale to /product-category/sale.
• Implement the redirects in WordPress with a redirect plugin (Redirection or Rank Math's manager) or, for large sets, at the server level for speed. Our guide to building a 301 redirect map walks through the exact structure.
• Redirect one-to-one where possible; avoid dumping everything to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404 and drops from the index.

For the broader checklist of technical items that protect organic performance, work through our website migration SEO checklist before and after launch.

Step 4: Point DNS, launch, and go live

Once staging is fully tested — products, checkout, redirects, and design all confirmed — you're ready to cut over. Because Shopify won't let you host WordPress on the same account, launch means moving your domain's DNS to your new host.

• Lower your domain's DNS TTL a day ahead so the switch propagates quickly.
• Update the A record (or CNAME) at your registrar to point to your WordPress host, and install an SSL certificate so the store loads over HTTPS.
• Keep your Shopify plan active for a short overlap so nothing 404s while DNS propagates worldwide (usually a few hours, up to 48).
• Set your final permalink structure in WordPress before launch and don't change it afterward — permalink changes create a whole new round of broken URLs.

Step 5: Test everything and monitor SEO after launch

Launch is the start of the most important 30 days, not the finish line. Verify functionality and watch your search signals closely.

• Place real test orders through each payment method and confirm order emails, inventory decrements, and tax/shipping calculations.
• Spot-check redirects by visiting old Shopify URLs and confirming each 301s to the right new page; crawl the site again to catch redirect chains and 404s.
• Submit a fresh XML sitemap in Google Search Console, and use the URL Inspection tool to prompt re-crawling of key pages.
• Watch analytics and rankings weekly. A brief dip during re-indexing is normal; a sustained drop signals a redirect gap or crawl issue to fix fast.
• Confirm structured data (product schema, reviews) is intact so rich results survive the move.

Realistic timeline and cost

A small store — a few dozen products, a handful of pages, no exotic apps — is a 1–2 week project. A mid-size catalog with hundreds of SKUs, blog content, and several app replacements typically runs 4–8 weeks. Large or heavily customized stores with B2B logic, subscriptions, or ERP integration can take a few months.

On cost, the platform itself is free, but budget for hosting ($20–$100+/month for ecommerce-grade), a premium theme or design, premium plugins, and a migration tool if you use one. Agency-led migrations vary with complexity; at our $80/hour rate, a straightforward store is a modest engagement while a complex rebuild scales accordingly. If you'd rather hand off the whole build, our WordPress development team handles design, data migration, redirects, and launch end to end. The money you save on Shopify fees and app subscriptions frequently pays back the migration within the first year.