Move your products, orders, customers, and SEO off Shopify and onto WordPress with WooCommerce, without breaking your store.
Shopify to WordPress migration with WooCommerce
Moving your store off Shopify means rebuilding it on WordPress with WooCommerce, the free e-commerce plugin that runs a huge share of online stores. Four things have to survive the trip. Products. Orders. Customers. And the SEO you have already earned. Drop any one of them mid-switch and you are bleeding either sales or rankings.
This is not a brochure-site move. A store has live inventory, customer logins, order history, and product URLs that Google already ranks. I have spent years moving stores and content between platforms, and the e-commerce jobs are the ones that keep me up at night. The last big one was a direct-to-consumer farm and food subscription business stuck on GrazeCart, a closed platform that had quietly boxed them in. I prepped two full migration plans for them. One went to Shopify. The other went to WooCommerce. That fork, Shopify versus Woo, is the exact decision this whole guide hangs on, so I will walk both honestly and point at where stores actually get hurt.
Want the wider migration picture across platforms first? Start with the complete WordPress migration guide. This page is the Shopify-to-WooCommerce deep dive.
Why move from Shopify to WooCommerce?
Nobody leaves Shopify because the software is bad. They leave because it is a closed, subscription platform that takes a cut of every sale unless you run Shopify Payments. Ownership is the real reason people walk.
I have sat on both sides of this exact call. On that GrazeCart job I lifted their content operations into WordPress first, served over WPGraphQL, which gave them a genuinely flexible blogging setup. The commerce side was the hard part, and I refused to guess it for them. So I built out both routes in full. One was a clean path to Shopify, managed and hands-off. The other was a WooCommerce build, fully self-owned with no landlord at all. The grind underneath both plans was the same. Every product, every order, every customer record had to map cleanly from GrazeCart’s model into the new one, and the two targets did not store any of it the same way. Doing it twice is what made the difference between the platforms impossible to wave away. Shopify rents you the store. WooCommerce hands you the keys. Choosing WooCommerce is choosing ownership, full stop.
What WooCommerce gives you
- No platform lock-in. You own the site, the database, and the customer relationship.
- No forced transaction fees. You pick your payment gateway and keep more margin.
- Content and commerce under one roof. WordPress’s content engine sitting next to WooCommerce makes for stronger content marketing and SEO.
- URLs you control. WordPress lets you set permalinks however you like. Shopify nails you to fixed
/products/and/collections/prefixes you cannot strip out.
Three ways to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce
Three routes actually work in practice. Which one fits comes down to catalog size, whether you need order and customer history preserved, and how much downtime risk you can stomach.
| Method | Transfers | Best for | Effort / cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built-in WooCommerce CSV import | Products only (via exported CSV) | Small catalogs, fresh start, no order history needed | Free; manual cleanup |
| Official Shopify → WooCommerce importer | Products, orders, customers, coupons, pages, blog | Most stores wanting full history | Paid extension; API setup |
| Done-for-you migration | Everything + redirects + SEO + theme | High-revenue or complex stores | Quoted; lowest risk |
Pick by what you cannot afford to lose. Only need products, and fine with starting order history from scratch? The free CSV route does the job. Need customers and orders kept intact? Use the dedicated importer, or hand it to someone who does this for a living. Once Shopify is switched off, that history is brutal to rebuild.
On a high-traffic store the math is lopsided. Lost rankings or a dead checkout will cost you far more than any migration fee. Our done-for-you WordPress migration service rolls products, history, redirects, and launch into one fixed-scope project. Want it scoped first? Run a free pre-migration audit of your current store.
Prepare your store for migration
Every hour you spend prepping a store move saves you several on launch day. Get this groundwork down before you touch a single row of data.
1. Set up WordPress + WooCommerce hosting
Pick a host that suits WooCommerce. Install self-hosted WordPress, then install and activate WooCommerce. The setup wizard walks you through currency, shipping zones, and tax.
2. Export your Shopify URL list
Pull every indexed Shopify URL out of Google Search Console. Products, collections, pages, blog posts. All of it. Shopify’s fixed URL structure guarantees these will shift on WooCommerce, so this list becomes your redirect map. Honestly, I treat this export as the single most valuable artifact of the whole project.
3. Decide what you must keep
Products are non-negotiable. After that, work out whether you also need order history, customer accounts, coupons, and blog content. That one call decides your migration method for you.
4. Don't cancel Shopify yet
Leave Shopify live and taking orders until WooCommerce is fully built, tested, and the domain has switched. The two run side by side through the cutover.
How to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce, step by step
This walkthrough leans on the dedicated importer for a full data move. Each step lines up with the structured how-to at the bottom of the page.
Step 1. Install WordPress and WooCommerce
On the new host, install WordPress. Then install and activate WooCommerce and run through its setup wizard.
Step 2. Create a Shopify custom app for API access
The official Shopify to WooCommerce importer talks to Shopify over its API. Inside your Shopify admin, create a custom app and generate an API key and API secret key with read access to products, orders, and customers.
Step 3. Install and connect the importer
Install the Shopify-to-WooCommerce migration extension in WordPress. Head to WooCommerce → Settings → Shopify to WooCommerce and paste in your Shopify API credentials to link the two stores.
Step 4. Configure and run the import
Now pick your data types. Products with their variations, images, SKUs, and stock, then orders, customers, coupons, pages, and blog posts. The importer also lets you filter by status, date, vendor, and type, so you can move things selectively. Kick off the import and watch it run.
Step 5. Verify products and orders
Spot-check the imported products. Prices, variations, images, stock levels, categories. Then confirm orders and customer records landed with the right statuses. At any real catalog size you are not eyeballing every row, so I work through a representative sample plus the usual troublemakers. Variable products. The ones with the most images. Anything currently on sale. Fix mapping problems now, while it is still pre-launch.
Step 6. Reconnect payments and shipping
None of Shopify’s payment and shipping config comes with you. Set up your WooCommerce payment gateway, whether that is Stripe, PayPal, or something else, and rebuild your shipping zones and rates. Then run a test order all the way through.
Step 7. Build your 301 redirect map
Here is the SEO-critical step. In my experience it is usually harder than moving the data ever was. Pair every old Shopify URL with its new WooCommerce address and set up 301 redirects. The two platforms use different URL prefixes, so nearly every product and collection URL shifts.
Step 8. Switch the domain and go live
Point your domain’s DNS at WordPress. Test checkout one last time on the live domain. Only then do you close the Shopify store, and only after WooCommerce is confirmed taking real orders with redirects working.
The free route, products via CSV import
No need for order or customer history? Then you can move products at zero cost, using exports and WooCommerce’s own importer.
Export products from Shopify
In Shopify admin, open Products → Export and download your products as a CSV.
Import into WooCommerce
Reach for WooCommerce’s built-in Product CSV Importer under Products → Import. It maps your CSV columns onto WooCommerce fields, handles simple and variable products, pulls in images, and builds category hierarchy with > notation. Files have to be UTF-8 encoded. Got a very large catalog? Split the CSV into batches.
This is the point where catalog size stops being a footnote. I once rebuilt a regional building-materials and tile store of roughly 2,000 products, every one of them locked inside a page builder. Hand-editing was never on the table. I wrote scripts that parsed the lot, stripped the proprietary markup, and emitted clean predictable rows I could trust. That lesson maps straight onto a Shopify CSV. At a few hundred products, fine, open the file and fix it by hand. At a couple thousand you treat the export as data and clean it with code. Hand-fixing 2,000 rows is exactly how a single bad value slips in and hides, quiet, until some customer trips over it months later.
Want the broader view of tools built for bulk store data and gnarly migrations? See our roundup of the best WordPress migration plugins.
Protect your store's SEO and rankings
Most Shopify migrations are won or lost right here. Shopify hard-codes URL prefixes you have no power to change. Think /products/, /collections/, and /pages/. Your WooCommerce structure looks nothing like that, so almost every URL moves and must be redirected. In nearly every migration I have run, the real work was preserving years of accumulated SEO value sitting on those old URLs. Shifting the content itself? That was the easy half.
Map old URLs to new
Take that exported Shopify URL list and pair each entry with its WooCommerce equivalent. Where your URLs follow a clean pattern, a redirect plugin can fire wildcard rules at them. Where they don’t, you map them one by one. Then validate the map and actually test it. An untested redirect map is just a guess wearing a spreadsheet.
Use 301 redirects, every time
According to Google Search Central, a permanent (301) server-side redirect makes the new URL canonical and carries the old page’s ranking signals over with it. Do it thoroughly and you hang onto the search equity you spent years earning. Do it halfway and you bleed traffic from every product you missed.
Don't forget structured data
Re-add your product schema on WooCommerce, the price, availability, and review markup, so the rich results come back. An SEO plugin handles this, and WooCommerce can output it too.
Launch checklist
- Submit a new XML sitemap in Google Search Console
- Crawl the store to confirm redirects resolve with no 404s or chains
- Verify product titles, descriptions, and meta data carried over
- Confirm checkout, payment, and tax work on the live domain
Something break along the way? Whether it is 404s, redirect loops, or missing images, our guide to fixing common WordPress migration errors has the fixes.
Common Shopify migration mistakes to avoid
Store migrations do not forgive. One slip can cost you real sales. Here are the ones that draw the most blood.
Migrating without a redirect map
Shopify’s /products/ and /collections/ URLs change on WooCommerce, which means every ranking product page moves. Launching without 301s is the quickest route to flatlining your organic traffic. Build the map before you switch the domain, not after.
Surprising customers with password resets
Passwords cannot be imported. Picture a loyal customer hitting the new store, locked out, with no heads-up. That is support tickets and eroded trust, all at once. Email your list before cutover and explain the one-time reset.
Forgetting to reconnect payments and tax
Payment gateways, shipping zones, and tax settings stay behind. More than one store has gone live unable to take a single order. So always run a full end-to-end test order on the live domain before you announce a thing.
Cutting over with no parallel period
Pulling the plug on Shopify the second WooCommerce looks ready is asking for trouble. Run both at once. Route the domain only once checkout is proven. Keep Shopify on standby until orders are genuinely flowing through WooCommerce.
A store carries more risk than a content-only move, full stop. If your source is a content site instead of a shop, the whole thing gets simpler. The Squarespace to WordPress migration and Wix to WordPress migration guides walk those non-commerce paths.
Run the entire flow on staging before anything else. Import, products, checkout, redirects, all of it. Verify the lot before a single customer lays eyes on it. With this much revenue on the line, plenty of owners just hand the cutover to our WordPress migration specialists and take the risk off the table.
Moving your store to WooCommerce, safely
Move from Shopify to WooCommerce and you walk away with a store you fully own. Lower fees, far more room to maneuver. It is also the highest-stakes migration going. Products, orders, customers, payments, and a complete 301 redirect map all have to land right, and the cutover has to happen with zero downtime.
Not keen to gamble your revenue on a DIY import? Our done-for-you WordPress migration service moves the entire store, products, orders, customers, payments, and SEO-safe redirects, then runs Shopify and WooCommerce side by side until the new store is proven live. Start with a free pre-migration audit to scope your catalog and URLs.
Frequently asked questions
Can you migrate a Shopify store to WordPress?
You can. The destination is WooCommerce, the WordPress e-commerce plugin. The official Shopify-to-WooCommerce importer brings products, orders, customers, coupons, pages, and blog posts across through Shopify’s API.
Do customer accounts and orders transfer from Shopify?
Orders and customer records come over with the dedicated importer. Passwords do not, because Shopify’s API will not expose them. Everyone resets their password on first login, so send an email explaining the change beforehand.
Is there a free way to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce?
Yes, but only for products. Export them from Shopify as a CSV and pull them in with WooCommerce’s built-in Product CSV Importer. Orders, customers, and coupons stay behind on this route.
Will I lose SEO moving from Shopify to WooCommerce?
Only if you skip the redirects. Shopify’s fixed /products/ and /collections/ URLs change on WooCommerce, so you set up a 301 for every URL. Google confirms permanent redirects pass ranking signals through to the new page.
Does WooCommerce cost less than Shopify?
WooCommerce itself is free, and you dodge Shopify’s subscription plus, without Shopify Payments, its per-transaction fees. You still pay for hosting, a domain, and any premium extensions you decide to add.
How long does a Shopify to WooCommerce migration take?
A small product-only move might wrap in a day or two. A full store with order history, customer accounts, payments, and a complete redirect map usually runs one to three weeks, depending on catalog size and how tangled things are.