Migration

Migrating to Shopify from another platform

Migrations to Shopify from WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento or a custom build, with the front-end rebuilt and — the part that hurts most when skipped — the URLs redirected one by one.

Facts checked on 21 October 2026

The order that causes fewest surprises

1. URL inventory before anything else. Before design comes up, I pull the list of URLs with traffic and with inbound links. That list decides the new store’s structure, not the other way round.

2. Data model. What was a product, what was a variant and what was a custom field on the old platform. Whatever does not map onto Shopify natively goes into metafields or metaobjects, and that is decided before importing, not after.

3. Catalog and history. Products, variants, images, customers and orders as history.

4. Front-end. On a paid theme or a custom one, with the sections your team will actually use.

5. Redirects, one by one. Every URL with value to its equivalent. Not to the home page: to its equivalent.

6. Verification after launch. A crawl of the new site looking for 404s and redirect chains, plus tracking rankings over the following weeks.

What gets forgotten and then costs

The old platform’s custom features. A PrestaShop module or a WooCommerce plugin that spent years doing something nobody remembers asking for. If it is not inventoried before the migration, it shows up the day after launch, usually phrased as “but we used to be able to…”.

How I reduce that: list the features with the team that deals with customers, not only with whoever manages the website. The things that really matter are known by whoever takes the calls.

Frequently asked questions

Will I lose rankings?

Not if the redirects are done properly. Traffic loss in a migration almost always comes from the same thing: old URLs landing on a 404 or all redirected to the home page. Every URL with traffic or links has to go to its specific equivalent.

Can old orders be migrated?

They can be imported as history, without real payment or fulfilment state. That is enough for the buyer to see what they bought and for reporting; it is not enough to process returns on those orders.

How long does it take?

It depends on the catalog and on how many custom features existed. What is never fast is the URL inventory and the redirect map, and that is exactly the part you cannot cut.

In the glossary

Liquid — Liquid is the template language Shopify themes are built in. It runs on Shopify’s server before the HTML is sent to the browser, so it can read products, collections, the customer or the cart, but it cannot react to anything that happens on the page afterwards.
Metafields — Metafields are custom fields added to a Shopify object — product, variant, customer, order, company — to store data the platform does not ship with. They are typed and validated, and they are readable from the theme in Liquid, from the API, and from inside a Shopify Function.
Sections and blocks — Sections are the modules of a Shopify template that a client can add, reorder and configure from the editor; blocks are the pieces that go inside a section. Since Online Store 2.0 they work on any template, and they are what makes a theme maintainable without a developer.

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