Stop maintaining a plugin stack.

Usually one of three reasons: the plugin stack has become fragile and updates break things, the security and hosting maintenance burden falls on a team that does not want it, or the checkout underperforms and improving it means yet another plugin. Shopify trades plugin-level control for a hosted platform with a checkout you do not maintain.

No, they are different trade-offs. WooCommerce gives you complete control and no platform fees in exchange for owning hosting, security, updates, and plugin compatibility. Shopify handles all of that and charges for it. The right answer depends on whether your team wants to operate infrastructure, not on which platform is better.

Often yes. If your team is comfortable maintaining WordPress, your plugin stack is stable, and your hosting is solid, migrating is expensive disruption for limited gain. We recommend staying when the real problem is a slow theme, a bad host, or an unoptimised checkout, all of which are far cheaper to fix in place.

Shopify and Shopify Plus are the most common destination, because they remove hosting and plugin maintenance entirely. BigCommerce suits mid-market catalogues with strong native B2B. Adobe Commerce fits very large or highly customised catalogues. Squarespace and Wix only make sense if you are simplifying rather than scaling. We compare them against your actual plugin stack rather than a feature grid.

The space splits into tools and agencies. LitExtension, Cart2Cart, and Matrixify are self-serve data-migration tools that move records but leave URL mapping, plugin replacement, subscriptions, and integrations to you. Agencies including Meetanshi, DigitalSuits, HeyCarson, and Magefan take on the full project, as we do. If your store is small and has no subscriptions or integrations, a tool may genuinely be enough, and we will say so.

Yes, and for content-heavy sites this is sometimes the better answer. WordPress stays for the blog and marketing pages while commerce moves to Shopify, connected under one domain via subdomain or reverse proxy. It adds architectural complexity, so it is worth it when the content operation is genuinely substantial.

Products including simple, variable, and grouped types, categories and tags, images, customers and address books, order and refund history, coupons, product reviews, blog posts and pages, and existing redirects. Custom fields, often built with ACF or a plugin, map to Shopify metafields, which is usually the largest single piece of data work.

Simple products map directly. Variable products become Shopify products with variant options, subject to Shopify variant limits. Grouped and external or affiliate products have no direct equivalent and need a decision: rebuild as collections, as metafield-driven bundles, or drop them. We identify these during the audit rather than at build time.

They become Shopify metafields. WooCommerce stores accumulate custom fields in postmeta over years, many written by plugins that are no longer active. We audit which fields are actually populated and rendered before mapping, because porting everything reproduces the mess on a new platform.

No. WordPress stores password hashes in a format Shopify cannot import, and no honest agency will claim otherwise. Accounts migrate without passwords and customers go through a reset at launch. We plan that communication in advance so it does not read as a breach notice.

Yes. WooCommerce order data lives in the WordPress database and can be exported and imported so customers keep seeing past purchases and your reporting stays continuous. Very large archives sometimes import as summarised records with full detail kept in an exportable archive, which we agree with you rather than deciding quietly.

Subscriptions do not transfer automatically and this is the single most underestimated part of a WooCommerce migration. Active subscriptions carry payment tokens tied to your existing gateway. Depending on the gateway, tokens may be portable, or subscribers may need to re-authorise. This has to be resolved before cutover, not after.

Not if permalink mapping is complete. WooCommerce permalinks are configurable, so two stores can have entirely different URL structures, and the defaults use /product/ and /product-category/ where Shopify uses /products/ and /collections/. We crawl every indexed URL, map each to its equivalent, and ship single-hop 301 redirects before launch.

It depends entirely on how your permalinks were configured, which is why we never assume. Common WooCommerce structures nest products under a shop base or a category path; Shopify uses fixed /products/ and /collections/ prefixes and does not nest. Every pattern in use has to be identified from a real crawl rather than from the settings page.

Shopify blog URLs sit under /blogs/{blog}/{article}, which almost never matches a WordPress permalink structure. For content-heavy sites this is the largest redirect mapping job in the migration, and it matters because the blog usually carries a meaningful share of the site's links and rankings.

Yes. WooCommerce sites usually carry years of redirects in a plugin such as Redirection or in the SEO plugin. Those have to be flattened and re-pointed at the new destination, otherwise you inherit two-hop chains on launch day where an old URL redirects to another old URL that then redirects again.

Titles, meta descriptions, and canonical settings live in plugin tables and need extracting and mapping rather than re-writing from scratch. Schema generated by those plugins also disappears with them, so structured data has to be rebuilt in the Shopify theme and validated before cutover.

None transfer. Each needs a Shopify app equivalent, a custom build, or a decision to drop it. Auditing the plugin list is where the real scope of a WooCommerce migration appears, because most stores run plugins nobody remembers installing alongside a handful that are genuinely load-bearing.

Usually yes. Shopify handles a lot of tax and shipping logic natively that WooCommerce needs plugins for, so this often simplifies. Complex rules such as per-zone rate tables, dimensional weight, or carrier-specific logic may need an app or Shopify Functions, which we scope explicitly rather than assuming native coverage.

Multi-vendor is a genuine architectural difference, not a plugin swap. Shopify has no native multi-vendor model, so it needs a marketplace app or a custom build with vendor payouts handled deliberately. This changes the scope enough that we treat it as a separate conversation rather than a line item.

Yes, with care. WooCommerce reviews are stored as WordPress comments, so they export cleanly but need mapping into whichever Shopify reviews app you choose. Review counts and ratings are a real trust and rich-result asset, so losing them in migration is a genuine cost, not a cosmetic one.

Shopify handles multiple languages differently, through Markets and translation apps rather than duplicated posts. A WPML site does not map one-to-one, and the hreflang structure has to be rebuilt. If translation is central to your traffic, this deserves scoping before anything else in the migration.

Most run from a few weeks to a few months. Catalog size matters less than the plugin list, subscription complexity, and how much content needs migrating alongside the store. Data quality moves the estimate more than anything else, which is why we audit before quoting.

It depends on catalog size, the plugin stack, whether subscriptions are involved, how much blog content moves, and integration depth. We scope it on a short call and send a fixed proposal before any work starts, so the number does not move mid-project.

No. We build and test on staging, run a full data migration, then a delta sync of anything that changed during the build, and switch DNS at a low-traffic window. The WooCommerce store stays reachable until the new one is verified, so rollback is a DNS change rather than a rebuild.

Admin access or a full database export, a complete plugin list, details of any active subscriptions and the gateway behind them, and ideally a crawl of your indexed URLs. Having those ready shortens scoping considerably and surfaces the expensive surprises while they are still cheap.

Yes. You own the code, the data, and the platform accounts. Nothing is rented back to you and there is no proprietary layer you cannot maintain without us.