Move the store. Think hard about the blog.

Usually because commerce has become the point of the site and WordPress is being asked to do a job it was not built for. Maintaining hosting, security patching, and plugin compatibility for a store is real work. Shopify absorbs that in exchange for less low-level control.

If your store runs on WooCommerce, that is the WooCommerce path and it centres on products, subscriptions, and the plugin stack. This page covers WordPress sites where the content is the main asset, including blog-only migrations where the store is being built fresh on Shopify.

Genuinely worth considering, and we recommend it more often than you might expect. Shopify's blogging is weaker than WordPress in real ways. Running WordPress for content and Shopify for commerce under one domain keeps editorial power while moving the store, at the cost of some architectural complexity.

Meaningfully. Shopify blogs have no categories, only tags, limited author handling, a simpler editor, and far less control over templates and taxonomy. For a site publishing occasionally this is fine. For a content operation with a large structured archive, it is a real downgrade you should decide on knowingly.

Yes. Posts, images, excerpts, publish dates, and authors can be imported into Shopify blogs. What does not survive intact is taxonomy: WordPress categories have no Shopify equivalent and collapse into tags, which changes how an archive is browsed and internally linked.

They become tags, because Shopify blogs support only tags. Any category archive pages you have indexed no longer exist as a structure, so those URLs need mapping to a tag listing or a relevant post. On content-heavy sites this is one of the larger redirect decisions in the project.

Not directly, because Shopify has no custom post type concept. Depending on what they hold, they become products, blog articles, pages, or metaobjects. Sites using custom post types for things like case studies or resources need an explicit content model decision before anything is imported.

Images are downloaded from the WordPress uploads directory and re-uploaded to Shopify with filenames and alt text preserved where possible. In-post image references then need rewriting to the new URLs, otherwise you launch an archive full of broken images pointing at a server you are decommissioning.

Not if the permalink mapping is complete, but the risk is concentrated in the blog rather than the store. WordPress permalink structures are configurable and often date-based or category-nested, while Shopify blog URLs sit under /blogs/{blog}/{article}. Almost every content URL changes.

It depends entirely on your permalink setting, which is why we crawl rather than assume. A date-based structure, a category-nested one, and a plain post-name structure each produce a completely different redirect map. We discover the real patterns from indexed URLs, not from the settings page.

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

They need to. WordPress sites usually carry years of redirects in a plugin such as Redirection or inside the SEO plugin. Those must be flattened and re-pointed at the final destination, or you launch with two-hop chains where an old URL redirects to another old URL that redirects again.

Neither has a clean Shopify equivalent. Author archives disappear, and blog pagination works differently. Both usually hold low-value indexed URLs, so we map the ones with genuine links or rankings and let the rest resolve cleanly rather than redirecting thousands of thin pages into chains.

Page builder output does not transfer. Elementor, Divi, WPBakery and similar store layout as builder-specific markup and shortcodes that mean nothing outside WordPress. Those pages are rebuilt in the Shopify theme, and the more of your site was built that way, the more of the project is rebuild rather than migration.

Some do, some are unnecessary on Shopify, and some have no equivalent at all. The audit matters more than the answer, because most WordPress sites run plugins nobody remembers installing alongside two or three that are genuinely load-bearing. Migration is a good moment to shed the rest.

Shopify handles languages through Markets and translation apps rather than duplicated posts, so a WPML structure does not map one-to-one and the hreflang setup has to be rebuilt. If translated content drives meaningful traffic, this deserves scoping before anything else.

Accounts can migrate; passwords cannot. WordPress stores hashes in a format Shopify cannot import, so customers reset at launch. We plan that communication in advance so it does not read as a security incident.

Usually a few weeks to a couple of months, driven far more by content volume than product count. A large blog archive with category structures and page-builder pages takes considerably longer than a small store with a handful of posts.

It depends on how much content moves, how much was built with a page builder, whether custom post types are involved, and whether you are redesigning at the same time. We scope it on a short call and send a fixed proposal before any work starts.

Yes, and it is often the sensible order. Content can move ahead of commerce, or stay on WordPress permanently while the store launches on Shopify. Splitting the two reduces launch risk and lets each part be judged on its own.

No. We build and test on staging, migrate content and data, then switch DNS at a low-traffic window. The WordPress site stays reachable until the new one is verified, so rollback is a DNS change rather than a rebuild.

Admin access or a database export, your WordPress XML export, a full plugin and theme list, a note of any page builder in use, and ideally a crawl of your indexed URLs. Those five things make the estimate real rather than optimistic.

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.