Migrating your store to Shopify (WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Wix) without losing sales

Updates that break the store, plugins piling up, slowness, security flaws: many retailers selling on WooCommerce or PrestaShop are considering moving to Shopify. It’s often a very good decision. But a poorly prepared migration can be costly: pages lost in Google, customers who can’t find their account, interrupted orders. Here’s the method we apply.

Step 1: take inventory

• The catalogue: products, variants, images, categories, attributes, stock.
• Customers: accounts, addresses, newsletter subscriptions.
• History: past orders, useful for customer service and accounting.
• Content: pages, blog articles, legal notice, terms of sale.
• Features: the plugins in use, and their Shopify equivalents (reviews, loyalty, subscriptions, shipping).
• URLs: the complete list of indexed pages and those that receive traffic or links.

Step 2: transfer the data

Products, customers and orders are imported via Shopify’s migration tools, specialised apps or CSV imports. The data almost always needs cleaning along the way: badly structured variants, descriptions copied from the supplier, images that are too heavy. It’s the ideal opportunity to tidy up the catalogue.

Step 3: preserve your SEO

This is the most critical point. Shopify imposes its URL structure (/products/, /collections/, /pages/): almost all your old addresses will change. Without redirects, every well-ranked page becomes a 404 error, and traffic collapses.

1. Export all the old URLs: sitemap, Search Console, crawling tool.
2. Map each old URL to its new equivalent, product by product, category by category.
3. Import these 301 redirects into Shopify, which accepts a CSV file.
4. Carry over the title and description tags of the pages that performed well.
5. After launch, monitor errors in Search Console and fix anything missed.

Our article redesigning your website without losing your SEO details this method, and our Shopify SEO guide the settings to configure on the new store.

Step 4: rebuild the experience

Choose a lightweight theme, customise it to your brand, and only install the apps you really need. Reconfigure payment methods, shipping zones and rates, taxes and notification emails. If you have a physical shop, it’s also the time to move to Shopify POS to unify stock and customers. For very advanced design or performance needs, a headless store in Next.js is an option.

Step 5: test, then switch over

• Place real test orders with each payment method and each shipping option.
• Check the emails sent to customers, the invoices and the taxes.
• Test the redirects on a sample of old URLs.
• Choose a quiet period to switch the domain name, never in the middle of the sales or before Christmas.
• Keep the old store accessible internally for a few weeks to look up information if needed.

How long does it take and how much does it cost?

For a medium-sized store, generally allow a few weeks between inventory and launch. The cost depends mainly on the number of products, the quality of the data to carry over and the features to rebuild. Our comparison Shopify or WooCommerce will help you confirm that migrating is the right choice.

After the migration

Take advantage of the change to set up what was missing: cart reminders and loyalty with a CRM connected to Shopify, customer reviews, product structured data. Our Shopify agency in Marseille handles the migration from start to finish, redirects and SEO monitoring included.