Shopify Plus migration

Most migrations fail quietly. The store launches, it looks better than the old one, and three months later organic traffic is down forty per cent and nobody can say exactly when it started. That is almost always redirects, and it is almost always avoidable.

So the first thing worth saying about a migration is that the front end is not the risky part. Rebuilding a product page in Liquid is a known quantity. What takes the time, and what actually decides whether this goes well, is everything underneath.

What comes across

Products, variants, collections, customers and order history all move, but none of them move cleanly. Every platform models this differently and the gaps are where the work is.

Customer records are the part people forget. Passwords cannot migrate between platforms, so every customer has to reset. That is a comms job as much as a technical one, and it needs planning into the launch rather than discovering on the day.

Magento to Shopify Plus

Magento's configurable products and custom options do not map one to one onto Shopify variants. A product with more than three option dimensions needs a decision rather than a script, and it is best made with the merchandising team rather than by whoever runs the import. Magento stores also carry the most bespoke checkout and pricing logic of the four, and most of it lands as a Shopify Function, a smaller app stack, or a feature nobody used. Magento 1 stores are the ones most often still on the old platform for want of anyone willing to touch them. The data comes across the same way.

WooCommerce to Shopify Plus

WooCommerce sites usually carry years of plugin-written meta. Sorting it into what becomes a metafield, what becomes a tag and what gets left behind is the bulk of the data work. The other job is the URL structure, since WordPress permalinks are free-form and Shopify's are not, so the redirect map is longer than on any other platform. The blog moves too, and it is often where most of the organic traffic actually lives.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus

Commerce Cloud stores tend to have the cleanest catalogue data and the most business logic sitting on top of it: promotions, customer groups, and integrations with an ERP or an order management system that expect the platform to behave a particular way. The migration is mostly a mapping exercise for that logic, deciding what Plus does natively, what becomes a Function, and what the integration has to absorb. The catalogue itself is usually the easy part.

BigCommerce to Shopify Plus

BigCommerce is the most straightforward of the four for products and orders. The work is in its price list and customer group model, which has to be rethought as Shopify Markets for regions and B2B catalogues for trade customers, and in the URL structure, which BigCommerce lets you set freely and Shopify does not.

URLs, redirects and rankings

This is the part that protects the traffic.

Every indexed URL on the old store needs a mapped destination on the new one. Not a redirect to the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft 404, but a page-level match. Shopify's URL structure is fixed in ways other platforms are not: products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, and a product accessed through a collection carries a different path to the same page. Getting the canonical structure right at the start is easier than unpicking it after launch.

The working method is to pull every URL that has an impression or a backlink, from Search Console, from the server logs and from a crawl of the old site, map each one to its new destination, and load the lot as redirects before the DNS change rather than after. Anything that cannot be mapped gets a considered decision, not a default.

Rankings dip for a few weeks after any migration. Done properly they recover. Done without a redirect map they often do not.

Apps and what replaces them

Every platform migration is also an app migration. Some things that needed an extension on Magento are native on Shopify. Some things that were native become an app, or become a Shopify Function. Subscriptions, loyalty, reviews and search are the four that usually need the most thought, because each one holds data that has to come with it. Reviews in particular are worth moving properly, since they carry structured data and they are slow to rebuild.

The honest version of this conversation is that the app stack often gets smaller. That is usually a good outcome, and it is worth doing deliberately rather than rebuilding the old stack out of habit.

What this costs in time

A straightforward catalogue with a clean redirect map and a theme built from an existing design is 4-6 weeks. A Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud store with heavy custom logic, B2B pricing and a large catalogue is 8-10 weeks. The variables that move it are catalogue complexity, how much business logic sits outside the platform, and how much of the design is being reworked at the same time.

Migrating and redesigning at once is usually a false economy. If the traffic drops you will not know which change caused it.