What the move costs, by store size and approach

WooCommerce migrations are the cheapest major route in replatforming — and the published estimates are still usually wrong, because they count the tool fee and skip the workstreams.

• 01
  DIY: $200–$1,500 in tools plus your time. Shopify's free Store Importer covers simple WooCommerce moves; LitExtension ($200–$400+) is the most-used paid option for this route, with Cart2Cart as the alternative. Matrixify has less direct WooCommerce support but works for specific scenarios. Watch the add-ons: SEO and redirect handling priced separately can double a tool quote.
• 02
  Freelancer or small team: $1,000–$5,000 for a properly scoped migration including redirect setup and SEO metadata transfer. The right tier for medium-complexity stores that want technical execution without agency rates.
• 03
  Agency: $3,000–$5,000 for small stores, $5,000–$15,000 mid-size, $15,000–$50,000 for large or complex builds. The biggest variable is how many custom features and plugins need rebuilding, not SKU count. A documented $5M-revenue, 2,000-SKU move cost $18,000 and cut hosting costs 40%.
• 04
  Timeline: 2–6 weeks for simple catalogs, 4–12 weeks typical end to end. The data transfer is days. The plugin audit, theme rebuild, subscription re-onboarding, and redirect validation are the weeks. Apply the standard 25–40% contingency — the cross-industry overrun rates don't exempt easy-looking routes.
• 05
  Budget the first post-launch year honestly: $100–$400/mo in apps as you discover which WooCommerce plugins need paid Shopify replacements. This is the line item that makes the first-year comparison look worse than the steady state, and it usually still nets out, since migrated merchants report 20–30% lower operational overhead once the legacy stack is cancelled. Run your own three-year numbers in the ECM platform calculator.
• 06
  One thing you keep: your domain. Point your registrar's DNS at Shopify or transfer the domain; either way the brand stays put. What changes is every path under it, which is why the redirect section below exists.

What transfers, and the five things that break every time

Agencies that run this route describe it as one of the most predictable projects in ecommerce: the same failures recur, so every one can be planned for. Here's the inventory.

Transfers cleanly

• →
  Products, variants, images, categories, and tags via WooCommerce's built-in CSV export or a migration tool. Customers with names, emails, addresses, and order history attached. Blog posts with categories and tags. Coupons, usually needing manual logic recreation.
• →
  Order history transfers — as read-only archives that preserve lifetime value and reporting but can't be modified or refunded. A pattern worth considering from agency practice: for stores with messy historical data, keeping the WooCommerce site alive as a private read archive is sometimes cleaner than importing a decade of orders.
• →
  One rule before any export: clean the data first. Years of inconsistent attributes, missing SKUs, and duplicate customer records migrate as exactly that. Tools transfer what's there; there is no third option between cleaning before and paying to clean during.

The five predictable breaks

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  URL structures. WooCommerce's /product/ and /product-category/ paths become Shopify's /products/ and /collections/, and blog URLs become /blogs/[name]/[slug]. Every product, category, and blog URL needs a 301 before launch — skip it and organic traffic collapses on a timeline Google controls, not you.
• →
  Plugin-dependent functionality. Each of the 30–50 plugins gets a verdict against a structured tech stack audit: native on Shopify, replaced by an app, rebuilt custom, or retired. Bookings, custom product fields, memberships, and advanced shipping rules are the categories that most often hide a mini-project each.
• →
  Subscriptions. WooCommerce Subscriptions maps to nothing Shopify-native — full treatment in the next section, because it deserves one.
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  Reviews. Native WooCommerce reviews don't transfer by default. Plan it as its own track: CSV export from your reviews plugin into Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox, or Stamped, then verify product-to-review mapping by hand.
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  Custom PHP and custom plugin tables. Anything built into custom WordPress database tables stays in WooCommerce unless a developer extracts and transforms it. Membership data and custom user fields are case by case — and finding them in the audit instead of mid-migration is what keeps the quote honest. Passwords, as on every route, never transfer; schedule the reset email as a comms project.

Subscriptions and the blog: what makes this route different

Every migration has redirects and data mapping. Leaving WordPress adds two projects other routes don't have, and both are chronically underestimated.

The subscriptions rebuild

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  WooCommerce Subscriptions is a separate migration project, not a data type. Subscription state, billing cycles, and scheduled renewals move to Recharge, Skio, Bold, or Smartrr — and customer payment tokens usually don't transfer between platforms. That means re-onboarding active subscribers, with some needing to re-enter payment methods.
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  For high-subscription stores, this single track can take longer than everything else combined. Plan the subscriber communication weeks in advance: an honest email sequence explaining the change, a reauthorization flow tested end to end, and a churn allowance in the revenue model for the subscribers who don't complete it.
• →
  This is also the piece that most changes the build-vs-buy math on agencies. If subscription revenue is a meaningful share of the business, the $5K–$15K agency tier stops being optional. The cost of a botched re-onboarding is measured in recurring revenue, not project fees.

The WordPress blog migration

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  If content SEO is why you were on WordPress, the blog is a first-class project, not an afterthought. Posts move via WordPress XML export or Matrixify with categories and tags intact, but custom post types, custom taxonomies, and advanced content blocks don't; Shopify's blog engine is simply less powerful. Hand-check your SEO-critical posts.
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  Yoast and Rank Math metadata needs explicit migration. The working mechanic: export all meta titles and descriptions as CSV from the WordPress plugin, add SEO Title and SEO Description columns to the Shopify import CSV, and match the fields. Done properly this replaces $500–$1,500 of consultant SEO work; skipped, your optimized titles get replaced with Shopify defaults.
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  Internal links inside posts still point at WordPress URLs after import. Budget a pass to update them to the new Shopify paths — redirects will catch the clicks, but clean internal links pass equity better than a redirect hop, and the difference compounds across a large content library.

The two recovery curves, and which one you get

This route's SEO data is unusually clean: two documented patterns, and the redirect map decides which one is yours.

• 01
  Done right: a 5–15% temporary dip with full recovery in 4–8 weeks. The documented ecommerce cases back it — one WooCommerce-to-Shopify launch (December 2025) recovered and grew organic sessions 10.7% within three months. Done wrong: a 30–50% loss lasting 6–12 months, against the background Ahrefs finding that 60% of pages that lose rankings in a migration never fully recover them.
• 02
  Build the map from a full crawl, prioritized by value. Every /product/, /product-category/, and blog URL gets one clean server-side 301 to its closest new equivalent: no chains, no bulk homepage redirects. Map the top 20% of pages carrying 80% of the traffic first, and include the PDFs and images that carry backlinks nobody remembers.
• 03
  Verify the metadata survived. The Yoast/Rank Math export-and-match mechanic above covers products and posts; confirm your top collection and product pages against the pre-migration export after import, because tools skip SEO fields on basic plans without announcing it.
• 04
  Confirm schema renders on day one. Shopify's native JSON-LD covers Product, Review, FAQ, and Breadcrumb markup, and well-structured product pages increasingly surface in AI answer engines without extra work — record your AI-citation baseline for top queries before launch alongside classic rank tracking. The full framework is in the ECM replatforming SEO impact guide.
• 05
  Validate against staging, then launch outside peak season. Crawl the redirect map before cutover, watch Search Console daily for two weeks after, and hold your nerve through the dip if the map was validated. If organic drives meaningful revenue, a migration-experienced SEO specialist on this phase is the cheapest insurance in the project.

The route-specific sequence, start to 90 days

The generic phases live in the ECM migration checklist. This is the WooCommerce-specific version, with the route's own traps marked.

• 01
  1. Audit (weeks 1–2): full URL crawl, the 30–50 plugin inventory with verdicts, subscription revenue exposure counted, custom-table data identified, and the data cleanup (attributes, SKUs, duplicates) done in WooCommerce before anything exports. Pull the baseline from your core KPIs: checkout conversion, organic sessions by landing page, page speed.
• 02
  2. Build and transfer (weeks 2–6): theme rebuilt (designs never transfer), products and customers imported via Store Importer or LitExtension, demo migration audited by hand: random products for variants and pricing, customers with order history attached, Yoast metadata spot-checked against the export.
• 03
  3. The parallel tracks (weeks 2–8): subscriptions re-onboarding prepared with subscriber comms scheduled, reviews exported and mapped into the new app, blog imported with internal links updated. Each runs alongside the main build with its own owner, because sequencing them serially is where 4-week projects become 12-week ones.
• 04
  4. Cutover (launch week): redirect map validated against staging, full-stack test orders placed (payment, tax, shipping, confirmation emails), a freeze window at the lowest-traffic hour with a final delta import, DNS pointed at Shopify. The domain stays; everything under it changes.
• 05
  5. The 90-day close-out: Search Console daily for two weeks, the password-reset and subscription-reauthorization emails monitored for completion rates, legacy hosting and the plugin stack cancelled at day 30 (the 20–30% overhead saving only exists if someone cancels), and the review run against the Phase 1 baseline. The platform-agnostic version of every step is in the ECM migration checklist.