What you will learn
- What to migrate and what to leave behind
- Moving products, customers, and orders
- Redirects and SEO preservation
- Rebuilding design and apps
- Launch day and the weeks after
1. Audit before you move anything
List what your current store contains: products, variants, customer records, order history, blog posts, pages, and discount codes, plus the apps and integrations you rely on. Decide what must move, what can be archived, and what should be rebuilt rather than copied, such as outdated pages or broken content. An audit prevents migrating years of clutter into a new store.
2. Move data in stages, and clean it as you go
Export products, customers, and orders from the old platform, clean the data in a spreadsheet, fixing titles, prices, and missing fields, then import it into Shopify and verify counts and samples. Clean data migrates once; dirty data creates support tickets for months. Keep the old store running throughout, so a failed import costs time rather than sales.
3. Protect search rankings with redirects
List every URL that receives traffic or links, especially product and category pages, and set up a redirect from each old URL to its new Shopify equivalent. Test the redirects before launch, including old URLs shared in emails and social posts. Without redirects, search engines and bookmarked customers land on error pages, and rankings built over years fade quickly.
4. Rebuild design and integrations deliberately
Rebuilding on a new theme is an opportunity to simplify: keep the layouts customers use, drop the customisations nobody missed, and re-add only the apps that serve a current need. Reconnect payments, shipping, email, and analytics, and test each integration with real orders before launch. A migration that also redesigns everything at once is harder to debug, so separate the move from the redesign where possible.
5. Launch in a quiet window, then watch closely
Point the domain at Shopify during a low-traffic period, then test the homepage, key products, search, cart, and checkout immediately. Monitor orders, error pages, and customer messages closely for the first two weeks, and fix redirect gaps as they appear in logs. Most migration problems surface in the first days, and fast fixes limit their cost.
Example: a staged migration for a mid-size store. A store with four hundred products exports its catalogue, cleans titles and descriptions, and imports them into a Shopify draft over two weeks while the old store keeps selling. It maps its top two hundred URLs to redirects, rebuilds only its homepage and product templates, and tests checkout with real orders. On launch night it switches the domain, tests the top pages, and finds three redirect gaps the next morning, which it fixes the same day. Customers notice a fresher design; they do not notice a migration.
After the migration: the first ninety days
The first ninety days after migration are when the remaining problems surface, and they deserve a structured watch. Monitor search traffic for your most important pages weekly, check server and error logs for old URLs still receiving visits, and fix any redirect gaps you find rather than assuming they will resolve themselves. Watch order completion and customer messages for issues the new platform introduced, such as a payment method behaving differently or an email template that reads poorly.
At ninety days, review the migration properly: compare sales, traffic, and conversion with the same period before the move, list what improved and what regressed, and fix the regressions before they become permanent. A migration is only truly finished when the new store performs at least as well as the old one on the measures that matter, and that verdict needs ninety days of evidence, not launch-week optimism.
Frequently asked questions
Can I migrate to Shopify without downtime?
Largely yes, if you build the new store while the old one keeps selling and switch the domain only after testing. A brief propagation delay is normal but rarely noticeable.
Will I lose my search rankings when migrating?
Not if redirects are set up for important URLs and content is preserved. Rankings can dip briefly during the switch, but missing redirects cause lasting losses.
What happens to my customer accounts?
Customer records can be imported, but passwords usually cannot transfer between platforms, so customers typically set a new password on first login. Tell them clearly in a launch email.
Should I redesign during migration?
Only lightly. Moving platforms is already a large change; a full redesign at the same time makes problems harder to trace. Migrate first, redesign after.
How long does a Shopify migration take?
A small store can migrate in days; a large catalogue with many integrations can take weeks. The audit and redirect mapping usually take longer than the import itself.