You have been selling online for several years on PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Wix, or Magento, and you are considering changing platforms. Your back-office has become cumbersome, technical updates keep piling up, and your performance has stagnated. The question keeps coming up: should you migrate to Shopify?
The short answer is yes, in the vast majority of cases. But an e-commerce migration cannot be improvised. Between data transfer, preserving organic search rankings, and maintaining business continuity, the stakes are high.
This guide was designed to accompany you through every step of your migration to Shopify, regardless of your source platform. We wrote it from our hands-on experience: more than 120 migrations completed at RYSE, a Shopify partner agency, on catalogs of 200 to 45,000 references, in sectors such as fashion, beauty, home décor, and B2B.
A migration to Shopify consists of transferring an entire online store (products, customers, orders, content, and SEO) from another e-commerce platform to Shopify, without any loss of data or organic traffic.
What is a migration to Shopify?
Concretely, this is not just a visual redesign. A migration involves structured data transfer, adaptation of site architecture, implementation of SEO redirects, and often reconfiguration of third-party integrations (ERP, CRM, carriers, payment methods).
The goal is to preserve all your data and rankings while benefiting from a more performant, easier-to-manage infrastructure designed to grow with your business.
We wrote it from our hands-on experience: more than 120 migrations completed at RYSE, a Shopify partner agency, on catalogs of 200 to 45,000 references, in sectors such as fashion, beauty, home décor, and B2B.
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Display by profile (decision-first): Shopify Plus and multi-entity — Direct answer on what you need to know.
Why migrate to Shopify in 2026?
Before discussing the how, it is essential to understand why so many merchants choose Shopify. Here are the reasons that come up most often in the migration projects we handle.
A SaaS platform with no technical maintenance
Shopify handles hosting, security, updates, and backups. You no longer waste time (or money) maintaining your technical infrastructure. This is a decisive advantage over open-source solutions like PrestaShop or WooCommerce, which require constant technical upkeep.
Performance optimized for conversion
Shopify delivers 99.99% uptime and uses a global CDN that accelerates page load times regardless of your visitors' geographic location. The faster your site, the higher your conversion rate — a direct revenue driver.
A complete app ecosystem
The Shopify App Store offers thousands of apps to extend your store's features: customer reviews, loyalty programs, upsell, subscription management, marketplaces, and much more. You don't need custom development for most needs.
Scalability built for growth
Whether you process 50 or 50,000 orders per month, Shopify adapts. And when your business reaches the next level, Shopify Plus offers advanced features for B2B, multi-store, custom checkout scripts, and complex automations.
A predictable total cost of ownership (TCO)
With Shopify, your subscription price is clear and includes everything: hosting, SSL, maintenance, support. No more unexpected invoices for a security update or module incompatibility.
- Guaranteed uptime: 99.99% — Shopify availability
- Migrations completed: 120+ — By RYSE
- Max references migrated: 45,000 — Catalog
- Data loss: 0% — RYSE commitment
Migrating to Shopify from each platform: what you need to know
Each source platform has its own technical specifics. Here is what to anticipate based on your situation.
Migrating from PrestaShop to Shopify
PrestaShop is the platform from which we perform the most migrations. PrestaShop merchants often face high maintenance costs, module conflicts, and risky updates.
What transfers easily: product sheets with their variants, customer data, order history, CMS pages, and blog posts.
Key considerations: the URL structure is completely different between PrestaShop and Shopify. You must systematically create an exhaustive 301 redirect plan to preserve your SEO. Faceted filters, very common on PrestaShop, must be rethought on the Shopify side with apps like Searchanise or Boost Commerce.
Learn more about migrating from PrestaShop to Shopify
Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify
WooCommerce, based on WordPress, is powerful but fragile. Reliance on third-party hosting, conflicting plugins, and security vulnerabilities push many merchants to seek a more stable solution.
What transfers easily: products, variants, customers, orders, and WordPress blog posts (which can be imported into Shopify's blog section).
Key considerations: WooCommerce variable products follow a different logic from Shopify variants (limited to 3 options and 100 variants by default). You may need to rethink your catalog structure. WordPress shortcodes do not work on Shopify and must be replaced with native content.
Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO
Migrating from Wix to Shopify
Wix is often chosen for its simplicity at launch, but its limits appear quickly as order volume grows. Migrating to Shopify represents a real qualitative leap in e-commerce features.
What transfers easily: products and their images, basic customer data.
Key considerations: Wix does not always allow clean export of order history. Wix designs cannot be transposed — you must recreate your design on Shopify with a suitable theme. Editorial content (pages, blog) must be migrated manually or via dedicated tools.
Migrating from Magento to Shopify
Magento (Adobe Commerce) is a powerful enterprise solution, but its maintenance costs and technical complexity have become a barrier for many brands. Migrating to Shopify Plus is the logical path for companies that want to maintain a high level of customization while simplifying their technical stack.
What transfers: products, attributes, customers, orders, categories, CMS content.
Key considerations: Magento often uses multi-store structures and very rich custom attributes. These data must be precisely mapped before adapting them to Shopify's logic (metafields, tags, collections). Existing ERP/PIM flows must also be reconfigured.
Migrating from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus
Brands leaving Salesforce Commerce Cloud generally do so to reduce their TCO and gain agility. Shopify Plus offers comparable features at a much lower cost.
What transfers: product catalog, customer data, transactional history.
Key considerations: Salesforce headless customizations and B2B logic require significant adaptation work. CRM connections (Salesforce CRM) can be maintained through native Shopify connectors.
| Source platform | Complexity | SEO risk | Average duration | Transferable data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PrestaShop | ⭐⭐⭐ Medium | 🟠 High (very different URLs) | 6 to 10 weeks | Products, customers, orders, CMS, blog |
| WooCommerce | ⭐⭐⭐ Medium | 🟡 Medium | 6 to 10 weeks | Products, customers, orders, WP blog |
| Wix | ⭐⭐ Low | 🟢 Low | 4 to 6 weeks | Products, images, customers |
| Magento | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ High | 🟠 High (multi-store) | 10 to 16 weeks | Products, attributes, customers, orders, CMS |
| Salesforce CC | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very high | 🟠 High (headless architecture) | 12 to 20 weeks | Catalog, customers, transactional history |
Planning a migration? A preliminary audit identifies SEO and technical risks before you start.
The 7 steps to a successful Shopify migration
Numbered cards — the key steps of the RYSE methodology.
Everything begins with a complete assessment of your current site. The goal is to identify what must be kept, what can be improved, and what should be discarded. This audit covers the product catalog, customer data, technical integrations, logistics flows, and above all the SEO configuration (indexed URLs, high-traffic pages, internal linking, backlinks).
Not everything needs to be migrated as-is. This is the time to sort things out: Which products are still relevant? Which pages actually generate traffic? Which features are essential from day one? This scoping exercise defines a realistic perimeter and prioritizes tasks.
This is the technical core of the project. Data is exported from your current platform, cleaned, formatted, and imported into Shopify. Depending on volume and complexity, we use tools like Matrixify (for bulk imports), the Shopify Admin API (for complex migrations), or third-party apps like Cart2Cart or LitExtension.
The migration is also an opportunity to modernize your design. Whether you start from an existing Shopify theme or a custom design, this step includes integrating your visual identity, configuring the purchase funnel, setting up essential apps, and connecting your third-party tools.
This is the critical step for preserving your organic search rankings. Creating 301 redirects for all changing URLs, carrying over title and meta description tags, checking canonical tags, adapting internal linking, submitting the new sitemap to Google Search Console, and monitoring 404 errors in the weeks following go-live. Shopify enforces a specific URL structure (/products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/), different from most CMS. This constraint makes 301 redirects absolutely essential.
Before go-live, every feature is tested: complete purchase funnel, payment, shipping, transactional emails, data flows, mobile responsiveness. This is also the time to verify that all redirects work and that imported data is correct.
The go-live is planned to minimize impact on your business (often in the evening or on weekends). DNS is switched to Shopify, and enhanced monitoring is put in place for the first few weeks to detect and quickly correct any issues.
- Products: title, description, images, price, variants, SKU, weight, publication status
- Customers: name, email, address, tags, newsletter subscription status
- Orders: complete history (number, date, amount, status, ordered products)
- Content: CMS pages, blog posts, FAQ
- Promo codes and discounts
- Metafields and custom data
Important: Shopify does not allow importing encrypted customer passwords. Your customers will need to reset their password on their first login to the new store.
How to preserve your SEO during a migration to Shopify
The fear of losing search rankings is the primary barrier to migration. And it's a legitimate concern: a poorly managed migration can cause your organic traffic to drop 30 to 50% in a few weeks. But a well-managed migration allows you to preserve all your SEO — and even improve it.
301 redirects: the absolute foundation
Every URL on your old site that received traffic or backlinks must point to its Shopify equivalent via a 301 redirect. This tells Google that the page has simply changed address, not disappeared. A complete redirect plan includes URLs for products, categories (collections), CMS pages, blog posts, and potentially images.
SEO tags to carry over
Your title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, and image alt texts must be carried over to Shopify. If your old platform managed them poorly, this is the opportunity to optimize them — but don't change everything at once. Google needs to find continuity signals.
Internal linking to adapt
Your internal linking must be reviewed to match Shopify's new structure. Broken internal links are a negative signal for Google and a loss of internal PageRank.
Google Search Console to monitor
Submit your new sitemap as soon as you go live and monitor coverage reports, 404 errors, and search performance daily. Active monitoring for the first 4 to 6 weeks is essential.
- 301 redirects: Essential
- Monitoring weeks: 4-6 post-migration
- Possible loss: 30-50% without redirects
Successful migrations: 3 real-world case studies
At RYSE, we have guided more than 120 merchants in their migration to Shopify, on catalogs ranging from 200 to 45,000 references, in various sectors (fashion, beauty, food, home décor, B2B). Here are three representative examples.
Case 1 — Beauty brand: PrestaShop → Shopify
Context: 1,800 products, 12,000 customers, SEO traffic = 40% of revenue
Challenge: Completely different URL structure, 350+ 301 redirects to create, faceted filters to reconfigure
Result at D+30: stable organic traffic (−2% then full recovery at D+45), conversion rate +18% thanks to an optimized purchase funnel
Project duration: 8 weeks
Case 2 — Home décor e-commerce: WooCommerce → Shopify
Context: 4,200 products, blog of 120 ranked articles, ERP connection
Challenge: WordPress blog migration (shortcodes to rewrite), product variant restructuring, ERP integration via API
Result at D+30: 0 404 error pages, load time divided by 2.3, technical maintenance cost −60%/year
Project duration: 10 weeks
Case 3 — B2B+B2C fashion brand: Magento → Shopify Plus
Context: 15,000 references, 2 stores (France + international), B2B logic with wholesale pricing
Challenge: Magento multi-store to reconfigure as Shopify markets, custom attribute import via metafields, PIM reconnection
Result at D+60: TCO reduced by 45%, team autonomous on the back-office, revenue stable from month one
Project duration: 14 weeks
Key takeaway: A poorly managed Shopify migration can result in up to 50% loss of SEO traffic. With a rigorous methodology, traffic is maintained and performance improves from the first weeks.
| Project type | Indicative budget | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Simple migration (small catalog, standard theme) | €3,000 – €8,000 | This covers stores with a few hundred products, no complex integrations, where an existing Shopify theme suffices. |
| Intermediate migration (custom design, integrations) | €8,000 – €25,000 | This is the case for the majority of merchants migrating from PrestaShop or WooCommerce with a catalog of a few thousand products and customization needs. |
| Complex migration (large catalog, ERP/PIM, Shopify Plus) | €25,000 – €80,000+ | Enterprise projects with tens of thousands of references, connections to complex information systems, and specific business logic. |
| Project type | Estimated duration | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Simple project (small catalog, standard design) | 4 to 6 weeks | This is the minimum for a clean migration that does not sacrifice quality. |
| Intermediate project (medium catalog, custom design) | 6 to 10 weeks | The majority of migrations fall within this range. |
| Complex project (Shopify Plus, ERP/PIM, multi-language) | 10 to 16 weeks | The largest projects can extend to 4 to 6 months when they include a complete redesign of the user experience. |
The 8 most common mistakes when migrating to Shopify
After more than 120 migrations, here are the mistakes we see most often — and how to avoid them.
This is mistake number one. Without redirects, you lose your organic traffic, your backlinks, and Google's trust.
Use the migration as an opportunity to clean up your catalog: obsolete products, poorly filled-out sheets, customers who have been inactive for years.
URLs, product variants, categories — everything is structured differently on Shopify. You must adapt, not copy-paste.
Shopify cannot import encrypted passwords. Plan a clear welcome email that guides your customers through the reset process.
Black Friday is not the ideal time to change platforms. Plan your migration during a quiet period.
Place a real test order for every payment method, every shipping option, on both desktop and mobile.
Your ERP, your carriers, your invoicing tool — verify that everything is connected and functional before go-live.
The first weeks are crucial. Track your traffic, SEO rankings, conversion rates, and 404 errors daily.
Our experts have migrated 120+ stores from PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Wix, and Magento with zero data loss.
Should you migrate to Shopify alone or with an agency?
Technically, Shopify provides the tools to perform a migration yourself: CSV import, migration apps, detailed documentation. For a small store with a few dozen products and little SEO at stake, this is entirely feasible.
But as soon as your store exceeds a few hundred products, your SEO is an important acquisition channel, or you have technical integrations, working with a specialist agency considerably reduces the risks.
A Shopify Partner agency brings expertise in data recovery, SEO preservation, design optimization for conversion, and integration configuration. It also helps you avoid costly mistakes that can take months to correct.
At RYSE, we guide merchants through their migration to Shopify with a proven methodology and a results commitment: 0% data loss and preserved SEO.
By profile (decision-first) — Decision support — Migrate alone or with an agency? — Quick summary:
Self-migration: Small catalog (<100 products), limited SEO at stake, no complex integrations, limited budget.
Migration with an agency: Medium to large catalog (500+ products), SEO = major acquisition channel, ERP/CRM/PIM integrations, zero downtime and zero loss required.
- Migrations completed: 120+ — Since 2020
- Data loss: 0% — Contractual commitment
- SEO preserved: 98% — From D+30
- Google rating: 5/5 — 47 verified reviews
What is a migration to Shopify? A migration to Shopify consists of transferring an entire online store (products, customers, orders, content, and SEO) from another platform to Shopify, without any loss of data or organic traffic.
How much does a migration to Shopify cost? From €3,000 for a small catalog up to €80,000+ for an enterprise project with ERP and Shopify Plus. The majority of migrations fall between €8,000 and €25,000.
Will I lose my SEO by migrating? No, as long as you implement 301 redirects, carry over SEO tags, and monitor Google Search Console for 4 to 6 weeks after launch.
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FAQ — Shopify migration
Find answers to the most common questions about migrating to Shopify, data transferred, SEO, and costs.
No, as long as the migration is carried out correctly.
Implementing 301 redirects, carrying over SEO tags, and post-migration monitoring allow you to preserve all your search rankings.
In many cases, SEO performance actually improves after the migration thanks to Shopify's superior speed and better technical structure.
Yes. Your current store remains operational throughout the entire project.
The new Shopify store is built in parallel, on a development environment.
The final switch (DNS change) takes a few hours, usually at night or on the weekend to minimize the impact.
The majority of essential data is transferable: products (with images, variants, descriptions), customers, order history, content pages, blog posts, promotional codes, and customer reviews.
However, encrypted customer passwords and certain data very specific to your old platform cannot be imported as-is.
Yes. Shopify natively handles catalogs of several tens of thousands of products.
For very large catalogs (100,000+ references) or advanced needs (B2B, multi-store, complex automations), Shopify Plus offers the necessary features.
With a well-executed migration and a complete redirect plan, SEO generally stabilizes within 2 to 4 weeks.
A slight fluctuation in positions in the first days is normal — Google needs to recrawl your site and validate the new URLs.
Full stabilization occurs within 1 to 3 months after the migration.
No. You keep your existing domain name. You simply connect it to your Shopify store by modifying your DNS records.
Your customers find the same address, and Google continues to associate your domain with your search ranking history.
Your customer reviews can be migrated to Shopify using compatible apps like Judge.me, Loox, or Yotpo.
If you already use a verified reviews solution (Trustpilot, Avis Vérifiés), the connection is generally straightforward to set up.
Migrating to Shopify is a strategic decision that can transform how you manage your e-commerce business and accelerate your growth. But it is also a technical project that demands rigor, methodology, and specific expertise.
If you are considering a migration, start by assessing your current situation: data volume, SEO stakes, critical integrations, timing. The stronger your preparation, the smoother the transition.
Your migration to Shopify
starts here
Migrating to Shopify is a strategic decision that can transform how you manage your e-commerce business and accelerate your growth. If you want to be guided by experts who have already completed more than 120 migrations, contact the RYSE team for a free audit of your project.
