Thinking of Migrating WooCommerce to Shopify? Read This First

Every few months, the same conversation surfaces in WooCommerce communities: "I'm fed up with slow page loads, plugin conflicts, and hosting headaches. Should I just move to Shopify?" It's a reasonable question. Shopify is a well-built platform with genuine strengths. But the WooCommerce to Shopify migration is rarely as clean as the YouTube tutorials suggest — and the problems that follow can be worse than the ones you're trying to escape.

This guide is not here to trash Shopify. It's here to give you the full picture before you commit to a migration that's difficult to reverse. We'll cover the real data migration challenges, the SEO risks most merchants underestimate, the cost reality once you factor in apps and transaction fees, and the vendor lock-in you're signing up for. We'll also explain why the performance complaints driving most migrations can be solved without leaving WooCommerce at all.

Why WooCommerce store owners consider Shopify

Let's start with honesty: the frustrations that push people toward Shopify are legitimate. WooCommerce stores can be slow. Plugin updates can break things. Hosting configuration is your responsibility. Security patches fall on you. These are real operational burdens that Shopify eliminates by managing everything centrally.

The most common triggers we hear from store owners considering migration are:

These concerns are valid. But there's a difference between "WooCommerce has limitations" and "Shopify will fix all of them." Shopify solves some of these problems genuinely well. It creates others. And the migration process itself introduces risks that most merchants don't fully appreciate until they're mid-way through.

The data migration minefield

The first major WooCommerce to Shopify migration problem hits before your new store is even live: getting your data across. On paper, both platforms handle products, orders, and customers. In practice, they model data very differently, and the translation is lossy.

What transfers cleanly

Basic product data — titles, descriptions, prices, images, and simple variants — migrates reasonably well using tools like LitExtension, Cart2Cart, or Shopify's own import tools. Customer names, emails, and addresses come across. Order history transfers in a basic form.

What doesn't

This is where it gets painful. WooCommerce's flexibility means your store likely uses data structures that have no Shopify equivalent:

Migration tools advertise "automated transfers," but automated doesn't mean complete. Every store we've seen migrate to Shopify required manual data cleanup — sometimes weeks of it. The more customised your WooCommerce store, the more data you'll lose or need to manually recreate.

SEO risks: the silent revenue killer

This is the migration risk that causes the most long-term damage, and it's the one most merchants underestimate. Your SEO equity — the rankings, backlinks, and domain authority you've built over years — is tied to specific URL structures. WooCommerce and Shopify use fundamentally different URL patterns.

URL structure changes

WooCommerce gives you full control over URL structure. Most stores use something like /product/blue-widget/ or /shop/blue-widget/. Category pages might be /product-category/widgets/.

Shopify enforces its own URL structure. Products are always /products/blue-widget. Collections are always /collections/widgets. Blog posts are /blogs/news/post-title. You cannot change these prefixes.

Setting up redirects sounds straightforward, but the complexity scales quickly. A store with 500 products, 50 categories, and 100 blog posts needs at minimum 650 individual redirects. Factor in pagination pages, filtered URLs, and tag pages, and you could be looking at thousands. Shopify's redirect system is manual (or requires an app), and it doesn't support regex patterns — every redirect must be entered individually.

Google has confirmed that even properly implemented 301 redirects pass slightly less link equity than the original URL. When you redirect hundreds of pages simultaneously, the cumulative impact on rankings is real. Many merchants report a 10-30% drop in organic traffic in the months following migration, with some pages never fully recovering.

If organic search drives a meaningful portion of your revenue, this risk alone should give you pause. For a deeper look at how headless architecture can actually improve your SEO rather than damage it, see our guide on headless WooCommerce SEO.

The real cost of Shopify

Shopify's pricing page shows clean, simple numbers. The reality for most WooCommerce migrants is considerably more expensive than expected.

WooCommerce is free. You pay for hosting ($10-100/month depending on your needs) and any premium plugins you choose. Crucially, you don't pay platform transaction fees — your payment gateway fee (typically 1.4-2.9% + fixed fee) is the only cost per transaction.

Shopify charges a monthly subscription plus transaction fees if you use a third-party payment gateway. But the real cost shock comes from apps. Features that are free or cheap in WooCommerce — advanced product filtering, custom checkout fields, subscription billing, multi-currency support, abandoned cart sequences — each require a paid Shopify app, typically $10-80/month each.

A WooCommerce store with moderate functionality typically finds itself spending $200-600/month more on Shopify than expected. Over a year, that's $2,400-7,200 in additional costs — and that's before the migration itself, which can cost $2,000-15,000 if you hire an agency. For a full cost breakdown of the headless alternative, see our headless WooCommerce cost guide.

Vendor lock-in: the problem you don't feel until it's too late

WooCommerce is open-source software. You own your database, your code, your content, and your customer data. You can export everything, switch hosts, modify any file, or fork the entire codebase if you want. Nobody can take it away from you.

Shopify is a SaaS platform. Your data lives on Shopify's servers, governed by Shopify's terms. You access it through their admin and their API, subject to their rate limits. This arrangement works fine — until it doesn't.

The vendor lock-in becomes most apparent when you want to leave. Migrating off Shopify means going through the same painful data migration process in reverse — except now your data has been reshaped to fit Shopify's model, and converting it back isn't straightforward. The migration tools that help you get into Shopify are considerably better than the ones that help you get out.

Lost WordPress flexibility

This is the one that creeps up on you after migration. WooCommerce runs on WordPress, which means you have access to the most extensive content management ecosystem in the world. WordPress powers over 40% of the web for a reason: it's extraordinarily flexible.

Features you take for granted in WordPress — advanced custom post types, flexible page builders, sophisticated SEO tools, membership systems, multi-language support, custom taxonomies — either don't exist in Shopify or require expensive apps to approximate.

If your business relies heavily on content marketing, SEO, or complex information architecture, moving away from WordPress means giving up tools that would be extremely expensive to replicate on any other platform.

The headless alternative: fix the speed, keep everything else

Here's the part most migration guides skip entirely. The number one reason WooCommerce store owners consider Shopify is performance — slow page loads, poor Core Web Vitals, and sluggish checkout experiences. These are legitimate problems. But they're problems with the frontend, not with WooCommerce itself.

Headless WooCommerce separates the frontend (what customers see) from the backend (where products, orders, and payments are managed). You keep WooCommerce running your commerce operations — the part it does well — and replace the slow PHP frontend with a modern JavaScript application built in Next.js.

The result is a store that loads as fast as (or faster than) Shopify, with none of the migration pain:

For a detailed walkthrough of how to improve WooCommerce performance without going headless, start with our WooCommerce speed optimisation guide. If you've already tried traditional optimisation and hit the ceiling, headless is the next step.

Headless WooCommerce vs Shopify migration: a direct comparison

If your primary goal is a faster store with a modern frontend, you have two paths. Here's how they compare:

For a head-to-head performance comparison between the two platforms, see our WooCommerce vs Shopify speed comparison. And for a broader look at how Shopify's own headless approach stacks up against headless WooCommerce, read our Shopify headless vs WooCommerce guide.

When Shopify genuinely makes sense

We said we'd be fair, so here it is. There are scenarios where Shopify is the right choice:

You're starting from scratch. If you don't have an existing WooCommerce store, there's no migration pain. Shopify's onboarding experience is excellent for new merchants who want to get selling quickly without technical involvement.

You need Shopify-specific features. Shop Pay, Shopify POS, Shopify Markets, and Shopify Capital are genuinely useful features with no direct WooCommerce equivalent. If these are critical to your operations, Shopify is the logical home.

You genuinely don't want to manage hosting. If the idea of server management, WordPress updates, and security patches fills you with dread — and you're willing to pay a premium for someone else to handle it — Shopify's managed approach has real value.

But if you're migrating primarily because your WooCommerce store is slow, that's a solvable problem. You don't need to burn down the house to fix a draughty window.

The bottom line

WooCommerce to Shopify migration problems are not theoretical — they're experienced by thousands of merchants every year. Data loss, SEO regression, cost escalation, and vendor lock-in are real risks that deserve honest evaluation before you commit.

If your WooCommerce store's performance is the primary pain point, you have a better option. Headless WooCommerce gives you modern, blazing-fast storefronts built in Next.js — the same technology that powers the fastest sites on the web — without losing a single product, review, customer record, or search ranking.

Shopify is a good platform. But migrating to it from WooCommerce is a high-risk, high-cost decision that most merchants don't need to make. Fix the frontend. Keep everything else.

Ready to explore headless WooCommerce? Start with our complete guide to headless WooCommerce to understand the architecture, or jump straight to the cost breakdown to see how it compares to Shopify financially.