Shopify Migrations

Moving to Shopify is the easy part; moving to Shopify without losing your customers, your order history, or your Google rankings is the part that takes a plan. A migration isn’t an export and a re-import — it’s a rebuild of how your store is structured, with every product, customer, and URL accounted for before anything goes live.

We migrate stores to Shopify and Shopify Plus from wherever they are now. Most often that’s WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, or a smaller proprietary or custom-built platform — the kind of setup that got the business this far but has started to cost more in workarounds than it returns. We’ve moved stores off all of them, and the approach doesn’t change with the starting point: understand what the current store actually does, then rebuild it on Shopify so it does the same things, better.

What comes across

Some things are non-negotiable, and we handle them on every migration: your products, your customers, your URLs and redirects, and a theme rebuilt to match — and usually improve on — your current design. Products and customers move with their data intact: variants, tags, metafields, and the relationships between them, not a flattened spreadsheet dump. The theme is rebuilt natively in Shopify rather than force-fitted, so you’re not carrying a decade of another platform’s quirks into a new store.

Order history and apps — the specific features your store relies on — come across whenever the source platform allows it. Some platforms expose order data cleanly and some don’t; where the history can be migrated, we bring it, so refunds, repeat-customer context, and reporting continuity survive the move. Where a feature was handled by an app or custom code, we rebuild it with Shopify’s native tools or the right app, rather than recreating the technical debt that came with it.

Keeping your SEO

The single most expensive mistake in a migration is losing the search rankings you spent years earning. When URLs change and nothing tells Google where they went, traffic falls off a cliff — and it’s entirely avoidable. Every migration we run includes a full redirect map from the old URL structure to the new one, canonical and index handling checked before launch, and the metadata and structure carried forward so the pages Google already trusts keep their equity. Preserving organic traffic through a replatform is its own discipline, and it’s built into the migration rather than bolted on afterward.

Migrating to Shopify Plus

Not every migration is a Plus migration, but two situations almost always are.

The first is the move off an enterprise platform — most commonly Magento (Adobe Commerce). If your team is spending more on hosting, security patching, and developer maintenance than on actually growing the store, Shopify Plus is the off-ramp: a hosted, flat-fee platform that removes the infrastructure burden without giving up the control an enterprise store needs. The migration is bigger, but so is the relief on the other side.

The second is outgrowing standard Shopify. Plenty of stores start on Shopify, do well, and then hit the ceiling of the plan — they need custom checkout logic, more staff accounts, higher API limits, native B2B, or expansion stores to run multiple regions. That’s the most straightforward migration there is, because you’re already on the platform; it’s an upgrade to Plus that unlocks the capabilities the business has grown into. Chief among them is checkout: Plus opens up deep checkout customization through Shopify Functions and checkout extensions, which is where a lot of brands find the flexibility they’d been missing.

Whichever situation you’re in, the point of a Shopify Plus migration is the same — the store should do more after the move than it could before, without the operational weight it used to carry.

How the work runs

A migration typically takes eight to twelve weeks, depending on catalog size, how much custom functionality has to be rebuilt, and how clean the source data is. It runs in clear stages: an audit of the current store and its data, an architecture and redirect plan you sign off on, the build and data migration on a staging store, thorough testing, and a coordinated launch with the redirects live from the first minute. Nothing goes live on guesswork — you see the new store working before it becomes the real one.

You’ll understand the store you’re left with, too. Every migration ends the way every Built Best engagement does: with a store whose structure you can actually follow, and the reasoning behind the decisions that shaped it — so the next person to touch it isn’t starting from zero.

If you’re weighing a move to Shopify or Shopify Plus, the first step is a look at what you have now and what it would take to bring it across. That’s where every migration starts.