WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: Cost, Timeline, and Keeping Your Rankings

A WooCommerce to Shopify migration takes most brands two to six weeks and costs between £3,000 and £15,000, depending on catalogue size and custom functionality. The part that decides whether it succeeds is not the product import. It is the redirect map. Done properly, search traffic dips five to ten percent and recovers within weeks. Done badly, it drops by half for a year.

Why brands leave WooCommerce

WooCommerce is still huge, but its share of the top one million ecommerce sites has been sliding, from roughly 16 percent in 2024 to around 13 percent in 2025 (BuiltWith data, reported by Barn2). Shopify has gone the other way. Shopify processed $378 billion in GMV across 2025, up 29.5 percent year on year (Digital Commerce 360, February 2026).

The reasons brands give me are always the same three. Plugin and hosting maintenance has become a part-time job. The checkout leaks conversions and nobody can fully explain why. And every Black Friday is a gamble on whether the server holds. Shopify takes those three problems off the table. You trade control you were not really using for reliability you actually need.

What you do not want to trade away is the search ranking you spent years earning. That is the whole game in a migration.

What the migration actually involves

A real WooCommerce to Shopify migration is five jobs, not one.

The data. Products, variants, images, collections, customers, and order history move across. Tools automate most of it and get you to about 90 percent. The last 10 percent, the custom fields, the bundles, the subscription data, is manual, and it is where botched migrations happen.

The redirect map. Every old WooCommerce URL needs a 301 redirect to its new Shopify equivalent. One to one. No chains, no pointing everything at the homepage. This is the single most important file in the project and the one cheap migrations skip.

The design. Most brands do not want a like-for-like rebuild. They want the migration to also fix the dated design and the slow product pages. That is the right instinct, and it adds scope.

The apps and integrations. Email, reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, and shipping logic all need a tested Shopify equivalent, and the Klaviyo flows rebuilt. Quiet, unglamorous work that takes longer than people expect.

The cutover. The DNS switch, the final data sync, the redirect deployment, and the post-launch crawl to catch anything missed. The riskiest hour of the project, which is why it should be the most planned.

The redirect map is the whole ballgame

Here is the number that matters. Shopify's own replatforming guidance and practitioner data agree: a clean migration with a complete one-to-one redirect map sees search traffic dip five to ten percent and recover within weeks to a couple of months. A migration where the redirect map is incomplete or lazy sees drops of thirty to fifty percent that take the better part of a year to recover, if they recover at all.

That gap is not Shopify versus WooCommerce. It is careful versus careless. The brands that lose half their traffic did not lose it by moving to Shopify. They lost it because someone exported the products, pointed the domain, and called it done.

The process that protects you is disciplined, not complicated. Pull every indexed URL from Google Search Console and a full crawl of the existing site. Map each one to its Shopify destination. Deploy the redirects with the cutover, not after it. Re-crawl on launch day. Watch Search Console for the next month and fix anything that returns a 404. That is the work, and it is the difference between a migration that compounds and one that sets you back a year.

This is why I run the migration end to end rather than handing you a plugin. You give me read access to your existing site. I build the redirect map, run the pre-migration crawl, migrate the data, rebuild the Klaviyo flows, and deploy the redirects with the launch. You are not project-managing a checklist you have never run before.

What it costs and how long it takes

For a straightforward catalogue under a few hundred products with standard functionality, a migration plus a clean design refresh runs roughly £3,000 to £8,000 and takes two to four weeks.

For a larger catalogue, custom WooCommerce functionality that needs rebuilding, or a full bespoke redesign on top, you are looking at £8,000 and up over four to six weeks. That is the territory of the Standard Build, where the migration is folded into a ground-up custom site rather than bolted onto a theme.

The cheap end of the market, the £500 "we will move you to Shopify" offer, is where the redirect map gets skipped. You save a few thousand pounds on the build and lose more than that in traffic over the following year. I have rebuilt enough of those to know the maths never works in the brand's favour.

Should you redesign at the same time?

Usually, yes. A migration already touches every page, every URL, and every template, so folding a design refresh into the same project is far cheaper than doing it separately six months later. The expensive part, rebuilding every page, is happening either way.

The exception is if your current WooCommerce design genuinely converts well and you are migrating purely for stability. Then a faithful rebuild is the cheaper, lower-risk move. I will tell you which situation you are in on the first call rather than push you toward a redesign you do not need.

If you are weighing the move, book a free teardown and I will look at your current WooCommerce site, flag the migration risks specific to your setup, and give you an honest scope before you commit to anything.