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A Shopify migration for a catalog of a few hundred to a few thousand products typically takes 8 to 14 weeks, and the work that protects revenue is a complete 301 redirect map built before anything else. Customer passwords never migrate, Shopify sets your URL structure for you, and the old platform's bad data follows you unless it is cleaned first.
Updated · 4 min read
WooCommerce stores leave because hosting, security and every plugin update are their problem, and the plugin count has quietly reached thirty. Magento stores leave because Magento 1 support ended on June 30, 2020 and the Adobe Commerce successor is priced for enterprises, which stranded a lot of mid-sized catalogs. Lightspeed eCom stores, common in Quebec and Ontario retail because of its point-of-sale roots in Montreal, leave when the theme and app limits start showing as the online side grows.
What Shopify gives in return is hosting, checkout, payments and security handled, and an app ecosystem for almost everything else. What it takes is control: URL structure is fixed, checkout customization is limited below Plus, and the theme layer has rules. Most stores find that a good trade. The ones that do not are usually better served by a headless build, which is a different decision.
Products move, with variants, images and metafields, and this is where the catalog's problems come with them. Collections and categories move, usually with some restructuring because Shopify's collection model differs from category trees. Customer profiles, addresses and tags move; passwords do not, on any platform, so every customer resets on their first login and the launch email has to say so.
Order history moves as reference data for customer service, not as live orders, and many stores bring across one or two years and archive the rest. Reviews move through the review app's own import. Discount codes get recreated. Gift card balances and active subscriptions need their own plan and their own test, because they are money.
Shopify puts every product under /products/, every collection under /collections/, and every page and post under /pages/ and /blogs/. Your old URLs will not survive, so every one of them that has traffic or a backlink needs a 301 redirect to its new address, and that map has to exist before the theme is built, not after launch.
The method: crawl the old site, pull the top URLs from analytics and Search Console, map each to its destination, import the map into Shopify's redirects, and test it on the staging store before cutover. Keep titles, descriptions, product data markup and the XML sitemap at parity with the old site, submit the new sitemap on launch day, and leave the redirects in place for at least a year. Google's own guidance on site moves with URL changes describes the same sequence.
Migration copies problems with perfect fidelity. Duplicate SKUs, variants that should be separate products, missing weights that break shipping rates, images in the wrong size, descriptions full of leftover HTML from two platforms ago: all of it arrives intact unless someone cleans it first.
Treat the cleanup as its own line item with its own owner. An export of the current catalog tells you more about the effort than any call does, and the cleanest migrations are the ones where the old store was tidied up a month before anyone touched Shopify.
Eight to fourteen weeks for most stores: discovery and the redirect map in the first two, theme build and app setup through week eight, migration dry runs from week six, and cutover on a quiet day with the old catalog frozen so nothing changes between the last export and launch.
The week after is a crawl comparison against the old site, a daily check of Search Console for errors and 404s, and patience. Rankings usually dip for a few weeks and recover once the redirects and parity are confirmed. A lasting loss comes from redirects that were skipped, content that was dropped, or a new site that is slower than the old one. We run these as fixed-scope builds, and the ecommerce management side can then run the store day to day if that is wanted.
A brief dip is normal. A lasting loss comes from missing redirects, dropped content or slower pages, all of which are avoidable. With a full redirect map and content parity, rankings usually recover within weeks to a couple of months.
Not exactly. Shopify's paths for products, collections, pages and blog posts are fixed. The redirect map takes care of it. A headless build would let you keep the old URLs, but that is a bigger decision than a migration.
Bring across what customer service needs to look up, which is usually the last one or two years. It is reference data, not live, so it does not need to be perfect, and the rest can live in an export.
The primary documents the numbers in this guide come from.
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Nockta builds ecommerce, custom software, and Amazon operations for businesses across Ontario and Quebec. See where we work or the full service list.