Migrate From WordPress to Shopify: A Planning Guide

Migrate from WordPress to Shopify and the honest first finding is not a percentage — it is that no single automated path moves every entity a WooCommerce store actually has. Shopify’s own Store Importer, paid migration apps such as LitExtension, and bulk-data tools such as Matrixify each cover a different slice of a store’s products, customers, orders, reviews, discounts, redirects and B2B accounts, and each says so plainly in its own documentation. The number worth benchmarking is not a single migration score. It is knowing, before cutover, exactly which slice of that list falls to you.

What Actually Moves When You Migrate From WordPress to Shopify?

A migration from WordPress to Shopify moves products, customer records and, on some paths, order history without much manual work; none of Shopify’s own Store Importer, LitExtension or Matrixify moves product reviews, discount codes or 301 redirects without a separate manual or paid step.

Read the row, not the column: the entity that is blank across all three tools is the one that becomes a manual project, whichever path you choose.

Every path shares the same three blind spots — reviews, discount codes and redirects. Shopify’s own migration guide is explicit that reviews cannot be exported from WooCommerce and must be rebuilt through an app such as Judge.me, Loox or Yotpo. Neither LitExtension’s nor Matrixify’s own documentation lists reviews among the entities it moves. A catalogue with meaningful review volume — the kind that shows star ratings on category pages — loses that social proof on day one of the new store unless someone has already scoped the rebuild. Shopify’s guide adds a second, unrelated ceiling worth knowing before cutover: products with more than three options do not have their options imported at all, a limit that predates and has nothing to do with variant count.

LitExtension’s own pricing page also offers a free demo migration before any payment is taken — a bounded run against a subset of the catalogue that lands in a development store rather than the live one. That demo is worth treating as a coverage check rather than a formality: run it, then check reviews, discount codes, redirects and B2B records — the entities every path leaves for manual work — against what actually landed. A demo that reproduces the same gaps is telling you the paid run will too, and a demo that surfaces a gap the vendor’s own documentation did not mention is telling you something a documentation comparison alone cannot.

How Should You Read the Migration-Coverage Numbers?

Migration-tool coverage is read as a checklist, not a scoreboard. A tool that migrates five of eight entity types has not migrated “most of the store” — it has left three entity types for someone to handle by hand, and which three matters more than how many.

Build the same table against your own catalogue before choosing a path. List every entity your WooCommerce store actually carries, including anything a plugin adds — subscription data, wholesale pricing, a custom post type — and check it against what the tool’s own documentation, not a reseller’s summary, claims to move. Checking the vendor’s own page, every time, catches a gap that a comparison site’s paraphrase smooths over.

None of Shopify’s Store Importer, LitExtension or Matrixify publishes a single completion percentage, and no independent third party audits one. That is why the honest read of “coverage” is entity by entity rather than a headline benchmark figure: any generic tool-to-tool comparison tells you what a vendor built the tool to move on a typical store. It does not tell you whether your store is typical.

What Is the Real Cutover Plan for a Store Shipping Orders Every Day?

A store that ships orders every day of the week needs a cutover plan sized to its own daily order volume, not the small-store checklist most migration guides publish, which assumes a brand that can take the site offline overnight and lose nothing.

LitExtension’s own product page states that a WooCommerce store “can stay active during the migration” with “no disruptions, no lost sales, no customer drop-offs” (vendor-reported). That claim is true of the tool’s own copy step, which reads from the live database without locking it. It is not a claim about the cutover itself: the moment DNS is repointed and the new Shopify store goes live, orders placed against the old store’s inventory count during that window are the ones that get missed.

Size that window against your own order rate rather than trusting a vendor’s zero-disruption framing. As an illustrative example, not a measured figure: a specimen store processing 3,000 orders a month averages 100 orders a day, or a little over 4 orders an hour spread across a 24-hour store. A 3-hour freeze on the old store’s inventory counts at cutover — roughly what DNS propagation and a final data sync take — therefore risks a little over 12 orders being placed against stock levels that are no longer current, not the zero that “no disruptions” implies. A store doing ten times that volume carries roughly ten times that exposure in the same window.

The fix is not a shorter freeze, which is mostly outside your control once DNS and app-review queues are involved. It is a reconciliation job that runs through the freeze window and immediately after cutover, comparing the last order IDs and inventory counts on the old platform against what landed in Shopify, and flagging anything that does not match instead of waiting for a customer to report a stockout. That scheduled comparison is ops automation work, not a migration-tool feature — none of Shopify’s Store Importer, LitExtension or Matrixify claims to reconcile post-cutover, because reconciliation is by definition a check a migration tool cannot run on itself.

A parallel run buys the same protection a shorter freeze cannot. Keep the WordPress store’s checkout live and correct through a defined trial window on the new Shopify store — even a single day of real orders flowing through the new platform while the old one still accepts a fallback order — before pointing every customer at the new domain and decommissioning the old one. Any order type that behaves differently from a standard storefront checkout is the one to test first in that window, not last: a wholesale order placed through a custom quoting flow, a subscription reorder, or an order carrying a manually applied discount code, because each depends on an entity — a custom quoting flow, a subscription plan, a discount code — that no automated migration path fully moves, and a parallel run is what catches a routing or formatting error against a handful of real orders instead of every order placed after the old checkout is switched off.

How Do You Migrate a Wholesale or B2B Catalogue Without Breaking a Custom WooCommerce Integration?

A wholesale or B2B catalogue needs two separate migration plans, not one — the price lists and company accounts that Shopify’s own B2B feature set can hold, and the custom WooCommerce integration that almost never has a direct Shopify equivalent.

Shopify’s own B2B feature set — company accounts, tiered price lists, quantity rules and net payment terms — shipped on Basic, Grow and Advanced plans, not only Plus, as of 2 April 2026 (Shopify’s own changelog). Non-Plus plans hold up to three active B2B catalogues; unlimited catalogues, direct catalogue-to-company assignment, and partial payments or deposits remain Plus-only. Shopify B2B covers the feature itself in more detail — the migration question here is narrower: whether the existing wholesale data actually maps onto it.

None of Shopify’s Store Importer, LitExtension or Matrixify migrates B2B data as a default path. Matrixify is the one built for it, with dedicated Companies, company-location and metafield export and import sheets (vendor-reported), which makes it the practical route for moving negotiated price lists and company records rather than rebuilding them by hand.

The custom integration is the harder half, and it is the half no migration tool claims to touch. A WooCommerce store selling wholesale commonly runs a plugin wired directly into its own database or REST API — a quoting tool, a net-terms calculator, a distributor portal — built against WordPress’s own plugin architecture, which has no Shopify equivalent to import into. That code does not migrate; it gets rebuilt, either as a Shopify app, a metafield-driven storefront customisation, or an external service called over Shopify’s own API. Scoping that rebuild before cutover, not after, is what a wholesale migration actually needs beyond the standard checklist — the entities in the coverage table can move in an afternoon; a custom quoting integration is its own project with its own timeline.

Verification here is a company-by-company check, not a spot check on a handful of orders. Once the migrated or rebuilt company accounts, price lists and quantity rules are in Shopify, pull a sample of your highest-volume wholesale accounts specifically and place a real test order against each one’s assigned catalogue — checking that the price shown matches the negotiated rate on file, not the standard storefront price — before any wholesale buyer sees the new store. A price list that migrated correctly for a company with one tier and broke silently for a company with a tiered, quantity-based rate is the failure mode this catches, and it is a gap no entity-coverage comparison catches, because Matrixify’s own documentation confirms the record moved; it says nothing about whether the pricing logic attached to it still resolves the way it did in WooCommerce.

How Much SEO Risk Does This Migration Actually Carry at Scale?

A WordPress-to-Shopify migration carries real SEO risk in two specific places — backlink equity and indexed page count — and Google’s own guidance quantifies neither as zero.

Google’s site-move documentation states plainly that “301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank,” so backlink equity survives a correctly redirected migration rather than being lost by the platform switch itself. The risk is not the redirect; it is the coverage. Google also states that ranking fluctuations are expected “while Google recrawls and reindexes your site,” that a medium-sized site typically takes “a few weeks or more” to fully reprocess, and that redirects should stay in place “generally at least 1 year” for the signal to transfer completely.

At scale, the practical exposure is the URL count a WordPress site has accumulated that a Shopify migration has no reason to recreate — old blog category pages, tag archives, author pages and paginated listings that WordPress generates by default and that a Shopify theme’s URL structure does not. Google’s own Index Coverage report shows this directly: indexed-URL counts drop on the old domain and rise on the new one as the switch completes, and a site that mapped every meaningful page to a 301 redirect before cutover shows a narrower, shorter dip than one that redirected only the homepage and top-level product pages and let the rest 404.

The size of that dip for a specific site is — metric to confirm. No published benchmark states an expected percentage drop by site size, because it depends on how many of the old URLs were actually earning organic traffic or external links before the switch. Pull the old site’s top 200 landing pages by organic sessions and by referring domains before cutover, and redirect every one of them individually rather than relying on a pattern-matching bulk redirect rule to catch them.

Quantifying backlink equity at scale means treating “backlinks” as two different lists, not one number. Search Console’s own Links report exports the pages on the old domain with external links pointing at them, ranked by referring domain count — that list is the one to redirect first and verify individually, because a link pointing at a URL that now 404s is a link Google can no longer credit to the new domain, regardless of how the rest of the site redirected. Indexed page count is the second list: export every indexed URL from the old property’s Index Coverage report before cutover, and after the switch, check that same list against the new domain’s own coverage report on a fixed schedule — weekly for the first month is enough to catch a redirect rule that silently stopped matching a URL pattern partway through, rather than discovering the gap when a page that used to rank stops showing up in either report.

Which Migration Path Fits a Store at This Size?

A store above the published $3M floor, with a catalogue that includes reviews, wholesale pricing or a custom integration, needs more than an entity-by-entity comparison to decide — it needs to weigh the manual-rebuild cost against each path’s price.

LitExtension’s automated migration starts at $59 and scales with the number of entities moved (vendor-reported). Matrixify is priced per app plan rather than per migration and suits an ongoing bulk-data workflow better than a one-time cutover. Shopify’s own Store Importer is free but covers the smallest slice of the table, leaving customers, order history, reviews, discounts and redirects to a separate tool or a manual rebuild. None of the three prices in a reconciliation job, a custom integration rebuild, or redirect mapping — those sit outside every migration tool’s own scope, on every path.

The choice is less about which tool claims the most entities and more about which entities your own catalogue actually has that the free path leaves out. A catalogue with no reviews, no wholesale accounts and a redirect map under a few hundred URLs is a reasonable fit for the free Store Importer plus a manual CSV pass. A catalogue carrying reviews, wholesale accounts or a redirect map running to hundreds of URLs is not — the manual-rebuild hours those gaps create routinely exceed what a $59 starting price implies, and pricing the migration against an entity-by-entity comparison before choosing a tool is what keeps that gap from showing up as a surprise on the first invoice.

None of this is a migration-tool problem once the entities are mapped — it is a visibility problem, and not only the traditional kind. The pages a WordPress site loses at cutover are not just ranking signals for Google; they are pages an AI answer engine has indexed, cited or might cite next, and a redirect map that covers products but drops blog archives, category pages and old landing pages removes exactly the long-tail content that citations tend to come from. Rebuilding that visibility on the new domain — deciding which old pages earn a permanent redirect, which get rebuilt fresh on Shopify, and which are safe to let go — is ai search visibility work, not a one-time redirect spreadsheet, because AI answer engines recrawl and recite on their own schedule, not Google’s.