Shopify to WooCommerce Migration Checklist, With a 301 Redirect Map Template

The short answer is that a Shopify to WooCommerce migration succeeds when three things are in place before launch day: a complete export of products, customers, and orders; a 301 redirect map covering every URL earning traffic or links; and a tested WooCommerce store where checkout, payments, and shipping work as before. Miss any one of those and the move costs you rankings, sales, or both.

This checklist walks through the move in order, from the audit to the first 30 days after launch, with a 301 redirect map template you can copy into a spreadsheet.

Why stores make the move

Shopify is a hosted platform: you rent the store, hosting, and checkout together under one monthly subscription. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin, so you own the store, hosting, and data, and pay for hosting separately instead of a platform subscription.

Stores usually move for control, cost, or content. On WooCommerce you can change the checkout, the URL structure, and the code without permission. A store with a large catalog or thin margins can find hosting plus a few plugins costs less over a year than a subscription with transaction fees. And a store that already runs a WordPress blog gets its shop and its content in one place. None of that matters if the move breaks the store: the migration is worth doing only when the new store keeps the old store's traffic, rankings, and sales from day one.

Before you touch anything: the pre-migration audit

A migration that starts with an export starts too late. Before any data moves, record what the store actually is: you cannot verify a migration without a baseline.

• Export everything from Shopify: products, customers, orders, discount codes, blog posts, pages, and navigation menus. Store the exports where the migration team can reach them.
• Crawl the live store and record every URL, status code, title, meta description, and H1. Products sit under /products/ and collections under /collections/, so the crawl gives you the full old URL list.
• From analytics, export the top 200 landing pages by sessions and revenue over the last 90 days, and pull the top queries and pages from Search Console. These are the pages the redirect map must get right, one by one.
• Export the backlink data: every referring domain and the URL it links to.
• Audit the catalog: export every product with title, description, price, stock status, SKU, barcode, brand, category, image URLs, and variants. Flag duplicates, missing images, missing prices, and discontinued products that still get traffic.
• List every Shopify app that does real work: reviews, site search, subscriptions, email, upsells, live chat, and shipping labels, and note each one's WordPress replacement, because apps do not migrate.
• Record the payment and shipping setup: gateways, tax settings, shipping zones, rates, and free shipping rules.
• Note the theme customizations: anything custom built on the Shopify theme, from a size guide to a custom product page layout, must be rebuilt on WooCommerce.

What moves cleanly and what needs manual work

Not everything in a Shopify store travels by export and import. The table shows where the work is.

The two rows that surprise most owners are customers and URLs: customers must reset passwords, so plan a clear email about it, and nearly every URL changes.

The 301 redirect map template

The redirect map says, for every old Shopify URL, where it goes now on WooCommerce. Build it before launch, test it on staging, and keep it live for at least a year. Two rules apply: redirect to the closest matching live page, never the homepage, and use one 301 per URL, never a chain.

Copy this template into a spreadsheet, one row per old URL.

How to fill it in:

1. 1. Start with the top 200 pages and every URL with a backlink, mapped one by one, by hand. They earn the traffic, so they earn the attention.
2. 2. Write pattern rules for the rest: if every product moved from /products/ to /product/, one rule covers the bulk of the catalog. Test each rule first, because one wrong rule breaks hundreds of pages.
3. 3. List the exceptions separately: discontinued products, merged products, and renamed categories, each with its own row and destination.
4. 4. Check the map on staging: request every old URL and confirm a single 301.

For the general move sequence, see The Website Migration Checklist: Every Step Before, During, and After the Move.

The migration sequence, step by step

Work in this order, verifying each step before the next starts, so problems surface on staging.

1. 1. Set up WordPress hosting and install WooCommerce. Pick a theme that supports the product layout, filters, and checkout flow, and confirm the hosting can handle the catalog and traffic peaks.
2. 2. Import products, customers, and content on staging: the full catalog, not a sample, and check prices, stock, images, and variants arrived intact.
3. 3. Rebuild the design, navigation, and checkout, matching the old layout where it matters, plus the custom pieces from the audit.
4. 4. Set up payments, taxes, and shipping with the same gateways, tax rules, zones, and rates, then test each payment method.
5. 5. Set up the apps' replacements: install the WordPress plugins that replace the Shopify apps, and confirm reviews, search, email, and subscriptions work.
6. 6. Apply the redirect map and test it: crawl staging against the old URL list and confirm every old URL returns one 301 to a live page.
7. 7. Check content parity: titles, meta descriptions, H1s, descriptions, alt text, reviews, and structured data should match the old pages at launch. Improve them later, once rankings settle.
8. 8. Launch in a low traffic window, with the redirect map live at the same moment as the new store. Point the DNS, then test the live checkout with a real order. Keep the Shopify store readable for 30 days, so anything missed can be recovered.

Launch day and the first 30 days

Rankings do not settle on launch day. The first month confirms the migration worked, while small problems are still cheap.

• Crawl the new site weekly against the old baseline: every old URL should 301 to a live page, and every new product page should return 200.
• Check Search Console daily for two weeks: crawl errors, indexed pages, and impression drops on the top pages.
• Compare organic sessions and revenue week by week against the same period before the move.
• Test the checkout end to end on the live store: a real order, a real payment, a real confirmation email, and the order in the admin.
• Verify the Merchant Center feed if the store runs Shopping ads: identifiers, prices, and availability must match the new landing pages, and disapproved items must be fixed, not ignored. Our Product Catalog Migration Checklist covers the catalog audit behind a clean feed.
• Spot check the top 100 products by hand: title, description, images, price, reviews, structured data, and breadcrumbs.
• Send the password reset email to customers, and watch support tickets for login problems.
• Keep the redirect map live for at least a year.

If organic traffic is down after 30 days, do not redesign the site or rewrite the content. Check the redirect map, the index coverage, and the feed first.

How AamirTechs approaches a Shopify to WooCommerce migration

AamirTechs has operated since 2018, providing WooCommerce store setup, website migration, catalog cleanup and migration, and product upload and listings. Our public ratings reflect that work: 4.9 on Fiverr from 121 reviews and 5.0 on Upwork from 25 ratings.

The approach follows the sequence in this post: audit and baseline, staged import with content parity checked, redirect map tested on staging, then 30 days of monitoring.

For a concrete benchmark, published market prices for a professional Shopify to WooCommerce migration start at about $2,000 for a basic store move and about $4,000 for an advanced migration with a large catalog and complex requirements, with full service agency projects typically starting at $5,000 and mid size stores with custom features and full SEO redirect mapping running about $5,000 to $15,000. Straightforward migrations are advertised from $499, and automated tools cost about $70 to $500, but neither covers theme setup, app replacement, or the redirect work this checklist is built around. Those figures are market benchmarks for planning, not an AamirTechs quote. Your price depends on catalog size, the apps that need replacing, integrations, and redirect scope, which is what the audit establishes.

For the services behind this approach, start with our WooCommerce store setup and website migration services.

The bottom line

A Shopify to WooCommerce migration is a URL preservation project first and a platform move second. Export everything, map every URL that earns traffic or links, rebuild the pieces that do not migrate, and test the whole store on staging. Do that, and the new store keeps its rankings, traffic, and sales.

Related: The Website Migration Checklist: Every Step Before, During, and After the Move · The Product Catalog Migration Checklist · Website migration service