The first migration I ever ran, I missed one detail. A subset of old WordPress URLs didn’t get 301-redirected to their new Shopify pages. Inside ten days, organic traffic dropped by a third. It took two weeks to fully recover. I’ve never made that exact mistake again — and in the years since, I’ve watched almost every agency in this city make it on their first migration. That’s the real pattern: the platform is excellent, the migration is where deals go to die, and the parts that kill you are the parts you can’t see until they break.

If you’re thinking about moving to Shopify in 2026, the good news is that the playbook is now well understood. The bad news is that most people doing migrations skip half of it to save time and then quietly cost their client six figures in lost SEO equity, broken customer accounts, or an inventory sync that was wrong on launch day. This is the version of the guide I actually follow on real projects. No marketing checklist. The real order of operations, the real landmines, and the places where cheap shortcuts turn into expensive rebuilds.

Step Zero: Audit Before You Touch Anything

The biggest reason migrations fail isn’t technical. It’s that people start moving things before they understand what they have. Someone opens a Shopify trial, picks a theme, imports a product CSV, and three weeks later realizes nobody documented the 47 custom URL patterns the old site used, the subscription logic that lived inside a plugin, or the tax exemption flags on 120 wholesale accounts.

Step zero is the unsexy step: a full inventory of what you’re actually moving. Every product. Every collection. Every customer record. Every URL. Every redirect already in place. Every payment integration. Every shipping rule. Every tax setting. Every email template. Every third-party tool hanging off the current stack. Write it down in one place. If you skip this, everything after is improvised — and improvising during a migration is how you lose data you didn’t know you had.

The audit also tells you what to throw away. Most stores I migrate are carrying years of dead products, broken collections, and blog posts nobody’s read since 2019. A migration is the cleanest moment you’ll ever get to cut deadweight. Don’t move garbage to a new platform. Move only what matters.

Step 1: Lock Down Your URL Strategy Before You Build Anything

This is the step everyone skips and everyone regrets. Before you create a single Shopify page, you need a 1-to-1 redirect map between your old URLs and your new ones. Every product page. Every category page. Every blog post. Every static page. Every weird one-off URL somebody built a campaign around four years ago that still has inbound links.

If your old WordPress store had /shop/blue-widget and your new Shopify store has /products/blue-widget, that needs a 301 redirect live on day one. Google has spent years indexing your old URLs. Those URLs have backlinks, rankings, and traffic. If they 404 after the migration, you lose all of it — and you don’t get it back for free. Shopify makes the redirects trivial to manage once you know what you want. The hard part is the spreadsheet that tells you what every old URL was and where it’s going now. Spend the afternoon on it. The cost of skipping this step is measured in months of lost organic traffic.

This is the single biggest way the hidden costs of cheap website work show up in a migration. Cheap builders don’t build the redirect map. The client doesn’t know it existed until the traffic crater shows up in Search Console six weeks later.

Step 2: Migrate Product Data Without Losing Your Variants

This is the step that looks easy and isn’t. Product migration isn’t “export a CSV, import a CSV.” Under the surface you have product variants, option types, image galleries, SKU structures, inventory counts across locations, metafields, custom attributes, and the relationship between products and collections. Any one of those breaking silently can cost you weeks.

The right approach: export from your current platform into a structured format, clean the data in a spreadsheet, map every field to its Shopify equivalent, and import in batches. Test 10 products first. Verify variants. Verify images. Verify inventory. Verify collection assignments. Then run the full import. Anyone who dumps 5,000 SKUs into a fresh Shopify store on the first pass has never had to clean up the result.

A specific landmine worth naming: image URLs. If your product images are hosted on your old site and that site goes offline before Shopify finishes pulling them in, you end up with broken image references on half your catalog. Always upload images directly to Shopify — or to a CDN you control — before you flip DNS.

Step 3: Customer Accounts and the Password Problem

Customer migration is where loyalty programs come to die. You can move customer profiles, addresses, order history, tags, and lifetime value into Shopify. You cannot move passwords. Passwords on your old platform are hashed, Shopify’s hashing is different, and on launch day every existing customer needs to reset their password to log in.

Fine if you tell them. A disaster if you don’t.

The move: send every existing customer an email the day of launch explaining that the store has moved, their account is still there, their order history is still there, and they need to set a new password the next time they log in. Include the direct reset link. Keep it friendly, not technical. Customers don’t care about platform migrations. They care whether their stuff still works.

Step 4: Payments, Taxes, Shipping — The Stuff That Touches Money

Slow down here. Payment gateway setup, sales tax configuration, currency settings, shipping rules. None of it is technically hard. All of it is unforgiving when it’s wrong.

Shopify Payments is the easiest path if it’s available in your country. Native integration, fast settlement, no 0.5–2 percent third-party fee. If you have a real reason to use Stripe or PayPal directly, fine, but understand the cost.

Tax settings need to be tested with real addresses in real regions. Don’t trust the defaults. Run a test order from Quebec, Ontario, California, New York. Verify the calculations match what your accountant expects. If you sell cross-border, double-check duties and import settings because that’s where small errors turn into customer service nightmares three weeks after launch.

Shipping rules deserve their own afternoon. Weight-based, price-based, location-based, free shipping thresholds, real-time carrier rates. Map every existing rule into the new system and place test orders to confirm each one fires correctly. The difference between “works in demo” and “works for all 14 rate scenarios” is always three bugs you didn’t expect.

Step 5: Theme, Apps, and Resisting the Urge to Rebuild Everything

The temptation during a migration is to rebuild the experience from scratch. Don’t. Pick a Shopify theme that gets you 80 percent of where you want to be and customize from there. Dawn, Sense, or one of the premium themes will cover almost every small-to-mid business look without a full custom build. Save the custom engineering for things that actually drive conversions — not things that look cool in a design review.

Apps are their own discipline. Every app you install has a cost, a performance impact, and a maintenance burden. Start with the bare minimum. Add apps only when you can name the specific problem they solve and the revenue they’re protecting. The store with 47 apps installed is almost always the store losing money on monthly fees for tools nobody remembers signing up for.

Step 6: Test Like Your Revenue Depends On It

Before you touch DNS, run a complete test of every customer-facing flow. Browse to a product. Add to cart. Apply a discount code. Check out as a guest. Check out as a logged-in customer. Use a credit card. Use a digital wallet. Trigger an abandoned-cart email. Verify the order confirmation. Verify the shipping confirmation. Try a return. Try a password reset. Try logging into an account on mobile Safari specifically, because mobile Safari is where launches die.

Anything that breaks during this test gets fixed before launch. The cost of finding a checkout bug at 11pm the night before launch is annoying. The cost of finding it at 9am the morning after is real money walking out the door every minute.

Step 7: Launch, Then Watch Like a Hawk

The launch itself is anticlimactic. DNS update, propagation, traffic starts hitting the new site. The work isn’t done — it’s just starting the sensitive part.

For the first 72 hours post-launch, you’re watching analytics in real time. Traffic patterns, error rates, checkout completions, support volume, anything that looks weird against baseline. Most launch issues show up in the first three days, and most are small and fixable if you catch them fast. The migrations that turn into disasters are the ones where nobody was watching for the first week. Good migrations have a human on the dashboard for 72 hours. Great ones have that human empowered to push fixes without waiting for a Monday meeting.

The Monday Morning Move

If you’re planning a migration to Shopify in the next 90 days, don’t start with the theme. Start with the audit and the redirect map. Those two documents determine whether the migration preserves or destroys the equity you’ve already built. Everything downstream is easier when those two are locked.

We’ve run 50+ migrations at Talkerstein from WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Magento, and a few platforms I’ll be polite about. Every migration has the same shape. The surprises are always different. The reason most agencies struggle isn’t intelligence — it’s reps. They haven’t done enough of these to know where the bodies are buried, so they discover them in production on your store.

If you’re staring down a migration and want a real second opinion before anyone touches anything, book a free Shopify migration consultation. We’ll walk through what you have, what you need, and what the realistic path forward looks like — and we’ll tell you honestly if the timing isn’t right.

One firm. Every system. Properly handled.