Migrating your webshop to a new platform is one of the most significant technical decisions you'll make as a business owner. Done wrong, it costs you rankings, customer data, and revenue. Done right, it opens a new chapter for your business.

Here's what a webshop migration to Shopify actually involves — and how to get it right.

Why merchants migrate to Shopify

Most migrations aren't impulsive decisions. They come from years of frustration with a platform that stopped keeping up with the business:

WooCommerce — every plugin update needs a developer, hosting costs mount, and performance stays unpredictable.
Magento — powerful, but expensive to maintain. Every customization requires specialized knowledge and a significant budget.
PrestaShop — once a solid choice, but the ecosystem has shrunk and module quality varies significantly.
Lightspeed — solid for retail, but limited once you want to grow seriously online.

Shopify offers a stable, managed platform where Shopify handles hosting, security, and infrastructure. You focus on the store; they handle everything underneath.

What can go wrong in a webshop migration

A migration looks straightforward until you consider what's at stake:

SEO rankings — if your URL structure changes without the right 301 redirects, you lose years of built-up authority overnight
Customer data — passwords, order history, and addresses don't migrate automatically and correctly on every platform
Product data — variants, metafields, and attributes have different structures on every platform
Integrations — email marketing, ERP, fulfillment, reviews, and analytics all need to be reconnected

The biggest risks are in what you don't see: the records you forgot to migrate, the redirects that are missing, the integration that silently stops working after the switch.

What a good webshop migration looks like

A well-executed migration follows a clear sequence:

Audit of the existing store — catalog all products, variants, customers, orders, pages, and blog posts. Map the current URL structure.
Migration strategy — decide what data you're moving, what tools you'll use, and how the new Shopify structure will look.
Data migration — products, collections, customers, order history, metafields — everything transferred accurately to Shopify.
Theme and customization — the Shopify store is built to match your current design and all custom functionality is rebuilt to Shopify's standards.
SEO and redirects — all old URLs get a 301 redirect to the new Shopify structure. Google follows those redirects; your visitors do too.
Testing — the new store is thoroughly tested before anyone sees it.
Go-live — DNS is switched and the new store goes live. Downtime: minutes, not hours or days.

Preserving your SEO during a webshop migration

This is where most migration mistakes happen. A URL that changes without a redirect is a URL that loses its rankings.

What you need:

A complete mapping of all existing URLs to the new Shopify structure
301 redirects for every URL that changes (products, collections, blog, information pages)
Verification that Google Search Console picks up the new structure
Traffic monitoring in the first weeks after launch

Shopify has built-in redirect management. That helps — but mapping hundreds or thousands of URLs is the real work.

When to bring in an agency

A small store with ten products and no organic traffic can self-migrate using Shopify's standard import tool. But if:

Your store has more than a hundred products
You have organic traffic you need to protect
You have complex product structures, metafields, or custom functionality
You have integrations that need to be reconnected

...then the investment in an agency handling the migration is almost always smaller than the cost of a self-migration that goes wrong halfway through.

We handle webshop migrations from WooCommerce, Magento, Lightspeed, PrestaShop, and other platforms to Shopify — covering data, SEO, theme, and integrations.

More information on our migration page, or get in touch to talk through your situation.