24 August 2026
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Shopify Store Migration Cost: The Complete 2026 Pricing and DIY vs Agency Guide
Every quarter we get some version of the same question in our inbox: “How much should a Shopify store migration cost, and do I actually need to hire someone to do it?” The honest answer is that migrations range from a $0 weekend project to a $60,000 replatforming engagement, and the gap between those two numbers is almost entirely determined by decisions you make before you touch a single product export. Get the scoping wrong and you will spend three weekends rebuilding URL structures and still lose 40% of your organic traffic; get it right and you can move a 2,000-SKU catalogue with near-zero downtime.
TL;DR
- Cost Range: A DIY Shopify store migration costs $0 to $400 in tooling, while an agency-led migration runs $2,500 for a small clean catalogue up to $60,000 for enterprise B2B with ERP integrations, with most owner-operated stores landing in the $4,000 to $12,000 band.
- The Real Cost Is Not The Migration: The expensive part is preserving SEO equity, redirect mapping, integrations, and theme parity. Data transfer itself is often the cheapest line item, which is exactly why cheap “just move the data” quotes are a trap.
- When To Hire: DIY makes sense under roughly 300 clean SKUs with no custom integrations; bring in a partner once you have B2B pricing logic, ERP or XML feeds, 1,000+ products, or organic traffic you cannot afford to lose.
Step 1: Inventory Everything Before You Price Anything
You cannot estimate a Shopify store migration cost until you know exactly what you are moving. The single biggest reason quotes come back at wildly different numbers, sometimes 4x apart for the same store, is that the merchant handed vendors an incomplete picture. Before you talk to anyone, including yourself as the DIY project manager, build a migration inventory.
At Presta, we’ve seen migrations balloon by 30% to 50% in cost purely because a merchant forgot to mention 4,000 legacy blog posts, a customer wholesale tier, or a subscription integration that needed to survive the move. Scope creep is not a vendor problem. It is a discovery problem.
What actually needs to move?
Walk through your current store as a catalogue, not a website. Every distinct data type is a line item with its own complexity and risk profile. Here is the inventory we hand clients at the start of a scoping call.
Data Type Typical Volume Migration Complexity Notes Products and variants 100 to 50,000 Medium to High Variants, metafields, and specs multiply effort Product images 1 to 20 per product Low Automated, but check alt text and filenames Customer accounts Any Medium Passwords never transfer; plan a reset flow Order history 6 to 60 months Medium Often optional; historical orders are read-only Blog and CMS content 0 to 5,000 posts Low to High SEO-critical if you rank for content URL structure and redirects Every indexed page High The most under-scoped, highest-risk item Integrations (ERP, recurring, reviews) Varies High Frequently the true cost driver Discounts and promotions Varies Low Rarely transfer cleanly; rebuild manually
How much traffic and revenue are at stake?
Pull 12 months of Google Search Console and analytics data before you do anything else. A store doing $30,000 a month with 60% organic traffic is a fundamentally different migration than a $30,000 store running entirely on paid social. In the first case, a botched redirect map can cost you $10,000+ in monthly revenue for two to three months while rankings recover. In the second, SEO risk is close to zero and DIY becomes far more defensible.
Pro Tip: Export your top 200 landing pages by organic traffic and sessions right now, before you change anything. These are the URLs that must have perfect 301 redirects on launch day. If a vendor’s quote does not explicitly mention redirect mapping for these pages, that quote is incomplete regardless of how low the number looks.
Migration inventory checklist:
- Products: Count total SKUs, variants, and how many carry custom metafields or spec sheets.
- Content: Log every blog post, landing page, and CMS entry that earns organic traffic.
- Integrations: List every third-party app or backend system currently touching orders or inventory.
- Traffic: Export top 200 organic landing pages and monthly organic revenue.
- Customers: Note account volume and whether you run wholesale or tiered pricing.
- Deadlines: Identify any hard date, such as a contract expiry or a peak season blackout window.
Checkpoint: You know your migration is scoped correctly when you can hand any vendor a one-page inventory and get back quotes within 20% of each other instead of 400% apart.
Step 2: Choose Your Migration Path (DIY, App, or Agency)
Once you know what you are moving, you can honestly evaluate the three paths. The mistake most merchants make is choosing the path first, usually the cheapest one, then discovering their store does not fit it. Match the path to the inventory you built in Step 1, not to your budget mood on a Tuesday.
The three real options
There is no single correct answer here. The right path is a function of catalogue size, integration complexity, and how much organic revenue is at risk. We break the WooCommerce vs Shopify decision and its migration paths down in more detail elsewhere, but here is the pricing and fit reality.
Path Typical Cost Time to Complete Best For Biggest Risk DIY (manual CSV) $0 to $50 20 to 60 hours Under 100 SKUs, no integrations Redirect and SEO errors Migration app (Matrixify, Cart2Cart) $50 to $400 8 to 25 hours 100 to 1,000 clean SKUs Metafield and variant edge cases Agency-led $2,500 to $60,000 2 to 10 weeks 1,000+ SKUs, B2B, integrations Choosing the wrong agency
Are there free Shopify migration options?
Yes, and they are legitimate for the right store. Shopify’s own import tools accept CSV files for products and customers at zero cost, and you can manually recreate a small catalogue in a weekend. Apps like Matrixify offer free tiers for small imports. So a genuinely free migration exists if you have under 100 products, no custom integrations, and either negligible organic traffic or the patience to build redirects by hand.
The catch: “free” almost always means you are paying in hours and risk instead of dollars. A 40-hour DIY migration for a founder whose time is worth $75 an hour is a $3,000 migration that just does not show up on an invoice. When we say free migration options exist, we mean the tooling is free, not that the project is.
When does an app beat DIY?
The moment you cross roughly 300 products, manual CSV work stops being economical and starts being error-prone. Migration apps handle products, variants, customers, orders, and often blog content in structured batches, and a mid-tier app license at $50 to $200 will save you 15 to 40 hours of tedious mapping. For a clean 500 to 800 SKU store with no ERP dependency, an app plus a careful human doing QA and redirects is the sweet spot for cost efficiency.
Path selection checklist:
- SKU Count: Under 100 leans DIY, 100 to 1,000 leans app, 1,000+ leans agency.
- Integration Load: Any ERP, XML feed, or B2B pricing logic pushes you toward an agency.
- Organic Revenue: High organic dependency raises the cost of getting redirects wrong.
- Founder Time Value: Multiply DIY hours by your hourly rate before calling it free.
- Deadline Pressure: Hard launch dates favor a team with a repeatable process.
- Post-Launch Support: Decide who fixes things at 11pm on launch night.
Checkpoint: You have chosen correctly when your migration path can plausibly handle your worst-case data type without a mid-project pivot to a different tool.
Step 3: Map Every URL and Protect Your SEO Equity
This is where migrations are won or lost, and it is the single most under-budgeted line item in every cheap quote we have ever reviewed. Your old store has an indexed URL structure that Google has spent years trusting. Shopify uses a fixed, opinionated URL pattern (`/products/`, `/collections/`, `/blogs/`). When those patterns change and old URLs die without 301 redirects, you do not just lose rankings, you lose the ranking history.
At Presta, when we scope this for clients we treat redirect mapping as a deliverable with its own line item, not an afterthought. A store with 2,000 indexed URLs needs a redirect map of 2,000 entries, and every one of them has to point to the correct new destination, not a homepage catch-all. Redirecting everything to the homepage is the SEO equivalent of shredding your rankings and lighting the pieces on fire.
How much SEO risk does a migration carry?
Handled well, a migration should hold 90% to 100% of organic traffic through the transition, with a brief 2 to 4 week dip while Google recrawls. Handled badly, we have seen stores lose 40% to 70% of organic traffic and take four to six months to recover, if they recover at all. That recovery gap is real money. For a store earning $20,000 a month in organic revenue, a 50% loss for three months is a $30,000 hole that dwarfs any savings from a cheap migration.
A migration that saves you $4,000 in fees but loses you $30,000 in organic revenue is not a discount, it is the most expensive decision you will make all year.
What is the URL preservation framework?
We call this the Traffic-Safe Transition framework, and it is the same four-step sequence we run on every migration regardless of platform.
- Crawl and capture: Use Screaming Frog to crawl the entire old site and export every URL with its current status and traffic.
- Match and map: Build a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its exact new Shopify URL, one to one.
- Redirect and verify: Implement 301 redirects, then re-crawl to confirm every old URL resolves with a single hop, not a chain.
- Monitor and adjust: Watch Search Console coverage and rankings weekly for 60 days and fix any 404s that surface.
Pro Tip: Shopify auto-generates a URL redirect tool under Navigation, but it does not build the map for you and it will not warn you about redirect chains. Before you go live, export your live redirect list and check that no URL redirects to another URL that then redirects again. Each extra hop leaks a bit of authority and adds load time. We aim for zero chains on every launch.
SEO protection checklist:
- Full Crawl: Capture every indexed URL from the old store before it goes offline.
- One-To-One Map: Match each old URL to its true equivalent, never a blanket homepage redirect.
- 301 Not 302: Use permanent redirects so Google transfers authority.
- Chain Check: Verify no redirect points to another redirect.
- Canonical Review: Confirm Shopify canonicals point to the correct product, not a duplicate variant URL.
- Sitemap Submit: Push the new sitemap to Search Console on launch day, not a week later.
Checkpoint: Your SEO is protected when a fresh crawl of your top 200 old URLs returns 301s to correct live pages with zero 404s and zero redirect chains.
Step 4: Rebuild Theme, Design, and Product Experience
Data is only half the migration. The other half is the storefront your customers actually see. A pixel-perfect clone of your old design is rarely the goal, and rebuilding on Shopify is often the moment to fix the conversion problems you have been living with. This is where the agency versus DIY redesign math becomes relevant, because a migration and a redesign frequently land in the same project window.
Should you clone or improve your design?
If your current store converts well and you are migrating purely for platform reasons, a close visual match reduces risk and shortens the timeline. If your conversion rate is soft, say under 1.5% for a store with decent traffic, then a straight clone is a missed opportunity. Shopify’s theme ecosystem and app layer let you rebuild the parts that were dragging, product page layout, mobile checkout flow, filtering, without paying for a full custom build.
Here is how the theme options break down on cost and effort.
Theme Approach Cost Timeline Best For Free Shopify theme (Dawn) $0 1 to 2 weeks Lean catalogues, tight budgets Premium theme $180 to $400 one-time 2 to 4 weeks Most stores, faster launch Customized premium theme $3,000 to $15,000 4 to 8 weeks Brand-specific needs Fully custom build $15,000 to $60,000+ 8 to 16 weeks B2B, complex spec catalogues
How do spec-driven catalogues change the build?
This is where migrations get genuinely hard, and where DIY tends to fall apart. If your products are bought on specifications, protection ratings, sizing tables, certification classes, dimensions, then the specs are not decoration. They are the interface.
We ran exactly this challenge on a live engagement for Ardon Adria, a Croatian supplier of professional workwear and personal protective equipment serving construction, industry, and logistics. Their catalogue is deeply spec-driven: protection classes, sizing, certification standards. We built them a Shopify custom ecommerce store with ERP and XML feed integrations, on the same principle we applied for Metalne Police: when the product is bought on specifications, the specs are the interface, not an attachment buried in a PDF. That engagement also runs alongside our nopCommerce work, which gives our team a .NET commerce credential distinct from the Shopify, WooCommerce, and Shopware builds we more commonly ship. The point for migration budgeting: a spec-driven B2B catalogue is never a $4,000 project, because the specs themselves have to be modeled as structured, filterable metafields, not pasted into a description box.
Theme and experience checklist:
- Conversion Audit: Decide clone versus improve based on your current conversion rate.
- Mobile First: Confirm the theme handles your real mobile traffic share, often 60%+.
- Metafield Modeling: Map every spec that customers filter or compare into structured fields.
- Page Speed: Test the built theme; aim for a Lighthouse mobile score above 70.
- Checkout Parity: Verify every payment and shipping method from the old store exists.
- Content Blocks: Rebuild trust elements, reviews, and policy pages, not just product pages.
Checkpoint: Your storefront is ready when a real customer can complete a full purchase on mobile, including a spec-filtered product search, without hitting a dead end.
Step 5: Move Integrations, ERP, and Backend Systems
For most owner-operated stores, integrations are the line item that turns a $5,000 migration into a $25,000 one. Product and order data move with tools. Live connections to your accounting system, your ERP, your supplier feeds, your fulfilment provider, and your marketing stack have to be rebuilt and re-tested, and each one carries its own failure mode.
Our Startup Studio team frequently builds these integration layers as the true core of a B2B migration, because moving the catalogue is trivial next to keeping stock levels, pricing, and orders synced across systems that were never designed to talk to Shopify. This is precisely the work that makes Shopify more than just a platform for serious commerce operations.
Which integrations actually need to survive?
Not all of them. Part of a smart migration is deciding what to kill. But the ones tied to inventory accuracy and money movement are non-negotiable.
Integration Rebuild Effort Risk If Missed Payment gateway Low Cannot take money ERP / inventory sync High Overselling, stockouts XML supplier feeds High Stale catalogue, wrong prices Accounting (invoicing) Medium Reconciliation chaos Email and marketing Low to Medium Broken flows, list gaps Reviews and UGC Medium Lost social proof and SEO Subscriptions High Failed recurring billing
How do you test an ERP or XML feed integration safely?
Never test against live inventory. We stage every integration in a development store and run a full sync cycle, pushing a small batch of products through the feed, confirming price and stock accuracy, then simulating an order to verify it lands in the ERP correctly. Only after two clean cycles do we point the integration at production. For a store with a live XML feed updating thousands of prices daily, a single mapping error can misprice your entire catalogue within one sync, so this staging discipline is worth the extra three to five days it adds.
Integration migration checklist:
- Inventory List: Document every live system connection touching orders, stock, or pricing.
- Prioritize: Separate must-survive integrations from ones you can retire.
- Stage First: Rebuild and test each integration in a dev store, never production.
- Sync Test: Run two clean full sync cycles before going live.
- Order Simulation: Push a real test order end to end through every connected system.
- Fallback Plan: Define what happens if a feed fails on launch day.
Checkpoint: Integrations are ready when a test order placed on your dev store appears correctly in your ERP, triggers the right emails, and updates inventory, all without manual intervention.
Ready To Migrate Without Losing Sleep Or Rankings?
If your store carries real organic revenue, a spec-driven B2B catalogue, or ERP and feed integrations, the cost of a botched migration is almost always higher than the cost of doing it right the first time. Our Startup Studio has migrated and rebuilt stores across Shopify, WooCommerce, Shopware, and nopCommerce, and we scope every project around protecting your traffic and revenue, not just moving your data. Talk to Presta’s Startup Studio and we will map your migration risk before you spend a dollar on tooling or theme licenses.
Step 6: Launch, Validate, and Monitor
Launch day is not the finish line. It is the start of the two most important weeks of the project. A migration can look perfect in staging and still break in production because DNS propagation, live traffic, and real payment flows behave differently than a sandbox. We run a structured go-live sequence on every project to catch problems in minutes, not days.
What is the go-live sequence?
We call it the Zero-Surprise Launch framework, and it exists so nothing depends on remembering to check something under pressure.
- Pre-launch freeze: Stop all changes on both stores 24 hours before go-live to lock a known-good state.
- DNS and SSL: Point the domain, confirm the SSL certificate is active, and verify the store loads on the live URL.
- Redirect activation: Confirm the full 301 map is live and spot-check the top 20 URLs manually.
- Transaction test: Place a real, small live order end to end, then refund it.
- Analytics and pixels: Verify tracking fires correctly on a live pageview and a live conversion.
- Search Console: Submit the new sitemap and request indexing on key pages.
How do you achieve near-zero downtime?
The goal is that customers never see a broken store. We stage the new store completely, keep the old one live and selling, and only cut DNS over once the new store passes every launch check. Because Shopify serves the storefront while DNS propagates, a clean cutover means most customers experience zero interruption. We cover the no-downtime migration approach in depth, but the principle is simple: never take the old store down until the new one is proven.
Launch checklist:
- Change Freeze: Lock both stores 24 hours pre-launch.
- Domain Cutover: Point DNS only after every check passes.
- Live Transaction: Complete and refund a real order before announcing launch.
- Redirect Spot Check: Manually test your top 20 organic URLs on the live domain.
- Tracking Verification: Confirm analytics and ad pixels fire on live traffic.
- Sitemap Submission: Push the new sitemap to Search Console the same day.
Checkpoint: Your launch succeeded when a real customer places a real order on the live domain and it flows correctly to fulfilment, with analytics recording the conversion.
Step 7: Measure Success With 30, 60, and 90 Day KPIs
A migration is not successful because it went live. It is successful because your traffic, revenue, and operations held or improved. We set expectations with clients on a 30/60/90 day cadence so nobody panics at a normal week-two ranking dip or, worse, ignores a real problem because “the site is up.”
What KPIs actually matter?
The vanity metric is “did it launch.” The real metrics are traffic retention, ranking recovery, conversion rate, and operational accuracy. Here is the timeline we hold ourselves to.
Timeframe KPI Target 30 days Organic traffic retention 85% to 95% of pre-migration baseline 30 days 404 error count Near zero for indexed URLs 30 days Conversion rate Within 10% of old store or better 60 days Ranking recovery Top keywords back to prior positions 60 days Organic traffic Fully recovered to baseline 90 days Organic traffic Above baseline if redesign improved UX 90 days Order and inventory accuracy 99%+ sync accuracy across systems
If organic traffic is still down more than 15% at 60 days, something is wrong and you investigate redirects and indexing immediately. We have seen stores over-recover, hitting 110% to 130% of pre-migration organic traffic within 90 days, when the migration was paired with faster page speed and better product page structure. That upside is real, but it only shows up when the fundamentals from Steps 3 through 5 were done right.
Pro Tip: Set a Google Search Console alert and a weekly ranking snapshot for your top 20 keywords starting on launch day. The stores that recover fastest are the ones that caught a redirect problem in week one instead of noticing a revenue dip in week six. Early detection cuts recovery time roughly in half in our experience.
KPI monitoring checklist:
- Baseline First: Record pre-migration traffic, rankings, and conversion before cutover.
- Weekly Snapshots: Track top 20 keywords and organic sessions every week for 90 days.
- 404 Watch: Monitor Search Console coverage reports for new errors.
- Conversion Compare: Benchmark new store conversion against the old store weekly.
- Sync Audit: Reconcile inventory and order accuracy across ERP monthly.
- Escalation Trigger: Investigate immediately if traffic is down 15%+ at day 60.
Checkpoint: Your migration is validated when organic traffic sits at or above baseline by day 60 and your systems report 99%+ order and inventory accuracy.
Common Mistakes That Blow Up Your Migration Budget
We review a lot of migrations that went sideways, and the failures cluster into a few predictable patterns. Each one is avoidable, and each one costs far more to fix after launch than to prevent before.
Mistake: Choosing a vendor on price alone. Why It Happens: Merchants treat migration as a commodity data transfer and pick the lowest of three quotes. Fix: Weight quotes by what they include for SEO and integrations, because the cheap quote almost always excludes redirect mapping and testing.
Mistake: Skipping the redirect map. Why It Happens: The old URLs feel disposable once the new store looks good, and the redirect work is invisible to the eye. Fix: Build a one-to-one 301 map for every indexed URL before launch and verify it with a fresh crawl.
Mistake: Testing integrations in production. Why It Happens: The dev store feels like extra work and everyone is eager to go live. Fix: Stage every ERP, feed, and payment integration and run two clean sync cycles before pointing anything at real inventory.
Advanced Tips for a Migration That Compounds
Once the fundamentals are solid, a few practitioner moves separate a migration that merely survives from one that becomes a growth event. This is the difference between treating a migration as a data move versus a growth story, which is how we frame every project.
First, use the migration to clean your catalogue. Most stores carry 10% to 30% dead SKUs, products with no sales in 12 months. Do not migrate them. A leaner catalogue crawls faster and converts better. Second, consolidate thin content. If you have 400 blog posts and 40 of them earn all the traffic, merge or prune the rest and 301 them into the survivors, concentrating authority rather than diluting it. Third, restructure collections around how customers actually search, not around how your old admin was organized, because Shopify’s collection URLs are prime real estate for category-level rankings.
For B2B and spec-driven stores specifically, model your specifications as structured, filterable metafields from day one. Retrofitting spec filtering after launch is expensive and disruptive. Build it into the migration and you turn a compliance requirement into a conversion feature.
Advanced optimization checklist:
- Prune Dead SKUs: Skip migrating products with zero sales in 12 months.
- Consolidate Content: Merge thin posts into your traffic-earning pages with 301s.
- Restructure Collections: Organize around search demand, not legacy admin logic.
- Structured Specs: Model B2B specifications as filterable metafields at build time.
- Speed Budget: Set a page-weight limit and enforce it during theme development.
- Post-Launch Roadmap: Plan the first three conversion experiments before you even launch.
If you are just getting started and running a small, clean catalogue with little organic traffic, prioritize the redirect map and a careful DIY or app-based product import; that is where 80% of your risk lives and it costs almost nothing to do well. If you are auditing an existing migration that already went live and something feels off, start with a full crawl and Search Console coverage report to find broken redirects and 404s, because that is the most common and most recoverable failure. In both cases, integrations and specs are the areas where getting outside help pays for itself fastest.
Next Steps:
- Export: Pull your top 200 organic landing pages and 12 months of revenue data today.
- Inventory: Fill in the migration inventory table from Step 1 for your own store.
- Decide: Match your inventory honestly to the DIY, app, or agency path in Step 2.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to migrate a Shopify store?
A Shopify store migration cost spans an enormous range because “migration” means very different things depending on the store. A DIY move of a small, clean catalogue can cost effectively nothing beyond your own time, with Shopify’s free CSV import tools and a free theme. A migration-app-assisted move runs $50 to $400 in software for a mid-sized store.
Agency-led migrations, where you are paying for scoping, redirect mapping, theme work, integration rebuilds, testing, and launch support, typically start around $2,500 for a simple store and climb to $60,000 or more for enterprise B2B with ERP and feed integrations. Most owner-operated stores with real traffic and a handful of integrations land in the $4,000 to $12,000 band.
The number that matters is not the headline price, it is the price-to-risk ratio. A $5,000 migration that protects $20,000 a month in organic revenue is cheap. A $0 migration that loses half that revenue for three months is the most expensive option on the table.
What is the average price for Shopify migration services?
For professional Shopify migration services, the realistic average for a small-to-mid store sits between $4,000 and $12,000. That figure assumes a few thousand products, standard integrations like reviews and email, a premium or lightly customized theme, and a proper redirect map. Below that range you are usually buying a bare data transfer with no SEO protection; above it you are typically dealing with custom builds, complex B2B logic, or ERP integrations.
Pricing models vary. Some agencies quote fixed-scope project fees, which we prefer because they force clear scoping up front. Others bill hourly at $75 to $200 depending on region and seniority. A Shopify agency in a strong-value region can deliver senior-level work at rates well below typical US or UK agencies, which is one reason where an agency is based matters to your total cost.
Always compare like for like. Ask each vendor exactly what is and is not included, particularly around redirects, integration testing, and post-launch support, because that is where the real price differences hide.
Are there free Shopify migration options?
Yes, genuinely free options exist, and for the right store they are the correct choice. Shopify’s built-in import tools accept CSV files for products, customers, and orders at no cost. Migration apps like Matrixify offer free tiers that handle small catalogues. You can rebuild a small store manually over a weekend with a free theme and pay nothing.
The honest caveat is that free tooling does not mean a free project. A DIY migration still costs you time, often 20 to 60 hours, and it carries real risk if you have organic traffic to protect, because the tools do not build your redirect map or test your integrations for you. When we say free migration options are legitimate, we mean they fit stores under roughly 100 to 300 SKUs, with no custom integrations, and with little organic revenue at stake.
Once you cross those thresholds, the “free” path quietly becomes the expensive one, paid in your hours and in recovery from mistakes rather than in an invoice.
Do I really need to hire someone to migrate my store?
Not always, and we will say that plainly even though we do this for a living. If you have a clean catalogue under a few hundred products, no ERP or feed integrations, no B2B pricing logic, and modest organic traffic, you can absolutely run the migration yourself with an app and this guide. Plenty of successful stores were moved by their founders over a weekend.
You should bring in a partner when the stakes or the complexity cross a line. In our experience that line is any of the following: 1,000+ products, ERP or XML feed integrations, B2B or wholesale pricing, spec-driven catalogues where specifications are the buying interface, or organic revenue you cannot afford to lose for even a few weeks. At that point the cost of a mistake exceeds the cost of expert help, usually by a wide margin.
This is exactly the threshold where our Startup Studio earns its fee, not by moving data, which is the easy part, but by protecting the traffic, revenue, and operational accuracy that a botched migration puts at risk. If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, that uncertainty itself is usually a sign it is worth a scoping conversation.
How long does a Shopify store migration take?
Timelines track closely with the path you choose. A DIY migration of a small store can be done in a single weekend to a couple of weeks of part-time work. An app-assisted migration of a mid-sized store typically runs one to three weeks including QA and redirects. Agency-led migrations run two to ten weeks depending on catalogue size, theme complexity, and how many integrations need rebuilding.
The two factors that stretch timelines most are integrations and custom design. A straight replatform with a premium theme moves fast. A custom B2B build with ERP sync, spec filtering, and a bespoke theme is an eight-to-sixteen-week project no matter how efficient the team is, because the integration testing alone cannot be safely rushed.
Build in a buffer. We plan for the launch date plus a monitored two-week stabilization window, because the work is not truly done until traffic and systems have proven stable in production.
Will migrating to Shopify hurt my SEO?
It can, but it does not have to, and this is entirely within your control. The risk is real: change your URL structure without proper 301 redirects and you can lose 40% to 70% of organic traffic. Handle redirects and indexing correctly and a well-executed migration should hold 90% to 100% of your organic traffic through a brief two-to-four-week recrawl dip, then recover fully.
The determining factor is the redirect map. Every indexed URL on the old store needs a one-to-one permanent redirect to its true equivalent on the new store, verified with a crawl and monitored in Search Console. Blanket homepage redirects, missing redirects, and redirect chains are the three failures that cause traffic loss.
Done well, a migration can actually improve SEO, because Shopify’s faster hosting and cleaner structure, paired with content consolidation and better page speed, often push traffic above the old baseline within 90 days. The WooCommerce to Shopify benefits frequently include exactly this kind of performance-driven ranking lift.
How do I choose the right migration agency?
Judge agencies on process and proof, not on the lowest quote. The strongest signal is whether they talk about redirect mapping, SEO retention, and integration testing before you bring it up. An agency that leads with data transfer and price, and treats SEO as your problem, is quoting a data move, not a migration. We break down how to evaluate a Shopify migration agency in detail, but the short version is: ask what happens if traffic drops, and listen for a specific answer.
Look at relevant portfolio work. A store like yours, similar catalogue size and complexity, matters more than a flashy logo list. Reviewing agency portfolio examples tells you whether a team has handled your specific challenge, whether that is high SKU counts, B2B logic, or ERP integrations.
Finally, confirm scope in writing before signing. The difference between a good and bad migration outcome is almost always the difference between a thorough scope and a vague one. If the proposal does not itemize redirects, integrations, testing, and post-launch support, ask for a revision before you commit.
