WooCommerce stores are flexible because WordPress lets you bolt on almost anything. That same flexibility is what makes a move to Shopify worth planning carefully: the core data transfers cleanly, but the plugins around it need decisions, one by one.
What moves cleanly
- Products and variations. Simple and variable products come across, with attributes becoming Shopify product options and variants.
- Categories and tags. Product categories usually become Shopify collections; tags carry across for filtering and search.
- Customers and order history. Names, emails, addresses and past orders move onto each customer record.
- Coupons can be recreated as Shopify discount codes.
- Blog posts and pages, including their titles and meta descriptions from your SEO plugin, so content that ranks keeps its value.
What needs a plan
- Subscriptions and memberships. WooCommerce Subscriptions and Memberships move to a Shopify subscription or membership app, and active subscribers need a careful handover with your payment provider.
- Bookings and custom product logic built with plugins usually need an equivalent Shopify app or a custom solution.
- Custom fields become Shopify metafields, which need to be defined before import.
- Page-builder layouts. Pages built with Elementor or a similar builder do not transfer as layouts. They are rebuilt in your Shopify theme.
What does not move
- Customer passwords. They are stored encrypted and cannot be migrated. Nobody needs to reset one, though: Shopify customer accounts can sign in with an email address and a one-time code.
- Plugin-specific features that have no Shopify equivalent, until an app or custom build replaces them.
Your URLs will change
WooCommerce product URLs typically sit under /product/ and categories under /product-category/. On Shopify they move to /products/ and /collections/, and blog posts move under /blogs/. Every old URL needs a permanent (301) redirect to its new page.
If your WordPress blog brings in a lot of organic traffic, give it the same care as your products. Blog URLs, titles and internal links are where rushed WooCommerce migrations most often lose rankings.
What you leave behind
Most WooCommerce owners move for the work around the store rather than the software: hosting, security patching, plugin updates that can break checkout, and the developer time all of that takes. On Shopify, hosting, security and checkout are part of the platform.
For the full picture, including example redirects and common questions, read our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide.