Shopify Migration: Step-by-Step Guide and Checklist (2026)

A Shopify migration moves your products, customers, order history and content to a new Shopify store, then redirects the old URLs and points your domain at Shopify. Import in a fixed order (products, then customers, then orders), check the imported data, place test orders, and switch the domain last. The steps that cost stores their Google traffic are the redirects, and Shopify has firm rules about which URLs you can redirect.

Shopify facts below come from the Help Center’s Migrating to Shopify guide and its URL redirect page, read on October 23, 2026. If you are still deciding whether to move, read Shopify replatforming first.

Before you move: decide what to bring

Shopify’s guide gives this list as an example of what you might migrate:

• Products
• Customers
• Historical orders (orders that were already fulfilled)
• Gift cards, certificates and store credits
• Blog posts
• Pages such as the shipping policy, contact and about pages

Use the move to drop what you would not build again: discontinued products with no traffic, test pages, old campaign pages. Fewer items means fewer redirects to map and less data to check.

Shopify has its own migration guides for Amazon, Clover, Etsy, eBay, GoDaddy, Lightspeed, Square, Squarespace, Wix and WooCommerce. Read the one for your platform alongside this plan. Stores on Shopify Plus follow the separate Plus launch checklist.

Three ways to move your data

Shopify also lists two heavier options: hiring a Shopify Partner, or a custom migration built on the Shopify API. Those make sense for large catalogs with custom data, or when the old platform has no clean export.

The data type decides the method more than your skills do. Shopify’s own example: policy pages can be copied by hand, while a catalog of 250 products needs a CSV or an app.

Shopify migration step by step

1. Create the Shopify store and leave the settings for later. Shopify’s checklist puts the import first.
2. Import products. If you import theme files or images, remove http: and https: from asset URLs so they always load.
3. Import customers. Set the Accepts Email Marketing column to yes only for people who opted in on your old store. Shopify’s guide warns against mailing anyone who did not.
4. Import historical orders with a migration app. Before you start, turn off new-order notifications for your staff, or every imported order sends them a “new order” email. Turn them back on afterwards.
5. Check the import (the errors table below), then organize products into collections.
6. Theme and pages. Pick a free theme in the admin or try up to 19 paid themes before buying one, and rebuild your pages.
7. Shipping, taxes and payments. Set shipping zones and rates, review tax settings, and activate Shopify Payments or another provider.
8. Test orders. Run a successful and a failed payment, a refund, a cancellation, and a full and partial fulfillment. Read every customer email these send and edit the templates under Settings > Notifications.
9. Staff accounts with their own logins and only the permissions each person needs.
10. Redirects from every old URL that changes (next section).
11. Domain. Disconnect the domain from the old platform first, or you can hit SSL certificate errors, then connect it to Shopify. Our guide to connect your custom domain to Shopify has the steps.
12. Invite customers to set new passwords. Imported customers cannot sign in with their old password, so send account invites.

The order of steps 2–4 matters. Shopify’s guide says to import products first, then customers, then historical orders, so orders link to the right products and customers.

Keep your Google traffic: redirects within Shopify’s limits

Shopify uses its own URL structure (/products/…, /collections/…, /pages/…, /blogs/…), so most old URLs change. Each old URL that has traffic or links needs a 301 redirect to its new address. Build the URL map before launch: export your old site’s URLs (from its sitemap or Google Search Console), and put the new Shopify URL next to each.

Then check the map against Shopify’s rules:

• Only broken URLs redirect. A redirect works only if the old address shows “Page not found” on Shopify. If a page exists at that address, the redirect is ignored.
• Some paths are off limits. You cannot redirect URLs starting with /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services or /shop, or the fixed paths /products, /collections and /collections/all.
• Collection tag URLs (/collections/name/tag) count as valid pages and cannot be redirected.
• .html endings. Shopify treats /page.html and /page as the same URL, so you cannot redirect one to the other.
• Query strings in old URLs may not redirect as expected. Test a few.
• Market subfolders (/en-ca/…) need their own redirects; a redirect does not cover every subfolder automatically.
• Limit: 100,000 redirects, or 20,000,000 on Shopify Plus.

Create single redirects under Content > Menus > View URL Redirects > Create URL redirect. For hundreds of URLs, Shopify suggests a third-party app. Redirects start working immediately, so you can add them before the domain switch and test them on the Shopify domain.

Common migration errors and fixes

Imported catalogs often need a second pass on prices, tags, vendors or SEO titles across hundreds of products. Shopify’s bulk editor handles small fixes; our app Bulk Product Edit applies one change to a filtered set of products with a preview, and on paid plans keeps a history so a task can be reverted.

The first two weeks after launch

• Open Google Search Console for the domain, submit the Shopify sitemap (/sitemap.xml), and watch the “Not found (404)” report. Each new 404 with traffic gets a redirect.
• Click through your top 20 old URLs from the URL map and confirm each lands on the right page.
• Place one real order with a real card and refund it.
• Check that order, shipping and refund emails carry your logo, address and return policy.
• Keep the old platform’s export files until the first month’s orders, refunds and payouts reconcile.

For the launch itself, use our Shopify store launch checklist. More guides are in the running a store hub.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a Shopify migration take? Shopify’s guide gives no duration, because it depends on what you move. Products and customers by CSV are the quick part; order history, custom data and a long URL map take longer, because each import and each redirect has to be checked before the domain switch.

Can I migrate my order history to Shopify? You can, with a migration app or Shopify’s Order API. Shopify’s product and customer CSV imports do not cover orders.

Will I lose my SEO when moving to Shopify? You keep most of it when every old URL with traffic has a 301 redirect to the matching new page and you fix new 404s quickly after launch. Pages that disappear without a redirect lose their rankings.

Do I need a migration app? For products and customers, CSV files are enough. For historical orders, gift cards, blog posts and pages, Shopify lists migration apps or its APIs as the bulk options.