Moving a modest fashion store from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing its search history
A design study showing how we plan a platform migration: the redirect map, the data mapping and the order of work.
Picture a modest fashion label that has outgrown a WooCommerce store: plugin updates break things, size and colour variants are slow to manage, and the checkout is not what shoppers on phones expect. The brief we set ourselves: move to Shopify, keep every URL that has earned traffic, and keep customers and order history.
A migration plan and build: product, variant, customer and order mapping, a URL redirect map, a Shopify theme tuned for fashion browsing with size and colour selection, and a cutover checklist. Designed to demonstrate method.
Choices we made, and why.
- 01
Crawl first, then map
Before building anything we crawl the old site and export URLs from Search Console and analytics. The redirect map starts from pages that actually get visits and links, not from the product export, because those are the URLs that cost you if they break.
- 02
One-to-one redirects, reviewed by hand
Products, categories and blog posts are mapped to the closest new URL and loaded as 301 redirects. Exact matches are generated by rule; anything ambiguous is reviewed manually, and discontinued items point to the nearest collection rather than the home page.
- 03
Variants modelled for how people shop
WooCommerce attributes become Shopify options and metafields. Size guides, fabric and care details live in metafields so they render the same on every product and can be filtered later. Shopify limits options per product, so the mapping is checked against those limits first.
- 04
Customers and orders migrated, passwords are not
Customer records and order history can move, but password hashes cannot be reused on Shopify. We plan an account activation email at cutover so customers set a new password in one step.
- 05
Staged cutover with a freeze window
The new store is built and tested on a staging domain, product and order data is imported twice (a trial and a final delta), and a short order freeze is announced before DNS changes. Rollback is a DNS change, so the old site stays intact for a period.
- 06
Post-launch monitoring is part of the plan
After launch we check Search Console for crawl errors and 404s, compare indexed pages with the map, and fix gaps. A migration is not finished at go-live.
Planned timeline: Planned as a 6 to 8 week project: audit and URL crawl in weeks 1 to 2, theme and data mapping in weeks 2 to 5, trial import and QA in weeks 5 to 6, cutover and monitoring in weeks 7 to 8.
Designed and engineered by our studio.
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