Migrating from Magento to Shopify: The Complete 2026 Guide for Store Owners

Running a Magento store means running a server. Not just a shop, a full web application that needs to be hosted, updated, secured, and maintained, whether you’re thinking about it or not. Most Magento store owners reach a point where the platform itself becomes the obstacle: routine changes take longer than they should, security patches need scheduling, upgrades need planning, and costs accumulate in the background year after year.

Shopify is fundamentally different from other platforms. It’s hosted software—meaning Shopify handles the infrastructure, security updates, and uptime. You log in and manage your store. The question most Magento store owners have isn’t really whether to move, it’s what the move actually involves.

This guide covers everything: what happens to your products, customers, and orders; how your URLs change and what that means for SEO; what a realistic timeline looks like; and what changes—and what doesn’t—in day-to-day store management after migration.

What This Guide Covers

Why Magento store owners move to Shopify

• Shopify vs. Shopify Plus: which plan applies to your store
• Before you start: preparation steps that save time
• What happens to your products, customers, and order history
• How product variants work differently in Shopify
• URLs, SEO, and protecting your search rankings
• Realistic migration timelines
• What the migration process looks like step by step
• What changes after launch
• Frequently asked questions

Why Magento Store Owners Move to Shopify

Magento is open-source, self-hosted software. That architecture gives you maximum control, but it also means every aspect of the platform’s operation is your responsibility. Security vulnerabilities need to be patched as soon as they’re discovered. Version upgrades require testing and often require specialist input. The hosting infrastructure needs to be scaled as traffic grows. Extensions—the add-ons that extend Magento’s functionality —need to remain compatible with each other and with the core platform.

None of that is theoretical. In 2024, a critical Magento vulnerability known as CosmicSting (CVE-2024-34102) was rated 9.8 out of 10 in severity by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Stores that hadn’t applied Adobe’s patch were exposed. Sansec, the security research firm that discovered the vulnerability, confirmed over 4,200 stores were compromised — including stores belonging to well-known brands. This is what running self-hosted software means in practice: the security of your store depends on how quickly you respond to vulnerabilities you didn’t create.

Shopify is a SaaS platform—Software as a Service. Security, infrastructure, performance, and uptime are managed by Shopify. Store owners don’t apply patches. They don’t manage hosting. They don’t schedule upgrade windows. That responsibility sits with Shopify, not with you.

Beyond security, the reasons Magento store owners move most often come down to three things:

• Operational cost. Magento requires ongoing technical input just to stay running. Routine tasks that are self-service on Shopify — updating content, adding products, changing prices in bulk — often require developer involvement on Magento.
• Speed of change. Shopify was built to be managed by non-technical teams. The admin is designed around the tasks store owners actually do every day: adding products, managing inventory, running promotions, and reviewing orders.
• Platform trajectory. Shopify processed $292 billion in GMV in 2024, a 24% year-over-year increase. The platform continues to invest heavily in commerce features, checkout performance, and international selling tools. For store owners, that trajectory matters: the platform you’re on determines what tools are available to you.

Shopify or Shopify Plus: Which Applies to Your Store?

Shopify and Shopify Plus are the same core platform. The difference is scale, support, and access to certain advanced features.

Note on transaction fees: Shopify charges an additional transaction fee (0.5%-2% depending on plan) if you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments. Shopify Plus removes this fee entirely, regardless of payment provider. If your store processes significant volume through a third-party gateway, factor this into plan comparisons.

Before You Start: Preparation Steps That Save Time

Migration is an opportunity to clean up what’s accumulated over the years of running a store. Products that were discontinued but never deleted. Customer records that are duplicated. Orders from old test transactions. Carrying that over to Shopify doesn’t solve the problem — it just relocates it.

Before any migration work begins, four preparation steps consistently reduce scope, timeline, and cost:

• Audit your active extensions. Magento extensions are built specifically for Magento and don’t work on Shopify. Every extension your store currently uses needs to be either replaced with a Shopify app or rebuilt as a custom integration. The Shopify App Store has over 12,000 apps, and most standard functionality has a direct equivalent. The ones that don’t are where scope surprises come from — and finding them before the project starts is far less disruptive than discovering them in the middle of a build.
• Clean your product data. Remove discontinued products, fix inconsistent data (missing descriptions, broken image links, incorrect SKUs), and decide whether you want to carry across product variants that are no longer active. Clean data migrates faster and validates more easily.
• Decide how much order history to migrate. Most stores migrate one to three years of order history — enough for customer service purposes without creating an unnecessarily large dataset. Historical orders older than that can be archived.
• Export your URLs from Google Search Console. Every URL that has earned search traffic or external links needs to be redirected to its new Shopify equivalent. The URL export from Google Search Console is the master list that drives the redirect map. Starting with this data before migration begins is what protects your SEO.

What Happens to Your Data

Magento and Shopify structure data differently, but the data itself transfers cleanly. The most commonly used tools for Magento-to-Shopify data migration are Matrixify (products and customers) and LitExtension (full-store migration, including orders). Both are established tools with documented processes for this specific migration path.

Products

Product names, descriptions, images, prices, SKUs, and inventory levels all migrate. The structural difference to be aware of: Magento stores product attributes (brand, material, fit, etc.) as custom attribute sets. Shopify uses tags and metafields for the same information. The data doesn’t disappear; it needs to be mapped to Shopify’s structure before the import runs. This mapping is a standard part of the migration process.

Customers

Customer names, email addresses, shipping addresses, and purchase history all migrate. One thing that does not migrate: passwords. This is a security constraint, not a platform limitation. Magento and Shopify use different methods to store passwords, and those methods are not interoperable by design. After migration, customers receive an email prompting them to set a new password when they first attempt to log in. This is standard on any platform migration and is a one-time friction point for each customer.

Order History

Past orders can be migrated and will be visible in the Shopify admin and in customers’ account history. The recommended approach is to migrate one to three years of recent orders. Older data can be archived outside Shopify if it’s needed for compliance or reporting purposes but not required in day-to-day operations.

Blog Posts and Content Pages

Blog content and CMS pages (About, FAQ, policy pages, etc.) migrate. The content transfers cleanly—text, images, and metadata. The URL structure for these pages will change, as it does for all Shopify URLs, as covered in the SEO section below.

How Products Work Differently in Shopify

If your store sells products with multiple options, sizes, colours, materials, or other variations, there is one structural difference in Shopify worth understanding before migration.

Magento uses a configurable product model: a parent product record links to separate child product records for each variation. A t-shirt in three sizes and two colours would be seven records in total (one parent, six children).

Shopify uses a single product record with variants inside it. The same t-shirt is one product, with size and colour as variant options:

Shopify variant limit: Shopify supports up to 3 option types per product (such as Size, Colour, Material) with a maximum of 100 variant combinations per product. This covers the full range of options for the vast majority of consumer products. If any product in the catalog has more than 100 variants, this needs to be addressed during migration planning—either by splitting the product or by using a third-party app designed for high-variant catalogs.

URLs, SEO, and Protecting Your Search Rankings

When a store migrates to Shopify, its URL structure changes. Shopify uses a fixed format for all content:

• Products: yourdomain.com/products/product-name
• Collections: yourdomain.com/collections/collection-name
• Pages: yourdomain.com/pages/page-name
• Blog posts: yourdomain.com/blogs/news/post-name

Unlike Magento, Shopify does not allow this URL structure to be customised. /products/ will always be /products/. This is not negotiable.

What this means for SEO: every Magento URL that has accumulated search rankings, backlinks, or traffic needs a 301 redirect to its new Shopify equivalent. A 301 redirect tells search engines that a page has permanently moved—and transfers the search equity from the old URL to the new one. Done correctly, this preserves rankings. Done incorrectly or incompletely, it causes ranking drops that take months to recover from.

A complete SEO handoff during migration involves five steps:

• Step 1: Export all indexed URLs. Download a full URL export from Google Search Console before migration begins. This is the master list of every URL that has a search value.
• Step 2: Build the redirect map. Every old URL gets a corresponding new URL. Products, collections, blog posts, policy pages, each one mapped before launch.
• Step 3: Handle URL variations. Magento often appends .html to product and category URLs. These specific URLs (not just the root path) need explicit redirects.
• Step 4: Validate internal links. Navigation menus, footer links, and any in-content cross-links need to be updated to point to new Shopify URLs before the store goes live.
• Step 5: Submit and monitor post-launch. Submit the new XML sitemap to Google Search Console immediately after DNS cutover. Monitor the Coverage report for 404 errors in the first two to four weeks.

Key insight: Shopify supports up to 100,000 URL redirects. For the vast majority of stores, this limit is never a consideration. Large stores with catalogs that have gone through significant URL changes over many years should audit their redirect count before planning.

The timeline for search rankings to stabilise after a well-executed migration is typically four to eight weeks. Rankings for individual pages may fluctuate during this period; this is normal while Google recrawls and re-indexes the new URL structure. Stores with an incomplete redirect map experience longer recovery times and, in some cases, permanent ranking loss for pages that weren’t redirected.

Realistic Migration Timelines

Migration timelines depend more on store complexity than on catalog size. The number of products matters less than the depth of customisation, the amount of custom functionality in the store, the number of third-party system integrations, and the structure of the product data.

The most common cause of migrations running over time is incomplete extension auditing at the start of the project. When the scope of custom functionality isn’t known upfront, it surfaces during the build, which costs more to resolve and disrupts the project timeline. Completing the extension audit in week one is the single most valuable preparatory step.

The Migration Process: Step by Step

Every Magento-to-Shopify migration follows the same sequence. The time each phase takes scales with complexity, but the phases themselves don’t change.

Phase 1: Discovery and Audit

Document every active extension and map it to either a Shopify app or a custom rebuild requirement. Clean and prepare product, customer, and order data. Confirm the Shopify plan (standard or Plus). Establish the theme approach, whether to use an existing Shopify theme or build a custom one. This phase produces the project scope and sets the timeline.

Phase 2: Store Build and Configuration

Theme setup, app configuration, payment gateway setup, tax and shipping configuration, and any custom functionality development. For Shopify Plus, this includes customising the checkout using Shopify’s checkout extensibility tools. This phase runs in parallel with data preparation on most projects.

Phase 3: Data Migration

Products, customers, and order history are migrated using tools like Matrixify or LitExtension. Every record is validated after import, products are reviewed for correct variant mapping, customer data checked for completeness, orders confirmed as accurate. This is not a one-click operation; each migration run is followed by a QA review before anything is considered complete.

Phase 4: Integration Setup

Any third-party systems, ERPs, warehouse management systems, shipping platforms, and marketing tools are connected to Shopify using Shopify’s APIs or native connectors. For stores with multiple integrations, this is typically the longest phase, and the one most sensitive to scope changes.

Phase 5: Pre-Launch QA

The full redirect map is built and loaded into Shopify. End-to-end checkout testing is completed across all payment methods. Page speed is benchmarked. All navigation, footer links, and internal cross-links are checked. Stakeholder sign-off is obtained. Nothing goes live until this phase is complete.

Phase 6: Launch and Post-Launch Monitoring

DNS is switched, the new store goes live, and the new XML sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console. A 30- to 60-day monitoring period follows, tracking crawl errors, order flow, payment processing, and integration performance. Any 404 errors that surface in Google Search Console are investigated and redirected during this window.

What Changes After Migration

The practical differences in running a Shopify store versus a Magento store become clear quickly after launch. The most significant ones:

• No platform maintenance. Shopify handles security patches, infrastructure updates, and platform upgrades. There are no upgrade projects, no patch windows, and no hosting configurations to manage.
• Self-service store management. Adding products, updating descriptions, running promotions, managing collections, and editing content pages are all handled through the Shopify admin without technical input. Tasks that required developer time on Magento are self-service on Shopify.
• App updates instead of extension upgrades. When Shopify app developers update their apps, those updates apply automatically. No compatibility testing is required between the app and the core platform.
• Check out performance. Shopify’s checkout uses the same infrastructure as millions of stores. Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout, has documented conversion advantages for returning customers who have their payment details stored. No custom development is needed to access these features.
• Integrated analytics. Shopify Analytics provides sales reporting, traffic analysis, and product performance data natively in the admin. Most stores also connect to Google Analytics 4 for more detailed acquisition and behaviour reporting.

Migration is not a one-time fix. The stores that get the most value from switching platforms treat launch as the beginning of an optimisation process, reviewing store speed, checkout flow, and conversion rate in the weeks after launch rather than considering the project complete on go-live day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will my SEO rankings drop after migration?

Not if the URL redirect works correctly. Every URL that has search traffic needs a 301 redirect to its new Shopify equivalent. Export all indexed URLs from Google Search Console before migration begins, build a complete redirect map, and submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console immediately after launch. Rankings typically return to the pre-migration baseline within four to eight weeks. Stores that skip or rush the redirect map see longer recovery times or permanent ranking loss on pages that weren’t covered.

What happens to my Magento extensions?

Magento extensions are built specifically for Magento and do not work on Shopify. Each one needs to be replaced with a Shopify app equivalent or rebuilt as a custom integration. The Shopify App Store has over 12,000 apps across every category of ecommerce functionality. Most standard extensions have direct equivalents. The extension audit during the discovery phase identifies the ones that don’t and determines how to handle them.

Do my customers lose their account history?

No. Customer profiles, shipping addresses, and order history all migrate to Shopify. The only thing customers cannot carry across is their password. Because the two platforms store passwords securely differently, they’re not transferable. On their first login after migration, customers are prompted to set a new password via email. This is a one-time step.

Can I keep my current store design?

The look and feel of a current Magento store can be replicated on Shopify, either using a Shopify theme that matches the existing aesthetic or through a custom Shopify theme build. Many store owners choose migration as the moment to refresh their design rather than replicating it exactly. Whether to redesign or replicate is a separate decision from migration and depends on how current the existing design is and whether a refresh is already planned.

Is Shopify Plus necessary, or will standard Shopify work?

Standard Shopify (Basic at $39/month through Advanced at $399/month) handles the needs of most growing stores. Shopify Plus (from $2,300/month) is built for higher-volume stores that need custom checkout logic, dedicated account support, or multiple storefronts. If the store processes over approximately $1 million in GMV per year, Plus is worth evaluating, particularly for checkout customisation and the removal of third-party payment gateway fees. Below that threshold, standard Shopify is typically sufficient.

What does migration cost?

Migration cost depends on the complexity of the store, not its size. A store with a clean catalog, standard product types, a small number of extensions, and no third-party system integrations costs significantly less to migrate than a store with custom checkout logic, ERP connections, and years of accumulated customisations. The most accurate way to understand what a migration costs is to complete the discovery and extension audit, which defines the scope.

Can migration and a store redesign happen at the same time?

Yes, and for many stores, this is the most efficient approach. Migration requires building the store on Shopify, regardless of whether a redesign is already planned; combining both efforts avoids duplicating the build. The tradeoff is that the project becomes larger and the timeline increases. Some stores choose to migrate first with a minimal visual refresh and redesign in the months after launch; others combine both. The right choice depends on how urgent the migration is versus how ready the brand is for a redesign.

The Bottom Line

Magento is a capable platform, but it was built for maximum flexibility, which means it requires constant technical input to operate. For stores where that overhead has started to outweigh the benefits, Shopify offers a different model: a fully hosted platform where infrastructure, security, and updates are Shopify’s problem, not yours.

Migration is a structured process, not a switch. Products, customers, orders, and content all transfer. URLs change, but can be redirected completely. The timeline depends on what the store is carrying. The preparation, especially the extension audit and URL export, determines how smoothly the project runs.

The store that exists after migration is one where the day-to-day work of running it sits with the people who know it best: the team managing the business, not the team managing the platform.

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