The Shopify Migration Readiness Checklist

A Shopify migration is ready to start once you can answer five questions: what data has to move, what happens to your SEO, which integrations need rebuilding, how customers get back into their accounts, and who's watching the store in the first weeks after launch. Most migrations that run late or over budget are missing an answer to one of these five going in, not struggling with Shopify itself.

Key takeaways

Treat data, SEO, integrations, customer accounts and launch monitoring as five separate plans, each with its own owner — not one combined "migrate everything" task.
A full redirect map, built from your actual indexed URLs (not just your current sitemap), is the single highest-leverage item on this checklist for protecting organic traffic.
Passwords never migrate between platforms — plan the customer activation flow before launch day, not during it.
Decide what's genuinely custom versus what Shopify already does natively before you scope a rebuild; this is where migration budgets most often go wrong.
The two weeks after launch matter as much as the migration itself — have someone watching Search Console, checkout completion and support tickets daily.

Before you start: scope the four things that actually move

Every migration — regardless of source platform — involves the same four categories of work. Getting a clear answer on each, before development starts, is what keeps a migration on budget:

Data. Products, variants, collections, customers, order history. What has to live in Shopify, and what can stay archived in your ERP or a data warehouse instead?
Functionality. Go through what your current store actually does — not what's installed, but what's used — and sort each piece into "Shopify does this natively," "an app replaces it," or "genuinely custom, needs rebuilding."
Integrations. ERP, CRM, PIM, marketing automation, tax and shipping providers. Each one needs its own conversation about data flow, sync frequency and who owns the connection.
SEO. Covered in detail below — it's the category most likely to cause a measurable revenue loss if it's rushed.

The Shopify SEO migration checklist

This is the part of a migration where a small gap turns into a large, visible problem a few weeks after launch. Work through it in this order:

Export every URL Google has indexed for your current site from Search Console — not just what's in your sitemap, which usually misses old or orphaned URLs that still rank.
Map every one of those URLs to its new Shopify equivalent. Products go to products, categories to collections; where there's no direct match, redirect to the closest relevant collection, never to the homepage by default.
Carry over title tags, meta descriptions and structured data for your highest-traffic pages — don't let them fall back to generic Shopify defaults.
Preserve your blog content and its URLs, or redirect them with the same care as product pages.
Set canonical tags correctly on any pages that could otherwise be seen as duplicates (common with filtered collection views).
Resubmit your sitemap in Search Console on launch day — don't wait for Google to discover it.
Monitor the Coverage and Performance reports weekly for the first month after launch.

The customer and data migration checklist

Decide how much order history needs to live in Shopify for support and reporting purposes.
Migrate customer profiles, addresses and marketing consent.
Build a password-reset or account-activation flow for launch day — this is not optional. No platform migration can carry hashed passwords across, so every returning customer needs a way back into their account that doesn't involve a support ticket.
Confirm how gift cards, store credit and loyalty points (if any) carry over.
Test the full customer journey — browse, account login, checkout, order confirmation — as an actual customer would, not just as an admin.

The pre-launch checklist

Test every payment method you currently accept, in the actual checkout, not a sandbox-only environment.
QA on real mobile devices, not just a resized browser window.
Check page speed against your current site — a slower new store erases some of the conversion gain a migration is supposed to deliver.
Confirm analytics and conversion tracking (GA4, ad platform pixels) are firing correctly before launch, not discovered missing after.
Have a rollback or hotfix plan for launch day, even if you don't expect to need it.

The post-launch checklist (the part most guides skip)

A migration doesn't end at launch. For at least the first two to four weeks:

Check Search Console daily for crawl errors or a spike in 404s — this is the fastest signal a redirect was missed.
Watch checkout completion rate against your pre-migration baseline.
Monitor support tickets for patterns (a specific payment method failing, a specific country's tax calculation being wrong) rather than treating each one as isolated.
Revisit the redirect map once real traffic data shows which URLs are actually being hit — something always surfaces that planning missed.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should I budget for a Shopify migration?

Most migrations take 6 to 16 weeks from discovery to launch, depending on catalogue size, integration count and how much custom functionality needs rebuilding rather than configuring. Simpler stores land at the shorter end; large catalogues, multiple markets or several system integrations push it longer.

What's the biggest risk in a Shopify migration?

Losing organic search traffic through an incomplete redirect map. It's also the most preventable risk on this list — a full URL export and mapping exercise, done properly before launch, removes nearly all of it.

Do I need a developer to migrate to Shopify, or can I do it myself?

Simple stores with a small catalogue and no custom integrations can migrate with Shopify's native import tools. Once you have custom functionality, several integrations, a large catalogue, or real SEO equity to protect, the redirect mapping and integration work benefit from an agency that has done it before — mistakes in those areas are expensive to undo after launch.

Can I migrate to Shopify without any downtime?

Yes. A well-planned migration runs the new store in a password-protected or development environment while the old store stays live, then switches over (DNS and final data sync) during a low-traffic window, typically with only a few minutes of effective downtime.

What should I ask a migration agency before hiring them?

Ask for an itemized quote broken out by data migration, theme/development work, app or integration replacement, and QA — a single lump-sum number usually means your catalogue hasn't actually been scoped yet. Also ask how they handle SEO redirects specifically, since that's where the most common and most expensive mistakes happen.