The Shopify migration checklist, and how long it takes

The short answer

A Shopify migration is eight jobs run in the right order: scope it, move the data, protect the SEO, build the store, connect the systems, rebuild the tracking, test everything, and launch with a plan for the weeks after. Each job has a handful of items that are easy to forget, and forgetting one is how a smooth project turns into a stressful launch week.

As for how long it takes: my Shopify migration package runs over four weeks from signed brief to a live store. That’s possible because one senior person runs the whole project and the decisions are made up front. Very large catalogues and complex integrations can take longer, and I say so after the audit, before anyone commits.

I’ve engineered more than 350 Shopify stores and migrated over 500,000 products in 20 years. Use this checklist whether you’re doing it yourself, hiring someone, or checking what a quote covers.

How long does a Shopify migration take?

The honest answer is that duration depends less on the platform than on four things: how clean the data is, how many systems connect to the store, how much design work is involved, and how quickly decisions get made.

My four-week package is built for established retailers in the left-hand column on most rows. If your store is in the right-hand column on several, the audit will say so, and the timeline is set in writing before you commit. The single biggest cause of delay on any migration is rarely technical. It’s waiting for decisions.

1. Week 1: audit and mapData, URLs, integrations and rankings mapped; design direction and launch date agreed.
2. Week 2: design and buildCustom theme built; apps chosen to replace every feature you rely on.
3. Week 3: move and connectData imported, integrations connected and tested, redirects loaded.
4. Week 4: test and launchFull testing, final data sync, go-live, then 30 days of support.

Peak season and timing

When you launch matters almost as much as how. Most retailers have a few weeks a year that carry a large share of their revenue, and launch week is not the time to discover a problem with checkout. Black Friday falls on 27 November in 2026, and for many UK retailers the run-up to Christmas follows straight after.

There are two sensible routes around peak:

• Launch before peak. Start early enough that the new store has a few settled weeks before your busiest period, with redirects proven and tracking trusted.
• Prepare now, launch after. Complete the audit, data map and design during peak, without touching the live store, then launch in the quieter weeks that follow.

What doesn’t work well is launching in the middle of peak, or rushing a launch to beat it. If the timing is tight, the second route is almost always the safer one.

Protecting the old store during the build

While the new store is being built, the old one is still taking every order. A few rules keep it safe:

• No platform changes. Avoid upgrades, theme changes or new extensions on the old store during the build unless they’re urgent.
• Keep a full export of products, customers and orders from before the migration starts, and another from launch day, for your records.
• Agree the content freeze in advance, so the team knows when to stop adding products or changing prices on the old store.
• Don’t cancel anything early. Hosting, apps and the platform subscription stay live until the new store is confirmed working.

Questions to answer before you start

If you can answer these, you’re ready to scope a migration properly:

1. What must the new store do better?The two or three outcomes that would make the move worth it.
2. What can’t break?The features, integrations and pages the business depends on every day.
3. When is your contract up?And how much notice your current provider needs.
4. Who decides?One person with the authority to sign off design, scope and launch.
5. When can’t you launch?Your peak weeks, stock takes, sales and holidays.

1. Scope and decide

Most migrations that run late were never properly scoped. This phase turns “it might be time to move to Shopify” into a written brief with a plan, a budget, a decision-maker and a date. It’s also where you find out whether a move makes sense at all.

• Write down why you’re moving. Lower running costs, a better store, fewer developer bills, more channels. The reasons decide what’s in scope.
• Check your current contract, its end date and notice period, and who owns your theme, data and domain.
• Choose the Shopify plan on evidence: features you’ll actually use, trade pricing needs, number of storefronts. My Shopify Plus migration guide covers when Plus is worth it.
• List every feature the current store has, and mark each as keep, improve or drop.
• Agree a budget and payment plan. My Shopify migration cost guide sets out what drives the price.
• Name one decision-maker and agree how quickly sign-offs will happen.
• Pick a launch window away from your busiest weeks.

2. Data

Data is where the hours go. The aim isn’t to copy everything across as it is; it’s to arrive on Shopify with a catalogue that’s cleaner than the one you left. Every item below should be exported, checked against a sample in Shopify, and signed off before the final import.

• Products: titles, descriptions, prices, compare-at prices, SKUs, barcodes, weights, stock and status.
• Variants and options: Shopify allows up to three options and 2,048 variants per product. Anything beyond that needs restructuring.
• Attributes and specifications: decide which become options, which become filterable metafields, which are shown as specifications, and which are dropped.
• Categories: mapped to collections and menus.
• Images: in the right order, with alt text.
• Customers: names, addresses, tags and marketing consent. Passwords can’t move; plan how customers will sign in.
• Orders: historical orders imported after products and customers, as Shopify recommends, with staff notifications switched off first.
• Reviews: exported from the old review tool and imported into the new one.
• Discount codes you still use, and any gift card balances.
• Pages and blog posts, with their images and internal links.
• Trade customers: companies, price lists and payment terms, mapped to Shopify B2B where needed.

3. SEO

SEO work starts before the build, not at launch. The baseline you capture now is what lets you prove, a month later, that rankings and organic revenue came through the move.

• Baseline captured: a full crawl, Search Console clicks by page and query, organic revenue by landing page, backlinked URLs and tracked rankings.
• Redirect map built: every old URL mapped to its new Shopify URL, including categories, content, discontinued products and filter URLs that earn traffic.
• Redirect chains collapsed so old redirects point straight to the new address.
• Titles and meta descriptions carried over or improved.
• Category copy and content present in the new templates.
• Structured data for products, reviews and breadcrumbs in the theme.
• Internal links inside content updated to new URLs.

My Shopify migration SEO guide covers each of these in depth, including Shopify’s redirect limits and rules.

4. Design and build

A migration is the cheapest moment you’ll ever have to improve your store’s design, because the data and templates are being rebuilt anyway. Even a like-for-like rebuild should be checked against this list, page type by page type.

• Templates for every page type: home, collection, product, search, cart, account, blog, pages and 404.
• Navigation that keeps important categories as reachable as they were.
• Filters built on the structured product data.
• Product pages that show what buyers need: options, specifications, delivery, returns and reviews.
• Mobile first. Check every template at phone width, where most shoppers browse.
• Speed: native theme code, compressed images, and only the apps you really need.
• Accessibility basics: readable text, sufficient contrast, labelled forms and alt text.

5. Integrations

Every system that reads or writes orders, stock or customers needs a named owner and a test. Integrations are the most common source of surprises in a migration, so list them early and confirm each one has a Shopify route before the build starts.

• Payments: Shopify Payments or your existing provider, plus any finance or buy-now-pay-later options.
• Shipping: rates, zones, couriers, click and collect, and label printing.
• Tax: VAT settings, tax-inclusive pricing and VAT number on invoices.
• Stock, EPOS and ERP: which system is the master for stock and product data, and how often it syncs.
• Accounting: orders, payouts and refunds flowing into your accounts package.
• Email marketing: subscriber lists with consent, flows and templates reconnected.
• Feeds and marketplaces: Google Merchant Center, Amazon, eBay and any comparison sites.
• Customer service tools: live chat, help desk and returns portals.

6. Tracking and consent

Tracking is invisible to customers and critical to you. If it’s wrong at launch, every report and every ad platform decision for the following weeks is built on bad data.

• Analytics installed and receiving data, with ecommerce events such as purchases and add-to-basket.
• Ad platform tracking for Google Ads, Meta and any others you use, with conversions checked against real test orders.
• Cookie consent set up so tracking respects your visitors’ choices, in line with UK rules.
• Search Console verified for the domain, ready for the new sitemap.
• Old tracking removed from anything that might double-count.

The simplest proof that tracking works is a handful of real test orders placed on the finished store before launch, each one checked in analytics and in every ad platform, with the right value and the right currency. If any of them is missing or doubled, fix it before the domain switches, not after.

Tracking is the item most often left to the end and most often broken at launch. Ad platforms that optimise on broken conversion data spend your budget badly until someone notices.

7. Policies and legal pages

These pages are rarely anyone’s favourite job, which is exactly why they get left behind. They need to describe how the new store actually works: the apps it uses, the checkout, delivery and returns.

• Privacy and cookie policies updated to name Shopify and any new apps that process customer data.
• Terms, delivery and returns pages moved across and checked against how the new checkout works.
• Company details shown as your current site shows them, such as registered name, address and VAT number.
• Customer communication: an email ready to explain the new store and how to sign in.

This isn’t legal advice; if your policies need reviewing, a solicitor is the right person. The point is not to let them fall through the gap between the old store and the new one.

8. Testing

Testing is where you find the problems your customers would otherwise find for you. Test on the finished store, with real payment methods, before the domain is switched, and keep a simple log of what was tested and by whom.

• Real orders, placed and refunded, for every payment method, including finance options.
• Discount codes, gift cards and free-shipping thresholds tested at checkout.
• Shipping rates for each zone and service.
• Tax on orders, invoices and refunds.
• Stock sync both ways with your EPOS or ERP.
• Emails: order confirmation, shipping, refund and account notifications, branded and correct.
• Devices and browsers: the full journey on phones, tablets and desktop.
• Redirect sample from the map, before the full bulk test at launch.

Who does what

Whoever runs the migration, some items can only come from you. Agreeing who owns each one at the start saves days later.

On my migrations, the retailer’s side usually comes to an hour or two a week, mostly decisions and sign-offs.

Launch day

1. Content freezeNo new products or price changes on the old store from the agreed time.
2. Final data syncCustomers and orders placed since the main import brought across.
3. Redirects loadedThe full map imported into Shopify.
4. DNS switchedOnly the website records changed, so email keeps working. Shopify’s Plus launch checklist suggests lowering the DNS TTL to 300 seconds about a week before, so the switch is quick.
5. Password page off and indexing allowedThe store opened to customers and search engines.
6. Bulk redirect test and top-page checksEvery old URL requested; the most valuable pages opened by hand.
7. Sitemap submitted, tracking checkedSearch Console updated, and the first real orders confirmed in analytics and ad platforms.
8. Customer email sentExplaining the new store and how to sign in.

The 30 days after

Launch isn’t the finish line. The month after is when hidden problems surface, and when they’re cheapest to fix.

• Daily Search Console checks for 404s, crawl errors and pages dropping out of the index.
• Rankings and organic revenue compared with the baseline. Google says rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls, so watch the trend.
• Missing redirects added as old URLs turn up in reports.
• Orders, payments, stock and tracking checked every day for the first fortnight.
• Customer feedback gathered from the team and from customer service.
• The old platform cancelled only once everything is confirmed, with a final export kept for your records.

At the end of the month, write a short review: organic clicks and revenue against the baseline, conversion rate, any pages that haven’t recovered and what’s being done about them, open issues from the team and customers, and the list of apps and subscriptions you’re now paying for. That one page tells you whether the migration did its job, and it becomes the starting point for improving the new store rather than just keeping it running.

My package includes 30 days of post-launch fixes for exactly this period. For the full service, see my Shopify migration service.

Doing it yourself, or not

Every item on this list can be done in-house by a capable team, and small stores often do exactly that with a migration app and a good theme. For an established retailer, the risk sits in the items that are easy to underestimate: the redirect map, the data restructuring, the integrations and the tracking.

My Shopify migration package covers the whole list, from $19,997 USD, or £14,997 + VAT for UK clients, with flexible plans depending on the deposit paid. I’m UK-based and work remotely with retailers all over the world. Outside the UK, the package starts from $19,997 with no VAT, quoted in US dollars after the free store audit. If you’re comparing providers, my guide to choosing a Shopify migration agency has the questions to ask.

When you need less than this

• A small shop with little traffic can skip much of the SEO and integration work and use a migration app.
• A store already on Shopify changing its theme keeps its data and URLs; the design, tracking and testing sections still apply.
• A brand-new store has nothing to migrate, and should start with the design and integration sections.

Shopify migration checklist: FAQ

Sources

Import order and historical orders: Shopify Help Center, “Migrating to Shopify”, accessed 24 October 2026. DNS TTL and delta migration: Shopify Help Center, Shopify Plus launch checklist, accessed 24 October 2026. Options and variant limits: Shopify Help Center and changelog, 15 October 2025. Customer passwords and accounts: Shopify Help Center, accessed 24 October 2026. Ranking fluctuation after moves: Google Search Central, “Site moves with URL changes”, updated 20 August 2026. KA Consultancy process, prices and proof points as published on the Shopify migration services page.