WordPress to Shopify migration (beyond WooCommerce)

Migrating a WordPress site to Shopify is a content migration first and a product migration second. Pages, blog posts, media, authors, categories, and — above all — URLs have to move cleanly, or you lose the SEO you spent years building. Products are the easy part. Budget ₹1,25,000 to ₹4,00,000 (about $1,500 to $4,800) and three to six weeks.

I am a senior Shopify developer in Delhi, and most "WooCommerce migration" jobs I take on are actually WordPress migrations — the client has a content site with a store bolted on, and the blog is carrying more organic traffic than the shop. This is the version that accounts for all of it.

WordPress migration vs WooCommerce migration — what's the difference?

WooCommerce is a plugin that turns WordPress into a store. So every WooCommerce migration is a WordPress migration — but not every WordPress migration involves a store. Three common cases:

• Brochure WordPress site — pages, a blog, a contact form, no products. You are moving content and rebuilding the site on Shopify because you now want to sell.
• WordPress + WooCommerce — a content site with a store attached. Both the blog and the catalog move. This is the most common and the one people underestimate.
• Content-heavy WordPress with a small store — a media or editorial brand where the blog is the main asset and the shop is secondary. Here the blog port and redirect map matter more than the products.

The mistake is treating all three as "just move the products." If you have a WooCommerce catalog to move as well, the product-side detail is in my WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide — this post covers the content that the product-focused guides skip.

What actually moves from WordPress to Shopify?

Here is the honest inventory. Some of it ports cleanly, some needs a mapping decision, and some has no home on Shopify and must be replaced.

The pattern: data ports, layout and functionality do not. Anyone quoting you a two-day migration is quoting the data and ignoring the two-thirds of the work that is layout, redirects, and plugin replacement.

How do I export content out of WordPress?

WordPress gives you two clean export paths, and you will usually use both:

1. Tools → Export (WXR XML). This gives you pages, posts, categories, tags, authors, and comments as a single XML file. It is the backbone of the content migration. It does not reliably carry media files — those are referenced by URL, not embedded.
2. Database + /wp-content/uploads for media. Your images, PDFs, and downloads live in the uploads folder. Pull them so you can re-host on Shopify's CDN and rewrite the paths inside your content.

For WooCommerce products specifically, do not rely on the XML export — use a purpose-built migration app or the Shopify API for variants, images, and metafields. The general export is for the content layer; the store layer needs the product-grade tooling covered in the migration checklist for D2C brands.

The trap in the export step is inline media and internal links. Every WordPress post body contains hard-coded links to yoursite.com/old-path/ and yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/image.jpg. After migration those paths change. If you import the raw XML and stop, you end up with hundreds of posts full of broken internal links and images pointing at a domain path that no longer serves them. The bodies have to be find-replaced to the new Shopify paths — this is the single most-skipped step in DIY WordPress migrations.

How do I map WordPress URLs to Shopify (the redirect part)?

This is where SEO is won or lost. WordPress and Shopify use different URL structures, and Shopify is opinionated about prefixes you cannot change.

Shopify forces /pages/, /blogs/, /products/, and /collections/ prefixes. So every old WordPress URL changes, which means every old URL needs a 301 redirect to its new home. The redirect map is not optional — it is the deliverable that preserves your rankings.

Practical steps I follow:

1. Pull the full URL list. Export from the WordPress sitemap, Google Search Console (Pages report), and Screaming Frog. Union the three so nothing is missed — especially old blog posts you forgot existed but that still rank.
2. Map every URL, one to one. Old → new. Blog posts first (they carry the ranking value), then pages, then category and tag archives.
3. Handle dated permalinks. WordPress sites on /YYYY/MM/slug/ permalinks generate a lot of URLs. Shopify drops the date; the redirect must strip it.
4. Decide category strategy. WordPress categories can become Shopify blogs (Shopify treats a "blog" as a category container) or tags. Redirect old /category/ archives accordingly.
5. Load redirects in Shopify. Bulk-upload the map via Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects (CSV import) or an app for large sets.

Get this right and reindexing is a blip. Skip it and you drop the traffic that made the site worth migrating. The mechanics of protecting rankings across a move are covered in depth in migrating without losing SEO.

How do I port a WordPress blog to Shopify's blog engine?

Shopify has a native blog, and for content marketing it is genuinely capable — articles, multiple blogs used as categories, tags, authors, featured images, and comments. It is not WordPress, and that is the point of this section: knowing what carries and what changes.

What ports cleanly: post title, body HTML, author name, publish date, featured image, tags, and excerpt. A well-structured WordPress blog lands as a Shopify blog with articles that look and read the same.

What needs a decision:

• Taxonomy. WordPress lets you nest categories and stack multiple categories per post. Shopify gives you one "blog" (container) per article plus flat tags. You have to flatten your taxonomy — pick the primary category as the Shopify blog, and push the rest to tags.
• Custom post types and fields. If your WordPress site uses ACF or custom post types (recipes, case studies, docs), there is no direct equivalent. These become Shopify pages, metaobjects, or metafields — a modelling exercise, not a copy-paste.
• Media in post bodies. Re-host every inline image on Shopify's CDN and rewrite the src. Leaving them pointed at the old WordPress uploads folder means broken images the day you turn off the old host.
• Comments. Shopify has basic native comments; if you ran Disqus or a heavy comment plugin, decide whether comments come across at all.

For an editorial brand, the blog is the asset — treat the port as the main event, not an afterthought bolted onto the store migration. If your content strategy leans on getting cited by AI assistants, structure the ported articles for it while you are in there; the approach is in how D2C brands show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity.

How long does a WordPress to Shopify migration take?

Timeline tracks content volume and complexity, not the platform switch. Rough guide:

The blog is usually the slow part. Porting and re-checking three hundred posts — links, images, formatting — takes far longer than importing a product catalog. Plan your cutover for a low-traffic window and keep the old WordPress site live but noindexed until the redirect map is verified. My timeline framework for any migration is in how long a Shopify migration takes.

What does it cost to migrate WordPress to Shopify?

Here is honest pricing for a done-for-you migration by a senior developer, content and store included:

USD is approximate at ₹83 to the dollar; content volume and plugin replacement drive the number more than product count.

What moves the price up: hundreds of blog posts (each needs link and image cleanup), plugin-heavy WooCommerce checkouts, custom post types that need remodelling into metaobjects, and page-builder layouts (Elementor, Divi) that have to be rebuilt as clean Shopify sections rather than ported. A brochure site with a clean redirect map is quick; an editorial site with a decade of posts is not. Detailed migration bands are on my Shopify migration expert page.

On the running side, remember you are also swapping WordPress's variable hosting-plus-plugin bills for a predictable Shopify subscription — roughly ₹1,994/mo on Basic or ₹7,447/mo on the Shopify plan (as of 2026, verify on shopify.com/in/pricing). No more separate hosting, security plugins, or page-builder licences. The full running-cost picture is in what a Shopify store costs to build in India.

What breaks, and how to protect it

Three things break on a WordPress migration, in order of how much damage they do:

1. URLs. Different structure, forced prefixes. A missing redirect on a post that ranks is lost traffic. The redirect map is the protection — build it before launch, not after.
2. Internal links and inline media. Post bodies are full of hard-coded old-domain paths. Find-replace them to new paths or you ship hundreds of broken links and images.
3. Plugin functionality. Forms, membership, SEO metadata, WooCommerce subscriptions, page builders — none auto-port. Each active plugin needs a Shopify app, a theme feature, or a conscious decision to drop it.

Product and content data migrate reliably. The risk is never the data — it is the URLs, the links inside your content, and the functionality your plugins provided. Those are the three things a real migration plans for and a cheap one ignores.

What's next

If you are moving a WordPress site — brochure, blog, or WordPress-plus-WooCommerce — to Shopify and want it done without losing rankings, the Shopify migration expert page lays out how I run migrations: full 301 redirect mapping, blog and content port, plugin replacement, and a clean Online Store 2.0 rebuild, with a fixed price and Definition of Done before any work starts.

Tell me your setup — page count, roughly how many blog posts, whether WooCommerce is involved, and your current SEO traffic — on the project intake and I will give you an honest fixed number and timeline within 24 hours.

Related reads

• WooCommerce to Shopify migration: cost, timeline & what breaks — the product-side detail for the store half of the move.
• How to migrate to Shopify without losing SEO — the redirect and reindexing playbook in full.
• Shopify migration checklist for Indian D2C brands — the end-to-end sequence in a checklist.

Sources

• Shopify — importing your blog posts
• WordPress — exporting your content (Tools → Export)
• Google Search Central — site moves with URL changes