Magento to Shopify Migration: The Complete Guide (2026)

If you’re running a Magento store and asking whether it’s time to move, you’re not alone. Rising hosting costs, patching overhead, and a shrinking pool of Magento developers have pushed a lot of UK merchants toward the same question this year, and a growing number are turning to a specialist magento development agency to weigh up the options properly.

This guide covers why businesses are making the switch and, more importantly, exactly what the migration process involves from first audit to go-live.

What Does a Magento-to-Shopify Move Actually Involve?

Moving from Magento to Shopify means shifting your entire storefront, catalogue, customer base, and order history off a self-hosted, PHP-based platform and onto Shopify’s managed SaaS infrastructure. It’s a rebuild, not a copy-paste job. Magento gives you granular control over layout XML and custom modules. Shopify trades that flexibility for a locked-down checkout and infrastructure you no longer have to maintain yourself.

Why UK Businesses Are Choosing to Migrate

Two reasons come up constantly in conversations we have with merchants: cost and talent. Magento Open Source is free to licence but not to run, since server infrastructure, patching, and extension conflicts eat developer hours month after month, a problem sharpened by Adobe’s MySQL 8.0 support changes. Magento talent is also getting harder and pricier to find, while Shopify’s simpler Liquid-based stack means faster hiring. Buyer behaviour backs this up too.

McKinsey’s B2B Pulse research shows a majority of “seeker” buyers are now willing to spend $500,000 or more through remote or self-service channels alone, so checkout speed matters more than ever. None of this makes Magento a bad platform; complex, highly customised operations often still belong there. But if a lighter maintenance load matters more than deep customisation, the case for moving is real.

Magento to Shopify Migration: What Actually Transfers

Products, customers, and order history can all move across, but not cleanly and not automatically. Products import via CSV, though Shopify caps you at 100 variants and three options per product, so heavily configured catalogues often need restructuring first. Customer records transfer too, but passwords never do, so every customer resets theirs after launch. Category trees don’t survive the move either; Magento’s nested structure has to be rebuilt as flat Shopify collections with menus recreated by hand.

Magento to Shopify Migration  – How to Do It

Here’s what the process actually looks like once you’ve decided to go ahead.

Step 1: Audit your existing Magento store.

Before touching any data, document your catalogue size, custom logic, third-party integrations (ERP, CRM, on-site search), and any multi-store or multi-region setup. This tells you what genuinely needs rebuilding versus what can be simplified. Skipping this step is the single most common reason migrations run over budget.

Step 2: Back up and clean your Magento data.

Use Magento’s built-in backup tools under System, Tools, Backups, or export your catalogue, customer, and order data in CSV format instead. Either way, keep a copy somewhere safe before you go further. While you’re at it, remove discontinued products, deduplicate customer records, and standardise SKUs and attribute values. Messy source data causes most of the “missing product” issues merchants run into later.

Step 3: Set up a private Shopify staging store.

Create your Shopify account under a myshopify.com subdomain and disable indexing so search engines don’t crawl it early. Configure your core settings first: currency, tax registration, shipping zones, payment gateways, and legal pages. Keep your Magento site live throughout this stage so trading isn’t disrupted.

Step 4: Import products, then customers, then orders

Sequencing genuinely matters here. Shopify links each order to existing product and customer records, so importing out of sequence leaves you with incomplete or orphaned order data. Tools such as Matrixify or LitExtension handle the heavy lifting, mapping Magento attributes to Shopify’s tags, options, and metafields as they go.

Step 5: Rebuild CMS pages, category structure, and custom logic.

Shopify has no CSV import for content, so static pages, homepage sections, and blog posts need manual recreation using a theme editor or a page builder. Bundled or grouped products, customer-group pricing, and any bespoke checkout logic also need rebuilding with apps rather than assuming they’ll transfer as-is.

Step 6: Reapply your SEO metadata.

Meta titles, descriptions, canonical tags, and structured data don’t carry over automatically. Rebuild these across product, collection, and content pages before you think about going live, not after.

Step 7: Test thoroughly, then go live with a full redirect map.

Run through navigation, checkout, tax calculation, and every form on desktop and mobile before switching your domain over. Once you do go live, upload a complete 301 redirect map immediately, since Shopify’s fixed URL paths won’t match Magento’s, and a gap here means lost rankings.

Step 8: Communicate the password reset and monitor closely.

Send customers a clear email explaining the move and prompting a password reset, since encryption differences mean their old credentials simply won’t work. Then keep a close eye on crawl errors, failed orders, and support tickets for the first few weeks. That’s usually where any missed edge case from the audit stage finally shows up.

Understanding the Cost of Moving from Magento to Shopify

There’s no single figure that applies to every store, and anyone quoting one without seeing your catalogue first should raise an eyebrow. Magento to Shopify migration cost depends heavily on catalogue complexity, the volume of historical order data, how many integrations you’re carrying over, and how much custom logic needs rebuilding rather than simply reconfiguring. A straightforward catalogue with a few hundred SKUs costs considerably less than a multi-region B2B operation with tiered pricing and deep ERP integration. Ongoing Shopify subscription fees and app licences for features Magento gave you natively also factor into the total. Scoping comes before pricing, every time.

Common Migration Pitfalls Worth Planning For

Most migration headaches trace back to a handful of avoidable mistakes. Rushing the audit is a big one, since it means missing business logic gets discovered weeks after launch. Submitting your sitemap before internal links are fully updated is another, as it can get outdated URLs indexed or important pages missed. Underestimating the CMS rebuild is common too; merchants often assume content “just moves,” then find themselves manually recreating pages days before launch. Treating SEO as an afterthought is the biggest risk of the lot, and it deserves as much planning time as the data migration itself.

Getting the Right Support

Whether you decide to move or stay, the platform choice matters less than the team executing it. A specialist Magento support agency understands the platform’s internals well enough to extract data cleanly, flag custom logic that won’t transfer automatically, and avoid the data-loss mistakes that plague DIY migrations.

If your business still needs ongoing Magento development services during a transition period, or you’re weighing whether migration is even the right move for your setup, that’s worth discussing before you commit either way.

chillicommerce works across both platforms, which means the advice you get is about what fits your business, not which platform we’d rather sell you. Get in touch with our team for a straight assessment of your migration options and what they’d realistically cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Magento to Shopify migration typically take?

A typical ecommerce migration takes about 12–20 weeks from discovery to launch. Smaller stores may finish in 4–8 weeks, while complex builds with custom integrations, testing, and hypercare can stretch to 4–6 months or more.

Can I keep my Magento SEO rankings after migrating?

Largely, yes, provided you build a complete 301 redirect map and reapply metadata before submitting your new sitemap. Rankings dip if redirects are incomplete or internal links still point to old Magento URLs, so this step shouldn’t be rushed.

Do customer passwords transfer to Shopify?

No. Encryption differences between the two platforms mean passwords can never migrate directly. Every customer will need to reset theirs after launch, so plan a clear communication campaign around this well before go-live.

What are the typical costs associated with replatforming an online store in UK?

Replatforming costs vary widely. Simple migrations can start around £8,000–£18,500, while mid-market projects often run £25,000–£120,000. Complex enterprise migrations can exceed £150,000 when custom integrations, ERP work, and SEO protection are included.