Migrating to Shopify in 2026: The Complete UK Guide
A migration to Shopify takes four to twenty-four weeks and costs between £8,000 and £80,000 in the UK, depending on where you’re coming from and how much of your business logic has to come with you. The technical move is rarely the hard part. Preserving your search rankings and translating a data model that wasn’t designed for Shopify is where migrations succeed or fail.
Why 2026 is pushing brands off legacy platforms
If you’re on Magento, the timeline has become a genuine forcing function. Adobe’s lifecycle schedule has been steadily closing support windows: 2.4.4 reached end of support in April 2026, 2.4.5 in August 2026, and Magento Open Source 2.4.6 receives no security patches, bug fixes or technical support after 11 August 2026. Adobe’s extended support is available to Adobe Commerce licence holders only — it does not cover the Open Source codebase.
Running an unsupported Magento version isn’t an abstract risk. It’s a PCI compliance problem, and Magento’s history of card-skimming attacks against unpatched stores is well documented.
For WooCommerce and BigCommerce merchants there’s no deadline, and the decision is usually driven by maintenance burden rather than urgency.
What a migration costs
| Coming from | Typical UK cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce | £8,000–£25,000 | 4–10 weeks |
| BigCommerce | £8,000–£20,000 | 4–8 weeks |
| Magento 1 | £15,000–£50,000 | 8–16 weeks |
| Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce | £20,000–£80,000 | 10–24 weeks |
| Magento with B2B + ERP | £50,000–£200,000+ | 16–36 weeks |
| Shopify → Shopify Plus | £15,000–£60,000 | 6–16 weeks |
Magento 1 is usually cheaper to migrate than Magento 2, which surprises people. Magento 1 stores have thinner extension ecosystems and simpler data models. Magento 2 stores have accumulated more custom modules, and every one of them is a decision.
The data model problem nobody warns you about
This is the part that determines your timeline, and it’s technical, so it tends to get glossed over in sales conversations.
Magento uses EAV. Entity-Attribute-Value — a flexible schema where a product can have arbitrary attributes defined at runtime. Shopify does not work this way. Shopify has a fixed product structure with up to three options and a defined set of fields, extended through metafields.
Translating one to the other is a genuine architectural exercise, not an export and import. A Magento configurable product with eight attributes doesn’t have a Shopify equivalent — it has a Shopify design decision, and the wrong decision here is expensive to unwind after launch.
Customer groups become B2B catalogues. Magento’s customer group pricing maps to Shopify B2B company locations and price lists, which is a cleaner model but a different one.
Multi-store becomes Markets or expansion stores. Magento’s store view hierarchy has no direct Shopify analogue. You’re choosing between Shopify Markets, expansion stores, or consolidating — and the right answer depends on tax, currency and catalogue divergence, not on how it was structured before.
Custom modules have to be re-decided, not ported. Every Magento extension is now a question: does native Shopify cover this, is there an app, does it need a custom build, or was it solving a problem you no longer have? A meaningful proportion of legacy modules fall into that last category.
Protecting your SEO
The single biggest fear about replatforming, and the one that’s most manageable if handled properly.
Map every URL before you build. Every legacy URL needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. Not just products — categories, CMS pages, filtered URLs that have accumulated links, blog posts, and any URL with external links pointing at it. Export your full URL list from your current platform, cross-reference it against Search Console and your backlink profile, and build the redirect map as a deliverable in its own right.
Shopify’s URL structure is fixed. You cannot remove /products/ or /collections/ from paths. This means your URLs will change regardless of what you want, which is exactly why the redirect map matters.
Preserve structured data. Product schema, breadcrumbs, reviews and organisation markup need rebuilding on the new theme. Losing rich results is a quiet, measurable traffic hit.
Keep metadata. Titles and descriptions migrate with the data if you plan for it, and get regenerated as theme defaults if you don’t.
Monitor daily for the first month. Search Console coverage and 404 reports, checked every day for the first fortnight and weekly after. Migrations that lose rankings usually lose them to problems that were fixable in week one and weren’t noticed until month three.
A well-executed migration typically sees a short dip and full recovery within four to eight weeks. Some improve, because Shopify’s performance and Core Web Vitals out of the box are better than a poorly maintained legacy store.
The migration sequence
1. Audit (1–2 weeks). Full inventory: product count and structure, custom modules, integrations, URL list, third-party services, payment and shipping configuration. Nothing is scoped accurately without this.
2. Architecture decisions (1 week). How the data model translates. Which extensions survive as apps, which as custom builds, which get dropped. Markets vs expansion stores. B2B structure. These decisions are cheap now and expensive in week ten.
3. Data migration and cleaning (2–6 weeks). Products, variants, customers, order history, content. Migration is the right moment to clean twelve years of accumulated catalogue mess — you will not get a better one.
4. Theme build (4–12 weeks). Runs in parallel with data.
5. Integrations (4–12 weeks). ERP, warehouse, accounts, 3PL, email. Often the critical path. See our ERP integration guide.
6. Testing (2–3 weeks). Checkout across every payment method, tax across every market, shipping across every rate, the full order-to-fulfilment path. Test with real edge cases from your existing order history, not with tidy invented ones.
7. Cutover. Lower DNS TTL in advance, deploy redirects at the moment of switch, monitor continuously. Done properly, customers see nothing.
8. Post-launch (4–8 weeks). Daily SEO monitoring, bug triage, and the changes the business only thinks of once it can see the thing running.
What goes wrong
Order history is treated as optional. It isn’t — your returns process, customer service and lifetime value reporting all depend on it. Decide early how much history comes across, because it affects the approach.
Integrations get scoped last. The storefront is visible so it gets attention; the ERP connection is invisible so it gets deferred. Then it becomes the thing that delays launch by six weeks.
Nobody owns the redirect map. It falls between the developer and the SEO, and ships incomplete.
Launching into peak. Q4 is the hardest window to migrate into. If the question is “can we go live in November”, the safer answer is usually to wait.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a Shopify migration take? Four to ten weeks from WooCommerce or BigCommerce, ten to twenty-four weeks from Magento, longer with B2B and ERP integration in scope.
What happens to my Google rankings? A platform migration can affect rankings either way. Redirects, metadata and structured data are mapped before launch and the store is monitored afterwards, which is what the outcome usually turns on. A complete redirect map is the single most important part.
Can I migrate my order history? Yes, though it’s more involved than products and customers. Decide how many years you need — most businesses need two to three for returns and support.
Do I have to rebuild my theme? Yes. Themes are platform-specific; there’s no way to bring a Magento or WooCommerce theme across. The migration is the natural moment for a redesign, though keeping the design close to the existing one reduces risk if the current site converts well.
What about my apps and extensions? Each one needs a decision. Many have direct Shopify equivalents, some are covered natively, and some need custom development. The audit stage exists to answer this.
Is Shopify cheaper than Magento? For most mid-market brands, yes — self-hosted Magento carries hosting, DevOps, security patching and PCI maintenance that Shopify absorbs. The comparison depends heavily on whether you currently pay for those properly or are quietly under-investing in them.
Can I migrate myself? For a small WooCommerce store with a simple catalogue, plausibly. Past a few hundred products, or with any integration or B2B requirement, the failure modes get expensive quickly.
When should I not migrate? When your current platform works, your team knows it, and nothing is blocked. Replatforming because a competitor did is an expensive way to stand still.
What’s the best time of year to migrate in the UK? January to September. Avoid launching anywhere near Black Friday or the Christmas trading period.
Do I need Shopify Plus to migrate? No. Migrate to the plan your business needs. Moving to Plus later is straightforward; moving down from it is not. Our Shopify vs Plus guide covers where the line sits.
Last reviewed July 2026. Adobe’s Magento lifecycle dates should be confirmed against Adobe’s published software lifecycle policy.
Planning a move off Magento or WooCommerce? We handle UK replatforms including B2B and ERP integration, with the redirect and data work treated as first-class deliverables. Get in touch.