Thinking of moving to Shopify but terrified of losing your Google rankings, your customer data — or a week of sales during the switch? That fear is justified: a careless migration loses all three. RouteIgnite has moved stores from WooCommerce, Wix, Magento and custom platforms onto Shopify without dropping orders mid-transition. 15+ years of e-commerce experience means we’ve seen every migration trap and dug stores out of most of them.
Why Stores Leave Their Old Platform
- WooCommerce fatigue. Plugin conflicts, hosting bills, security patches, a site that breaks every time WordPress updates. Your weekends belong to maintenance instead of the business. (Deciding honestly? Read Shopify vs WooCommerce.)
- Wix/Squarespace ceilings. Fine for a launch, limiting at scale — weak inventory logic, thin app ecosystems, poor checkout control.
- Magento overkill. Enterprise machinery with enterprise costs, running a store that needs a fraction of it.
What a Safe Migration Includes
- Full data migration. Products with variants and images, customer accounts, order history, reviews, discount codes — mapped and verified, not “mostly transferred”.
- SEO preservation. The step everyone botches. Every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new home; titles, descriptions and schema carry over. Your rankings took years to earn — they move with you.
- Design rebuild, not copy-paste. Migration is the cheapest moment to fix what wasn’t working. Your new store is built conversion-ready through our development process — see what “conversion-ready” means there.
- Parallel-run launch. The new store goes live only after testing against the old one — payments, shipping rules, tax settings, emails. Cutover happens in a low-traffic window; the old store keeps selling until the second we switch.
- Post-move monitoring. Two weeks of ranking, traffic and order watching, so any anomaly is caught while it’s trivial. Most clients then roll into maintenance.
What Migration Costs and How Long It Takes
A typical NCR store migration runs 3–6 weeks depending on catalogue size and redirect complexity. Pricing follows the same fixed-quote rule as our builds — audit first, itemised number, no surprises. For context on build economics, see the Shopify cost guide for India — migration typically lands 10–20% above an equivalent fresh build because of data and SEO work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will I lose my Google rankings?+
Not with proper 301 mapping — expect minor fluctuation for 2–4 weeks, then recovery. The disasters you’ve read about come from skipped redirects, which is why redirect mapping is the first document we produce.
Does my store go offline during the move?+
No. The old store sells until the new one is tested and live. Cutover itself takes minutes, scheduled at your quietest hour.
Can you migrate my customer passwords?+
Passwords can’t move between platforms (they’re encrypted differently — that’s a good thing). Customers get a friendly one-time reset flow; accounts, addresses and order history all carry over intact.