Migrating & comparing
Moving a store to Shopify and comparing platforms: WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Lightspeed and Tilroy, and how to keep your rankings and data.
Most stores come to Shopify from somewhere else. The comparison decides whether to move; the migration decides whether you keep what you have built on the way over: your rankings, your customer accounts and your order history.
Comparing platforms
Each platform makes a different trade-off. WooCommerce and PrestaShop give you full control and leave hosting, updates and security with you. Lightspeed and Tilroy start from the shop floor and its tills. Shopify takes the infrastructure off your hands and puts the effort into the store itself. The right choice depends on where your store is heading, not only on where it is today.
What a migration involves
Products, variants, collections and images
Customers and order history
Content: pages, blog posts and navigation
A redirect for every old URL that has rankings or links
Tracking, apps and integrations rebuilt on Shopify
The redirect map is the part that protects your search traffic, and the part most often left until last. We start with it. Read how in Technical SEO migration.
From your platform
We have written up the move from each platform we migrate from: WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Lightspeed and Tilroy.
Articles
- Migration
Technical SEO migration: redirects, canonicals and crawl budget made simple
Plan your SEO migration without losing rankings. A practical checklist, tools, costs and growth strategy for founders, marketers and e-commerce teams.
Wout Blockx- Migration
Which CMS Best Boosts Your SEO? WordPress, Shopify, or Headless
Discover how your CMS choice WordPress, Shopify, or Headless impacts SEO performance, website speed, and user experience. Make an informed decision.
Arthur Lauwers
- 301 redirectA 301 redirect permanently sends visitors and Google from an old URL to a new one. It is how you keep your rankings through a migration or a new URL structure.
- Website migrationWebsite migration means making major structural or technical changes to a site while protecting SEO, traffic and conversions. Learn how it works and key steps.
Questions
What people ask about this topic.
Not if the migration is planned around them. Every old URL with rankings or links needs a redirect to its new address, and content and structure need to carry over. Done well, traffic holds; done late, it drops.
Yes. Customers, orders, products and content can all be migrated. Customer passwords cannot be transferred, so customers set a new one; a clear email at launch takes care of that.
Most migrations take a few weeks to a few months, depending on catalog size, integrations and how much the design changes along the way.