Magento (now Adobe Commerce) was the right choice for a lot of UK retailers in 2015. In 2026 most of them are paying for flexibility they never use: a dedicated hosting stack, quarterly security patches, an agency retainer just to keep the lights on, and a checkout that converts worse than Shopify's out of the box. We have moved a range of brands off Magento — including B2B catalogues that everyone said "couldn't" run on Shopify — and the pattern is consistent enough to write down.
Should you actually migrate?
Migrate if two or more of these are true: your total platform cost (hosting + patches + agency) exceeds £2,000/month; your last major upgrade took more than a month; you cannot ship a new landing page without a developer; your checkout conversion is under 2% on mobile; or your team spends more time maintaining than selling.
Stay on Magento if you genuinely rely on deep ERP-driven customisation that Shopify's app ecosystem cannot replicate, or you sell configurable products with thousands of dependency rules. That is a smaller group than agencies selling Magento retainers will tell you.
| Concern | Magento 2 | Shopify / Shopify Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting & security | You own it (or pay someone to) | Included, PCI Level 1 |
| Checkout | Customisable, slower, often abandoned | Shop Pay; typically higher conversion |
| B2B | Native in Commerce (paid) | Native on Plus: companies, price lists, net terms |
| Multi-store | Multi-website | Shopify Markets or expansion stores |
| Typical UK monthly cost (mid-size) | £1,500–£6,000+ | £300–£2,000 (Plus from ~£1,900) |
Phase 1 — Audit and plan (weeks 1–2)
- Export everything twice. Products (with all attributes), categories, customers, orders (at least 3 years), reviews, gift cards, store credit, CMS pages and blog posts. The second export is your sanity check after import.
- Map Magento attributes to Shopify. Shopify has 3 options per product and 100 variants (2,000 on Plus with the new variant limits). Anything beyond that becomes metafields, a separate product, or a bundling app. Decide now.
- Crawl the old site. Screaming Frog every URL, its status, canonical, title and organic traffic (join with Search Console and GA4). This is the foundation of your redirect map.
- List every integration. ERP, WMS, PIM, email, reviews, loyalty, payment, shipping. For each: is there a Shopify app, a native feature, or does it need custom work?
- Choose Shopify vs Shopify Plus. B2B, checkout customisation, multiple stores or 100+ variants push you to Plus. See our Shopify vs Plus comparison.
Phase 2 — Build (weeks 3–8)
Build on a development store while Magento keeps trading. Do not touch the live domain until launch day.
- Theme. Start from a well-coded Online Store 2.0 theme and customise. A "pixel-perfect port" of your Magento design is usually a mistake — it ports the conversion problems too.
- Data import. Use Matrixify (Excelify) for products, customers and orders; it handles Magento's exports better than the native importer and supports metafields. Import products first, then customers, then orders (orders need both).
- Customer passwords cannot migrate. Shopify hashes differently. Plan a "we've upgraded, set a new password" email sequence in Klaviyo for launch week, or use Shopify's new passwordless customer accounts, which sidestep the problem entirely.
- Categories → collections. Magento's nested categories become collections plus a menu hierarchy. Use automated collections by tag or product type where you can; manual ones are a maintenance trap.
- B2B. On Plus, model Magento customer groups as Shopify Companies with catalogues (price lists), payment terms and locations. Trade gating that previously needed a Magento module is native.
- Apps replacing modules. Typical stack: Klaviyo (email), Judge.me or Okendo (reviews), Searchanise or Boost (search/filters), Shopify Bundles, Shopify Flow (automation). Keep the count low.
Phase 3 — SEO preservation (the part people rush)
Most traffic loss in migrations comes from three avoidable things: missing redirects, changed titles, and lost internal links.
- Redirect map for every URL with traffic or links. Magento URLs like
/mens/jackets/waterproof-jacket-blue.htmlbecome/products/waterproof-jacket-blue. Bulk upload to Shopify's URL Redirects (CSV, up to 100k). Map categories to collections and old CMS pages to new pages — do not send everything to the homepage. - Keep titles and H1s identical on launch. Improve them later, once rankings have settled (4–8 weeks). Changing URL and title on the same day doubles the re-evaluation.
- Re-implement structured data. Product, BreadcrumbList, Organization. Validate before launch.
- Preserve content. Category descriptions, buying guides, blog posts — all of it, with the same wording initially.
- Image file names. Shopify renames uploaded images; alt text is what carries over. Populate it in the import.
The WooCommerce to Shopify SEO guide covers the same principles in more depth; the redirect and monitoring plan is identical.
Phase 4 — Launch (one day, ideally Tuesday)
- Freeze Magento orders for a final delta import of orders/customers since the last sync.
- Lower DNS TTL 48 hours before. Point the domain to Shopify. Enable Shopify SSL.
- Verify redirects with a crawl of the old URL list — every one should return 301 to a 200.
- Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console. Add the new property if the domain protocol or www changed.
- Test checkout with a real card, test every payment method, test tax and shipping rules for GB, NI and EU.
- Send the "we've moved" email (with password reset if needed) that evening, not that morning.
Phase 5 — The 30 days after
Watch Search Console daily for 404s and coverage errors; fix any you missed within 24 hours. Compare organic sessions and revenue week on week to the same weeks last year. A 10–20% dip in weeks 1–3 is normal; it should recover by week 6–8. If it does not, the usual culprit is missed redirects on category URLs, which carry more authority than product URLs on most Magento sites.
Timelines and cost in the UK
A clean Magento-to-Shopify migration for a store with 500–5,000 SKUs takes 8–12 weeks with a specialist agency and costs roughly £12,000–£40,000 depending on B2B complexity, integrations and design. Complex Adobe Commerce estates with ERP middleware run £50,000+. The savings on hosting and retainers typically pay that back within 12–18 months — before counting the checkout conversion lift.
The best migration is boring. Same URLs redirected, same titles, same content, better checkout. Redesign after the rankings settle, not during.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take?
8–12 weeks for a typical UK store with up to 5,000 SKUs and standard integrations. Larger catalogues, B2B pricing structures or ERP middleware can extend that to 16+ weeks.
Will I lose SEO rankings moving from Magento to Shopify?
Not if redirects, titles and content are preserved. Expect a small temporary dip in the first 2–4 weeks while Google re-crawls. Stores that lose traffic permanently almost always skipped the redirect map or changed URLs and titles at the same time.
Can Shopify handle B2B like Magento?
On Shopify Plus, yes: company accounts, per-company price lists, net payment terms, quantity rules and multiple locations are native. Standard Shopify needs apps for trade gating.
Can customers keep their passwords?
No — password hashes cannot be migrated. Options are a password reset campaign at launch or switching to Shopify's passwordless customer accounts (one-time code login), which most brands now prefer.
Want this done for you?
Groweyo builds and runs the full e-commerce growth stack for UK brands — Shopify, paid media, Klaviyo, marketplaces and analytics. Free 30-minute consultation, no pitch deck.
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