There’s a good chance that when you first built your Magento site, Shopify wasn’t a viable alternative for your scale. That’s probably changed and now you’re scoping out the project.
Unfortunately, Magento being built on PHP and integrated into the Adobe Experience ecosystem means there’s no quick “Migrate” button, and it’s going to be a bit of a project.
At FreshConstruct we’ve done several of these migrations, and while they’re not easy, they’re fairly methodical.
Here are the basic steps, but each website will present different challenges. We’re happy to help if you’re stuck on any of them – just pop me a mail on LinkedIn or on the FreshConstruct site and we can jump on a call.
- Make a Plan
- Assess your current Magento store, including data structure, extensions, and customizations.
- Map out any functionality you need to preserve, like custom checkout
- Identify the data you need to migrate, such as products, customers, orders, and other relevant information.
- Analyze your theme and design elements to determine the scope of the migration.
- Really Compare the costs
- Shopify’s costs aren’t entirely transparent, or easy to forecast, when you factor in transaction costs, payment gateway costs (which may change), and subscription costs to third party apps you may need to replace functionality
- Make a detailed analysis of costs and get it checked by someone who knows Shopify well
- Create a Shopify Account – the setup only takes a couple hours, provided you know which tier you want and have budget approval
- Back up Magento
- Export product data, customer information, order history, and other relevant data from your Magento store.
- Use Magento's built-in export tools or third-party extensions to facilitate the process.
- Convert data to Shopify’s format
- The format is very straightforward, but it’s worth doing a mapping exercise and understanding all of Shopify’s data fields before you start.
- However, if you miss something it’s very easy to re-upload with additional fields
- Configure your Shopify store. You’ll need to set up things like:
- Contact forms (and any CRM integrations)
- Checkouts – a lot of config options available in Shopify but check if you need to build anything custom
- Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, etc – Shopify has neat little blocks to paste them into, and boilerplate templates to start from. But make sure you spend the time customizing them, or paste your own over them.
- Analytics/Advertising platform integrations. Chances are you already have software to do this, but Shopify’s native functionality may be a quick win if you need to trim scope
- Import your data
- Start with products, THEN customers and finally orders – this will maintain your data dependencies
- Recreate (or re-imagine!) your site’s theme and styles
- Shopify’s out-the-box themes are actually pretty incredible, especially if you’re able to tinker with them yourself. You might be surprised that you can get one of their standard themes almost where you want it with little effort.
- Update your links and redirects
- Your internal link structure needs to be mapped and updated. Things will shift around unless you make a huge effort to replicate it exactly.
- Set your new page of 301 redirects up
- Test everything
- Update DNS and go live
- Establish tolerances for key metrics, and monitor
- You need to have some guardrail metrics or key gauges to make sure the migration has been a success
- In the beginning you’re not necessarily looking for equal or better – just that none of your main metrics have tanked. You can always iterate if performance is on a par or slightly worse
Easy as that, right? These are the high level steps, but since every website is different, and Magento sites are usually more complex than the average small online store.
For expert help, advice, and a free website migration plan get in touch with FreshConstruct on our website, or reach out to me directly here on LinkedIn, and we’ll get it done for you.
