WordPress to Shopify migration: cost, risks and who to hire

WordPress to Shopify migration services move your products, customers, orders, pages and Google rankings from a WordPress (usually WooCommerce) store to a new Shopify store. In India, open freelancer bids run from ₹12,500 to ₹50,000 for a small store (one WordPress to Shopify job drew 95 bids averaging ₹21,387), while overseas agencies publish $15,000 to $75,000 for stores with 500 to 5,000 products. The biggest risk is losing search traffic through missing redirects, and for a lot of stores the honest answer is that fixing the WooCommerce store costs less than moving it.

I'm Mohit, a freelance web developer in Gurugram. I build WooCommerce stores myself and set up Shopify stores with my e-commerce partners, so I have no reason to push you one way or the other.

What do WordPress to Shopify migration services include?

WordPress to Shopify migration services cover five jobs: moving your data, rebuilding your design, replacing your plugins with Shopify apps, protecting your SEO with redirects, and switching the domain over on launch day. A quote that only talks about "moving products" is covering one of the five.

Here is what each job means in plain words.

Moving the data. Products, product photos, customers and past orders are copied across. Shopify's own guide says products and customers can be imported from a CSV file (a CSV is a spreadsheet file) with its free Store Migration app. Orders are different: Shopify states that orders can't be imported by CSV, so a paid third-party app is needed for order history.

Rebuilding the design. Your WordPress theme does not work on Shopify. Nothing about the look moves across. Someone either picks a Shopify theme and styles it to match your brand, or builds a custom theme. This is often the largest part of the bill and the part cheap quotes leave out.

Replacing plugins with apps. Every WooCommerce plugin you rely on (shipping rules, GST invoices, reviews, wishlists, WhatsApp notifications) needs a Shopify app that does the same thing, or a different way of working. DigitalSuits calls the number of WordPress plugins that need a Shopify replacement the main cost driver for WooCommerce moves.

Protecting SEO. Your web addresses change on Shopify. A redirect is a forwarding note that sends visitors and Google from the old address to the new one. Without redirects, your Google rankings point at dead pages.

Launch. The domain is pointed at Shopify, payments are tested with a real order, and someone watches Google Search Console (Google's free report on how your site appears in search) for a few weeks.

One thing to settle early: "WordPress to Shopify" almost always means "WooCommerce to Shopify", because WooCommerce is the shop plugin most WordPress stores run on. If you search for woocommerce to shopify migration services, you are looking for the same thing. If your WordPress site has no shop at all (a blog or a brochure site) and you want to start selling, that is a much smaller job: there is no order or customer data to move, only pages, posts and redirects.

How much does a WordPress to Shopify migration cost?

A WordPress to Shopify migration costs anywhere from a few thousand rupees for an app-based move of a tiny catalogue to tens of thousands of dollars for an agency project. The spread is wide because "migration" can mean a data copy or a full rebuild of the store.

These are published market figures, each linked to where I found it. They are not my prices.

For WooCommerce stores specifically, DigitalSuits puts the move at $3,000 to $25,000 and rates it low complexity, because WooCommerce exports its data cleanly.

A few honest notes on these numbers. Most of them come from agencies and software companies that sell migrations, so read them as asking prices. The Indian figures come from open bids on Freelancer.com, which sit at the low end of the market: a ₹12,500 bid promising delivery within days is pricing a data copy, not redirects, design and testing. A studio in Gurugram, Mumbai or Bengaluru quoting a full project with a custom theme will land well above those bids.

What moves the price up or down?

Five things decide where your store lands in those ranges.

• Design. A ready-made Shopify theme with your logo and colours is cheap. A custom theme that matches your current site section by section is the expensive part.
• Number of plugins. Count the active plugins on your WordPress site that customers or staff actually use. Each one is a line on the quote.
• Order history. Moving ten years of orders costs more than moving the last two. Many stores archive old orders as a spreadsheet instead.
• Product complexity. Simple products move easily. Products with many options, bundles, or wholesale pricing need manual work.
• SEO value. If Google sends you most of your sales, the redirect work has to be done properly, page by page. DigitalSuits notes that SEO protection is usually not included in DIY or bare-bones freelancer quotes.

What does the migration software itself cost?

The data-copy tools are the cheapest part of the job. Shopify's Store Migration app is free. LitExtension, a popular paid tool rated 4.9 from 328 reviews on the Shopify App Store, charges by the amount of data moved and lets you test with a free demo of 20 products, 20 orders and 20 customers. Ringly estimates LitExtension at about $200 to $400 for roughly 1,000 products and 2,000 orders.

So when an agency quotes thousands of dollars, you are not paying for the copy. You are paying for the design, the plugin replacements, the redirects, the testing and someone who answers the phone when something breaks on launch day.

What does Shopify cost every month in India after you move?

Shopify in India costs from ₹1,499 a month on the Basic plan billed yearly, plus a Shopify transaction fee of up to 2% on online payments, plus your apps. Budget for the running cost before the migration cost, because you pay it forever.

Shopify's India pricing page lists these plans:

The last column is the one Indian store owners miss. Shopify only charges that fee when you use a payment provider other than its own, Shopify Payments. But Razorpay's pricing guide confirms that Shopify Payments is not available in India, so an Indian store has to use a gateway such as Razorpay, Cashfree or PayU, and Shopify's fee applies on top of the gateway's own charge.

Razorpay works through the sum for a ₹1,000 order on Shopify Basic: ₹20 goes to Shopify, ₹20 to Razorpay and ₹3.60 in GST, a total of ₹43.60, or 4.36%. On Grow the same order costs 3.36%, and on Advanced 2.96%.

• Basic4.4%
• Grow3.4%
• Advanced3.0%

Put that in monthly terms. If your store takes ₹5,00,000 a month in prepaid online orders on the Basic plan, Shopify's 2% alone is ₹10,000 a month (my own arithmetic from Shopify's published rate). On WooCommerce you pay the gateway and nothing to the platform. There is one piece of good news for Indian stores: Razorpay notes that manual payment methods, including cash on delivery, are exempt from Shopify's fee, so a COD-heavy store pays less of it.

On the other side of the ledger, Shopify includes hosting, security updates and the checkout. On WooCommerce you pay for hosting, premium plugin renewals and a developer's time for updates. I've broken those running costs down in my guide to WooCommerce website cost in India, so you can compare the two honestly.

Related guide: Freelance Shopify developer: rates, design cost and what to check

What are the risks when you transfer WordPress to Shopify?

The main risks when you transfer WordPress to Shopify are lost Google traffic, customers who can't log in, features that have no Shopify equivalent, and a cost base that rises with sales. All four can be managed if they are named before work starts.

Losing Google rankings

Every product and category address changes. A WooCommerce product usually lives at an address like /product/blue-kurta. On Shopify it lives under /products/, and categories become "collections" under /collections/. Blog posts move under /blogs/. You can't keep the old addresses.

Shopify lets you create redirects in bulk from a spreadsheet, and a standard store can hold up to 100,000 of them, so the limit is never the problem. The problem is nobody making the list. Ringly reports that a 5 to 10 percent traffic dip in the first month is normal and recovers within three to six months, while a skipped or sloppy redirect map can cause a 30 to 50 percent drop that takes up to a year to recover.

If you sell mostly through Instagram ads and WhatsApp, this risk is small. If Google search brings in most of your orders, it is the whole project. I've written about what recovery looks like in traffic dropped after a website redesign.

Customers can't log in

Shopify is blunt about this: customer passwords can't be migrated. Customer names, emails and addresses move, but each person has to sign in with a one-time code or set a new password. Plan an email to your customers before launch so nobody thinks the account vanished.

Features with no direct match

Shopify's migration guide lists several things that don't come across cleanly:

• Products with four or more option types (size, colour, fabric, sleeve) hit Shopify's maximum of 3 options per product and are imported without their variants.
• WooCommerce categories have no direct equivalent. They arrive as tags, and collections are then built from those tags.
• Coupons can't be imported by CSV. They are recreated as discounts or moved with an app.
• Reviews are not in the product export and need a reviews app to import.
• Blog posts and pages are not in the WooCommerce export at all.
• Sale dates are not imported, so a sale that is running on launch day must be set up again by hand.

Subscriptions are their own case. A WooCommerce subscription does not move as a setting. Shero Commerce, a migration agency, says subscriptions move to a Shopify subscription app such as Recharge, which means recurring payments are set up again with a new tool.

Paying more as you grow

On WooCommerce your platform cost is mostly flat. On Shopify in India the transaction fee grows with every online sale, and most apps charge monthly. A store that replaces ten free or one-time-fee plugins with ten monthly app subscriptions can end up with a bigger bill than the hosting it left behind. Ask for a list of apps with monthly prices before you sign anything.

When is fixing your WooCommerce store the better choice?

Fixing your WooCommerce store is the better choice when the real problem is speed, a bad host, a broken plugin or a developer who stopped replying. None of those need a new platform, and a repair usually costs a fraction of a migration.

Most owners who think about moving to Shopify are tired of one of these:

• The store is slow. That is nearly always hosting, oversized images or too many plugins. See why your WooCommerce store is slow before you pay to move.
• Updates break things. A staging site (a private copy for testing updates) and a monthly maintenance routine fix this.
• Payments fail. A Razorpay or checkout fault is a repair job. It follows you to any platform if the cause is your gateway account.
• The developer disappeared. You need a new developer, not a new platform.

Fhoke, a UK agency that does these migrations, makes the same point: growth alone is not a reason to move, and if WooCommerce is still stable, flexible and selling well, improving the existing store may be the better choice.

I did this kind of repair on Wow Vastra, a UK boutique that sells sarees and lehengas to customers worldwide from a WooCommerce store on a purchased theme. The brief was to improve the store without replacing the theme. I moved asset loading into the theme and added caching, which brought the desktop homepage to about 1.5 seconds, and I added a currency switcher and a free-format worldwide address at checkout. The store stayed on WooCommerce.

Here is how I'd separate the two cases.

Some of the WooCommerce stores I've built would be poor fits for Shopify. The Whitfield Service Station ordering site runs on a custom delivery radius plugin and automatic receipt printing, and a store like that would need paid apps or custom app development to do the same on Shopify. A boutique selling fifty sarees with standard shipping is the opposite case: little ties it to WordPress, and Shopify's simpler admin is a fair trade for the fees.

My rule of thumb: if you can name the Shopify feature you need and WooCommerce can't give it to you, move. If you can only name what annoys you about your current site, get the site audited first. My longer comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce covers the platform choice itself.

Related guide: Jewellery website development cost in India: a breakdown

Should you hire a WooCommerce to Shopify migration agency, a freelancer, or do it yourself?

Hire a WooCommerce to Shopify migration agency when the store is large, depends on Google or has custom integrations. Use a freelancer for a small or mid-sized store, and do it yourself only when the catalogue is small and you have the time.

Ringly's guide gives a useful test for the do-it-yourself route: you likely don't need an agency with under 500 products, no custom integrations and a standard theme, provided you are willing to build your own redirect plan. It also suggests a middle route that I think suits most small stores: a migration app for the data, plus a freelancer for the redirect map and theme polish.

The cheapest option is not always the wrong one. If your store has forty products and gets its orders from Instagram, a careful freelancer or even a weekend with the Store Migration app is enough. If the store took years to rank on Google, paying for proper redirect work is the cheapest insurance you will buy.

Related guide: Ecommerce website developer in India: cost and what to check

How do you choose WordPress to Shopify migration services in India?

Choose WordPress to Shopify migration services in India by checking four things: a written scope, a redirect plan, experience with Indian payment gateways and GST, and who supports you after launch. Price comes after those.

India-specific points that overseas guides skip:

• Payment gateway. Since Shopify Payments isn't offered in India, ask which gateway they will set up (Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU), and make sure the Shopify transaction fee is in your cost sheet.
• Cash on delivery. Ask how COD orders, COD charges and return-to-origin parcels will be handled, and which shipping app they use.
• GST. Your WooCommerce store may produce GST invoices through a plugin. Shopify needs its tax settings configured and usually an invoicing app. Ask for a sample invoice before launch.
• Ownership. The Shopify store, the theme and the domain must be in your name and on your email address, not the agency's.

What should you ask before you sign?

Ask these questions and compare the answers from two or three providers.

1. How many WooCommerce to Shopify moves have you done, and which of those stores are live today?
2. Will you give me a written scope that lists what is included and what is not?
3. Who builds the redirect list, and will every product, category and blog address be covered?
4. Which of my plugins will be replaced by which app, and what does each app cost per month?
5. How many years of orders will you move, and what happens to the rest?
6. What happens to my blog?
7. What is the plan if launch day goes wrong, and can we switch back?
8. Who do I call in the first month after launch?

What are the red flags?

Ringly lists the warning signs: a firm price before anyone has looked at your catalogue, a quote that is unusually fast and cheap, a vague track record, and a refusal to put the scope in writing. I'd add three more.

• The quote never uses the word "redirects".
• The provider wants to create the Shopify account under their own email.
• Nobody asks which plugins you use. That provider is quoting for a different, simpler store than the one you own.

How long does a migration take, and what are the steps?

A small WooCommerce to Shopify migration takes about 2 to 4 weeks, and a store with a custom theme takes 4 to 8 weeks, according to Ringly's published timelines. Bids promising a few days are describing the data copy alone.

1. 1

   Audit the current store

   List every product type, plugin, payment method, shipping rule and page that gets traffic from Google. This list becomes the scope.

2. 2

   Decide what to leave behind

   Old orders, dead products and unused plugins don't need to move. Cutting them lowers the cost.

3. 3

   Build the Shopify store

   Set up the theme, navigation, collections, taxes, shipping and payment gateway on a private Shopify address.

4. 4

   Import and check the data

   Move products and customers first, then orders. Spot-check prices, stock, photos and variants by hand.

5. 5

   Map the redirects

   Match every old address to its new one in a spreadsheet and import it into Shopify.

6. 6

   Test, then launch

   Place real test orders, including COD and a refund. Point the domain at Shopify in a quiet sales period.

7. 7

   Watch for a month

   Check Google Search Console weekly for broken pages and fix them as they appear.

Two timing tips. Don't launch just before Diwali, a big sale or your busiest season: if something breaks, it breaks when it costs the most. And freeze changes on the old store for the last few days, so new orders and stock changes don't get lost between the two systems.

What happens to your WordPress blog and pages?

Your WordPress blog and pages are not part of the standard WooCommerce export, so they are either rebuilt in Shopify, moved with a third-party app, or left on WordPress. Shopify's guide says blog posts and pages have to be recreated or moved with an app.

You have three choices:

1. Move everything into Shopify's blog. Simple, and one system to manage. Shopify's blog editor is basic compared with WordPress, so long articles with tables, custom layouts or many categories lose some polish. Every post address changes and needs a redirect.
2. Keep WordPress for content on a subdomain. Shero Commerce offers this as an option: move the shop to Shopify and keep WordPress for content on a subdomain such as blog.yourstore.in. Your writers keep the editor they know. You do keep paying for WordPress hosting and updates, and the blog addresses still change because the subdomain is a new address.
3. Drop the weak content. Move only the posts that get traffic. Redirect the rest to the closest relevant page.

If your blog brings in a large share of your orders, treat this decision as carefully as the product move. Shopify also only lets you redirect from addresses that no longer exist on the store, so the redirect list has to be built against the final Shopify structure, not guessed at the start.

How can I help with your move from WordPress to Shopify?

I can help in two ways: by telling you honestly whether your WooCommerce store should move at all, and by running the migration with my e-commerce partners if it should.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

• A second opinion first. I've built and maintained WooCommerce stores for brands including Nortek LED and IPL Biologicals, so I know where these stores usually go wrong, and I'll look at whether your trouble is the platform or the setup. If a speed fix, a hosting move or a plugin clean-up solves it, I'll say so, and that work sits under my WooCommerce service.
• The Shopify build. Shopify stores are work I deliver with my e-commerce partners: store setup, custom themes and app integrations. You deal with me as the single point of contact throughout.
• The SEO side. Redirect maps, Search Console checks and page speed are part of my own daily work on WordPress and Next.js sites, and they are the part of a migration that most often gets skipped.

What I won't claim: I'm not a Shopify-only specialist, and for a very large catalogue with ERP links a dedicated Shopify Plus agency may suit you better. I'm based in Gurugram and work with clients in India, the UK and the US.

What should you do next?

Before you ask anyone for a quote, write down three lists: the plugins your store depends on, the pages that bring you traffic from Google, and the things that annoy you about the current site. Those three lists tell any honest provider whether you need a migration or a repair, and they stop you from being quoted for the wrong job.

If you'd like a straight answer on your own store, send me the URL through my contact page with a line on what is going wrong. I'll tell you whether I'd move it to Shopify or fix it where it is, and what the work would involve.