Wix to Shopify Migration: Step-by-Step Guide

You built your store on Wix because it was fast and cheap. Now it's neither. You're paying for apps to patch gaps Wix should've covered natively, your checkout looks the same as it did three years ago because you can't customize it, and every time you try to add a feature a competitor already has, you hit a wall labeled "not available on your plan."

That wall is the reason store owners move to Shopify. Not because Shopify is trendy — because it removes the ceiling. Abandoned cart recovery, real inventory management, a checkout you actually own, and an app ecosystem with over 8,000 tools built specifically for selling products, not just building websites.

The migration itself isn't complicated if you follow the right order. Here's exactly how to move from Wix to Shopify without losing products, customers, or the Google rankings you've already earned.

What You're Actually Migrating

Before touching anything, know what has to move. A Wix to Shopify migration has four moving parts, and skipping any one of them is what causes stores to lose revenue during the switch:

• Product catalog — titles, descriptions, images, variants, pricing, SKUs, and inventory counts
• Customer data — accounts, order history, and email opt-ins (where Wix's export allows it)
• SEO equity — your existing URLs, meta data, and backlinks pointing at Wix pages
• Store logic — shipping rates, tax settings, discount codes, and payment methods

Most Wix-to-Shopify horror stories come from people who moved the product catalog and called it done. The SEO piece is where rankings quietly die if you're not careful — more on that below.

Step 1: Set Up Your Shopify Store Before You Touch Wix

Don't migrate live. Build your new store on a Shopify trial first, fully populated and tested, before you redirect a single visitor. This gives you room to fix mistakes without your customers seeing a half-finished storefront.

1. Create your Shopify account and choose a plan (Basic is fine for most stores under 500 SKUs)
2. Pick a theme close to your current Wix design, or brief a developer to rebuild your existing layout
3. Set up payment providers (Shopify Payments, PayPal, or your existing processor)
4. Configure shipping zones and tax settings to match what you currently charge

Step 2: Export and Import Your Product Catalog

Wix doesn't make this one-click, which is the biggest technical hurdle in the whole process. You've got three realistic paths:

• Manual CSV export/import — Wix lets you export products to CSV; Shopify has a native CSV import tool. Works for small catalogs (under 100 products) but requires reformatting columns to match Shopify's schema
• Migration apps — tools like Cart2Cart or LitExtension automate product, customer, and order transfer between Wix and Shopify for a flat fee based on catalog size
• Manual rebuild — for stores under 50 products, sometimes it's faster to just re-enter everything directly with fresh, optimized copy

Check every product's images and variants after import. Wix and Shopify handle variant structures differently (size/color combinations especially), and this is where data gets scrambled most often.

Step 3: Protect Your SEO Rankings

This is the step that gets skipped, and it's the one that costs the most money. Every Wix URL that's currently ranking on Google needs a 301 redirect to its new Shopify equivalent. Without this, you lose your rankings and have to rebuild authority from zero.

1. Pull a full list of your current Wix URLs from Google Search Console
2. Map each old URL to its new Shopify URL (product pages, collection pages, blog posts)
3. Set up 301 redirects in Shopify under Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects
4. Resubmit your new sitemap to Google Search Console once the store is live
5. Monitor Search Console weekly for the first month to catch crawl errors early

Stores that handle redirects correctly typically hold 80-95% of their organic traffic through a migration. Stores that skip this step routinely lose half their search visibility within 60 days.

Step 4: Migrate Customer Accounts and Order History

Wix's export tools are limited here, and customer passwords never transfer between platforms for security reasons — that's true of any migration, not just Wix. What you can move:

• Customer names, emails, and addresses (via CSV export/import)
• Order history, either through a migration app or a manual CSV of past orders for record-keeping
• Email marketing lists, exported separately if you're using Wix's built-in email tools and imported into Shopify Email or Klaviyo

Send an email before cutover letting customers know they'll need to reset their password on the new site. It's a small friction point, but a silent one — if you don't mention it, it causes a spike in "why can't I log in" support tickets in week one.

Step 5: Test Everything Before You Flip the Switch

Run a full checklist before pointing your domain at Shopify:

• Place a real test order and refund it to confirm payments process correctly
• Check every shipping rate against your actual carrier costs
• Test the mobile experience — Wix and Shopify render layouts differently
• Verify every redirect from your mapping list actually resolves
• Confirm tax calculations match your obligations in each region you sell

Step 6: Point Your Domain and Go Live

Once everything checks out, update your domain's DNS to point at Shopify, or transfer the domain into Shopify directly. Propagation usually takes a few hours, sometimes up to 48. Keep your Wix site accessible (unpublished, not deleted) for at least 30 days in case you need to reference something you missed.

How Long Does This Actually Take?

For a store under 100 products with a straightforward catalog, a clean migration takes 1-2 weeks done properly, including testing. Stores with 500+ SKUs, custom Wix functionality, or multi-language content typically need 3-6 weeks. Rushing this timeline is the single biggest predictor of post-migration problems.

Get It Done Right the First Time

A Wix to Shopify migration touches your products, your customers, and your search rankings all at once. Get one piece wrong and you're not just losing time — you're losing revenue while you fix it. TheDeki has migrated stores off Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce, and Magento onto Shopify without the traffic drops and data loss that DIY migrations often cause.

Book a free migration consultation with TheDeki and get a clear plan for moving your store before you touch a single setting.