The Complete Wix to Shopify Migration Checklist

A store migration has more moving parts than a brochure-site move, and the parts fail independently: you can migrate every product perfectly and still lose your search traffic, or preserve every URL and discover at launch that shipping rates are wrong. This checklist is the order we actually work in.

The short answer if you are here for it: budget 10–14 days for a store up to ~500 products, keep Wix paid throughout, and treat the redirect map as the deliverable that matters most. Everything below is the detail.

Before anything: the audit#

Crawl the live store. Every page, product URL, collection URL and policy page. Wix product URLs (/product-page/…) will all change shape on Shopify (/products/…), so this list is your future redirect map.

Export what Wix will give you. Wix Stores exports products and orders as CSV. Do it now, and check what actually came out, variant structures and product options in particular tend to need manual attention.

Inventory your apps. Reviews, loyalty points, gift cards, subscriptions: for each app, find out whether it has an export. This determines what can move and what cannot, and you want that answer before you commit to a launch date, not after.

Export from Search Console. The pages that earn organic traffic get priority in the redirect map. For a store, collection pages are usually the quiet heroes, check them specifically.

Product data#

Reshape the product CSV. Wix's export does not match Shopify's import format. Columns need remapping: options and variants, SKUs, weights, compare-at prices, inventory quantities. Do a test import of ten products first and inspect them closely rather than importing five hundred and auditing the wreckage.

Check the variant math. Shopify allows up to three options per product (size, colour, material). If your Wix products use options in unusual ways, some will need restructuring. Find these now.

Images. Shopify imports images from URLs in the CSV. Since your Wix store is still live, the import can pull directly from it, one good reason to keep Wix running during the build.

Collections. Rebuild both manual and automated collections. Shopify's automated collections (by tag, price, vendor) are often better than what Wix offered, this is a rare spot where the migration can quietly upgrade something.

Customers and orders#

Customer import. Names, emails, addresses and, critically, marketing consent status. Consent does not regenerate: a customer who opted in on Wix must arrive in Shopify still marked opted-in, or your email list quietly shrinks.

Order history. Import past orders so support can answer "where is my refund from March" and your reporting has a baseline. Old orders arrive as archived records, not live transactions.

What cannot come: saved payment methods. Card details live with the payment processor, not the store. Nobody can migrate them, on any platform. Returning customers re-enter payment once. Say this in your launch email and it is a non-event.

Store configuration#

• Payments: set up Shopify Payments (or your gateway), run a real test transaction and refund it.
• Shipping: recreate every rate and zone. This is the single most common source of day-one losses, a missing zone silently blocks checkout for a whole region.
• Taxes: confirm rates for every region you sell to.
• Emails: order confirmation, shipping notification, refund. Send each one to yourself.
• Policies: shipping, returns, privacy, rebuilt at their new /policies/ URLs, with the old policy URLs in the redirect map.

The redirect map#

This is the artifact that decides whether your traffic survives the move. Every URL from your crawl gets a destination, not a category of destination, a specific one.

Wix pattern	Shopify pattern
/product-page/{product}	/products/{product}
/category/{collection}	/collections/{collection}
/shop	/collections/all
/store-policy	/policies/…
/post/{slug}	/blogs/news/{slug}

Shopify has a built-in URL redirect tool that handles this natively, the map imports as a CSV. Collection pages deserve special care: they often hold more ranking value than individual products.

If you would rather not build the mapping by hand, our redirect map generator takes a pasted URL list and applies these transformations automatically, exporting as CSV, .htaccess or nginx config. It runs entirely in your browser.

Checkout, end to end#

Before cutover, run the whole journey as a customer: find a product through a collection, add to cart, apply a discount code, pay with a real card, receive the confirmation email, then refund it. Then do it again on a phone. Most launch-day embarrassments would have been caught by this one hour of testing.

Cutover#

• Pick a quiet hour for your traffic (your analytics will tell you).
• Lower your DNS TTL a day or two ahead so the switch propagates fast.
• Point the domain at Shopify; both stores exist during propagation, and either one can take an order, no downtime.
• Immediately after: confirm the redirect map resolves (spot-check your top 20 URLs), confirm robots.txt is not blocking anything, submit the new sitemap in Search Console.

The week after#

Keep the Wix subscription until you have verified everything, a fortnight of overlap is cheap insurance. Before you cancel lists what to retrieve first, including the image check that catches the failure that shows up weeks later. Watch Search Console's Page Indexing report for a rising 404 count (a missed redirect), and watch your conversion rate against the old baseline. Then, and only then, cancel Wix.

How long it actually takes#

For a store up to about 500 products, 10 to 14 days, split roughly like this. The same phases apply to any migration, and the full timeline breakdown explains why the rebuild is never the long pole:

Phase	Days	What decides the length
Audit and URL inventory	1–2	Page count, app sprawl
Product data reshaping	2–3	Catalogue size, variant complexity
Store build and configuration	3–5	Theme work, shipping zones, tax regions
Your review	1–2	Your availability, not ours
Cutover	Hours	Chosen quiet hour, DNS TTL
Verification	2–3, then six weeks of watching	Redirect count

Three things legitimately extend this: subscriptions (recurring billing has to be re-established with customers, which is a communication project), multi-currency or multi-region tax, and catalogues over ~500 products where reshaping stops being spreadsheet work.

One thing does not legitimately extend it: waiting on decisions. If you can answer questions the same day, a two-week migration stays a two-week migration.

What it costs, three ways#

Doing it yourself: free in cash, roughly 20–40 hours in time for a small store, more if the catalogue fights you. The hours are real and they arrive during whatever else your week contains.

Automated migration tool: typically a few hundred dollars depending on record count. Covers the catalogue transfer well and leaves the audit, design, content redirects and verification to you, we mapped exactly which parts here.

Done for you: our store migrations start at $1,499 up to 100 products and $2,199 up to 500, fixed before work starts, with the audit, complete redirect map, checkout testing and six weeks of Search Console monitoring included rather than sold separately.

The comparison worth running is not price against price. It is tool price plus your hours against service price, and then whether those hours genuinely exist in the next fortnight.

Should you do this yourself?#

Yes, if: your catalogue is small and uncomplicated, your store is young enough that search traffic is not yet a major channel, you are comfortable in a spreadsheet, and a bad week would be survivable.

Probably not, if: organic search is a meaningful share of your revenue, you have accumulated content pages and collection pages that rank, you sell subscriptions, or the store is your primary income and downtime is not an abstraction.

The migration risk score walks through the eight questions that separate those two cases in about two minutes, and tells you which gaps to close first either way.

The short version#

Products, customers, orders, configuration, redirects, checkout test, quiet-hour cutover, two weeks of verification. None of it is exotic, but the steps protect against different failures, and the stores that get hurt are the ones that skipped a step that "obviously" did not apply to them.

If you want the whole thing handled at a fixed price, send us the store URL and a real number comes back within one business day.