How to Move Your Online Store Off Shopify Without Losing Sales

Migrating your online store is one of the most anxiety-inducing decisions an e-commerce merchant can make. Your store represents months or years of work — product listings, customer relationships, search rankings, and revenue. The idea of losing any of it during a platform switch keeps many merchants stuck on Shopify long after they've decided it's not the right fit.

The good news: migration is very doable when done systematically. This guide walks through every step, from exporting your data to preserving your SEO rankings, so you can make the move without losing sales.

Step 1: Decide If Now Is the Right Time

Before touching anything, audit your current situation. The worst time to migrate is during peak sales periods — Black Friday, the holiday season, or any major promotion you have planned. Pick a quiet period where a few days of reduced traffic or technical issues won't be catastrophic.

Also consider your reasons for migrating. Are they structural (platform limitations, transaction fees, scalability) or surface-level (you don't like the interface, you want a different theme)? Surface-level frustrations can often be fixed without migrating. Structural problems usually can't.

Step 2: Export Everything from Shopify

Shopify makes data export relatively straightforward, but you need to be thorough. Here's what to export:

Products

Go to Products → Export in your Shopify admin. Choose "All products" and export as CSV. This gives you product titles, descriptions, prices, SKUs, variants, images, and inventory. Check the file after downloading — Shopify's CSV format is specific, and some platforms import it directly while others require reformatting.

Customers

Go to Customers → Export. Export all customers with their names, emails, and order history. Note: Shopify does not export customer passwords (they're hashed). Customers will need to reset their password on your new platform, or you can implement a "migrate on login" flow.

Orders

Orders are tricky. Most platforms can import historical orders for reporting purposes, but transactional data (fulfillment, payment records) rarely transfers cleanly. Export your orders for record-keeping, but plan for historical orders to be read-only on your new platform.

Blog Posts and Pages

Export blog content from Settings → Export in the Shopify admin (under "Blog posts"). Static pages need to be manually recreated, so document all your pages and their content before starting the migration.

Images

Product images typically transfer via the CSV export (they're referenced as URLs). However, Shopify-hosted images will need to be re-uploaded to your new platform's CDN. Use a bulk download tool or download them manually — don't skip this step.

Step 3: Map Your URL Structure

This is the most important SEO step. Shopify uses a specific URL structure:

• Products: /products/product-handle
• Collections: /collections/collection-handle
• Blog posts: /blogs/news/post-handle
• Pages: /pages/page-handle

Your new platform will almost certainly use a different structure. Before you launch, create a complete mapping of every old URL to its new equivalent. You'll use this to set up 301 redirects.

Use Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or a similar crawler to get a complete list of your indexed Shopify URLs. Export this list and map each one to its destination on the new platform.

Step 4: Set Up Your New Platform in Parallel

Never take your Shopify store offline before your new store is fully ready. Run both simultaneously during the migration period. Most platforms offer a free trial — use it to build out your new store completely before switching traffic over.

The parallel setup period should include:

• Importing all products and verifying they look correct
• Setting up payment processing
• Configuring shipping rules
• Testing the checkout flow end-to-end (place a real test order)
• Setting up email notifications
• Connecting your domain (don't switch DNS yet)
• Recreating all pages and blog content
• Setting up 301 redirects

Step 5: Preserve Your SEO

SEO is the area where most migrations go wrong. A poorly executed migration can wipe out years of search rankings in days. Here's how to protect what you've built:

301 Redirects

Every old URL that no longer exists on your new platform needs a 301 redirect to the closest equivalent page. Products redirect to their new product pages. Collections redirect to the equivalent category pages. Blog posts redirect to their new URLs. Missing redirects mean 404 errors, which means lost rankings and lost customers.

Metadata

Ensure every product and page on your new platform has the same (or better) title tag and meta description as it did on Shopify. Don't let the platform generate generic ones — copy them over manually.

Internal Links

Update all internal links in your blog posts and pages to point to the new URLs. Shopify-format links embedded in your content will break after migration.

Google Search Console

After switching over, submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console immediately. Monitor the Coverage report for 404 errors and fix any missed redirects quickly.

Step 6: Switch DNS and Monitor

When your new store is fully built, tested, and redirects are configured, it's time to switch. Update your DNS to point your domain at the new platform. DNS changes propagate within minutes for most providers, but can take up to 48 hours in edge cases.

During the first 48 hours after switching:

• Monitor your new store's analytics for traffic and orders
• Check for 404 errors in Google Search Console
• Test the checkout flow on the live site
• Monitor your email notifications (order confirmations, shipping updates)
• Keep your Shopify store on a temporary domain as a fallback

Step 7: Communicate with Customers

If customers have accounts on your Shopify store, they'll need to create new passwords. Send a proactive email before the migration explaining the change and making it easy for them to reset. Frame it as an improvement ("We've upgraded our store") rather than a disruption.

For subscription customers or anyone with open orders, communicate clearly about what's changing and what's not. Fulfillment, refund, and support processes should continue uninterrupted — your customers shouldn't notice anything except potentially a fresher-looking store.

Common Migration Mistakes to Avoid

• Going offline during the switch — there's no reason to have any downtime with a proper parallel setup
• Skipping redirects — the single most common cause of post-migration SEO drops
• Not testing checkout — payment issues discovered after going live cost real money
• Migrating during peak season — always pick a quiet period
• Not informing customers — account migrations without communication damage trust

How Long Does Migration Take?

For a store with under 500 products, a thorough migration takes 1–2 weeks of part-time work. Larger catalogs with thousands of products can take 4–8 weeks, especially if custom development is involved. The URL mapping and redirect setup often take longer than the actual import — plan for it.

The Bottom Line

Migrating off Shopify isn't as scary as it sounds — but it does require planning and patience. The merchants who run into trouble are almost always the ones who rush the process or skip the redirect mapping step.

Take the time to do it right, test thoroughly before switching, and monitor closely for the first two weeks after. Done properly, you'll land on a new platform with your rankings, customers, and revenue intact — and often growing faster than before.