Should I migrate from Magento to Shopify?

Building an online store for your business is essential if you want to boost your sales, but succeeding in e-commerce depends on the platform you decide to host your website on.

There are many different e-commerce platforms to choose from, yet in such a fast-paced market, online merchants often find that their business requirements are rapidly outgrowing the platform they originally opted for.

Magento, for example, was a major player throughout the 2010s. However, with the advancement of modernised online sales platforms that are more attuned to the needs of today’s sellers and consumers, some merchants may find themselves held back by Magento’s limitations in the 2020s.

If you’re currently hosting your online shop on Magento and wondering whether you should switch platforms to stay competitive, you might have heard a lot about Shopify.

But is switching to Shopify worth it to help scale your store and boost your sales performance?

In this blog, we’ll run through the reasons why you should migrate from Magento to Shopify to help you make up your mind – explaining everything you’ll need to consider and how to successfully complete a Magento to Shopify migration.

Why should you migrate your website to Shopify?

Migrating a website from one platform to another can be complicated, so this decision shouldn’t be made lightly. It’s important to weigh up your options and determine whether a new platform like Shopify could serve your growing business better than Magento.

A significant portion of e-commerce websites still use Magento, as it offers all the basic SEO tools a business might need when starting out. As an open-source platform, Magento allows users to customise their websites with third-party plug-ins – but this can be time-consuming and costly, requiring in-house developers.

On the other hand, you don’t need to know much about coding to quickly build an online store on Shopify. As a dedicated CMS (Content Management System) platform, Shopify comes with plenty of built-in e-commerce SEO features, making it much easier to use.

That’s why Shopify is fast gaining popularity over Magento for its improved UX (user experience), enhanced functionality, and reduced website maintenance and costs.

Still not sold on whether you should make the transition from Magento to Shopify? Read on to discover the wide range of benefits that your business could enjoy with Shopify.

What are the benefits of Shopify vs Magento?

While Magento has hundreds of thousands of merchants using its platform, Shopify has millions – and for good reason.

Some of the countless benefits explaining why so many merchants around the world trust Shopify include:

Shared web hosting

Cloud-based web hosting is included in a monthly Shopify subscription, streamlining the process as users won’t need to find their own hosting solution or resolve technical issues.

Unless you have the more advanced version of Adobe Commerce, with Magento, you must manually set up a web host provider and pay separately. The same applies for storage if you want enough bandwidth to handle traffic.

All Shopify plans come with unlimited bandwidth, ensuring your online store can handle high volumes of customers.

Plus, Shopify also offers a free subdomain – e.g. yourbusiness.myshopify.com – which you can use until you’re ready to set up your custom domain name.

Built-in security

Shopify websites also automatically benefit from built-in security features, including fraud analysis, SSL certificates for encrypted connections, and PCI DSS and GDPR compliance.

Shopify provides Level 1 PCD DSS compliance – the highest Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard – ensuring all payment information and customer data is secure.

While you have to be PCI DSS compliant to use Magento, security responsibilities lie with the merchant, meaning you must manage and implement security features and certificates yourself (unless you have Adobe Commerce Cloud).

Shopify managing security elements on your behalf makes the migration worth it by saving a lot of time and money.

User-friendly interface

Shopify is renowned for its ease of use. While it does offer CSS and HMTL editing, you don’t need to know how to code to set up a store independently, as Shopify provides a beginner-friendly website editor with drag-and-drop features.

On-boarding is simple with an instructional wizard and a hub of how-to documentation available, allowing teams to jump right in and adapt to the intuitive interface quickly.

Meanwhile, the open-source nature of Magento means you’ll need to do a lot of coding to get your online store exactly how you want it. This typically requires assistance from an experienced developer – otherwise, it’s a steep learning curve to implement the updates you desire.

If you would like to update your website fast with an easy display and no coding, Shopify can deliver.

Extensive customisation

Both Shopify and Magento allow extensive customisation of online stores on their platforms, but as mentioned, editing a Magento website is much more difficult, as it requires advanced web developer skills.

However, the user-friendly Shopify editor makes it extremely easy to tweak almost everything within the platform – without requiring third-party extensions or coding skills.

The CMS allows merchants to manage their own onsite blog with built-in SEO features like metadata, while the Shopify App Store offers dozens of contemporary themes and thousands of plug-ins with straightforward integration.

Magento has far fewer themes and apps, which are also harder to integrate to ensure compatibility, relying on third-party tools for personalising your online store’s appearance and adding marketing functions.

Scalable for all businesses

Magento has several plans with lower rates, but having to pay for your own hosting, storage, domain, security, and customisation on top of that soon adds up. This is typically meant for larger enterprise businesses who have their own web development team, though Adobe Commerce offers more capabilities with a premium subscription.

For small to medium businesses that may not have in-house developers or the training to set up and manage an online store independently, the flexibility Shopify offers makes it suitable for all business sizes.

You can start with the free trial and scale up to different subscription levels depending on the features you need at your current stage of business growth.

The Basic version is great for solo entrepreneurs, standard Shopify is perfect for small teams, and Advanced and Plus subscriptions support larger businesses. You can learn more about Shopify Plus vs Shopify Advanced on our blog.

What data can be migrated from Magento to Shopify?

Before you can begin planning your migration from Magento to Shopify, you need to know what can be imported directly and which data has to be transferred separately.

Data that can be exported from Magento and migrated to Shopify includes:

• Product data – product names, descriptions, prices, images, stock (SKU) numbers, manufacturer details, URLs, and metadata.
• Product categories – collections and categories used to organise inventory and make it easier to locate products.
• Customer profile data – names, email addresses, linked billing and shipping addresses, and newsletter subscriptions.
• Order data – product info and prices, ID numbers, dates, statuses, and billing and shipping details for past transactions.
• Coupons – existing coupons or discount codes (type, amount, and validity dates).
• Customer reviews – usernames, dates, ratings, comments.
• CMS pages – static content pages such as ‘about us’, contact, or policy pages.

In some cases, it may not be possible to directly import data in the Shopify admin dashboard.

For example, you might need to use the Shopify API (Application Programming Interface) or a third-party app to migrate customer passwords, onsite blog posts, past orders, and discounts.

Additionally, any Magento-specific data obviously cannot be used in Shopify – such as Magento store credit, themes, custom extensions, or multi-store set-ups.

Are there any disadvantages of migrating to Shopify?

Moving an entire online store from one platform to another is no simple feat, so it’s inevitable that you’ll face a few hiccups along the way – but it’s all about how you handle them.

Some common problems that merchants may encounter during a website migration include:

• Data loss or inaccuracies – transferring a significant quantity of data may result in duplicates or losses, but a backup copy will allow you to retrieve and correct this data.
• Loading speed issues – your website may initially experience longer page loading times after moving platforms, but you can optimise your Shopify store to improve performance.
• Dropping SEO rankings – it can take a few hours to a few weeks for search engines to recognise your website changes, which can harm your SEO rankings, but this should improve as long you ensure that all 301 redirects are set up and metadata is imported.

Some businesses may also face lengthier migration timelines and higher costs, depending on factors such as the number of products you sell, the amount of customisation your website requires, the compatibility of any third-party apps that need integrating, and any additional SEO work required.

Just like a family moving to a new house, a business moving platforms involves many different steps, changes, and investments, but the process can be made much easier and faster with a comprehensive plan.

How to migrate from Magento to Shopify

Now you know more about the benefits of migrating from Magento to Shopify, you need to learn about the actual process of website migration between these two platforms.

This is a complicated task that requires proper planning to execute a smooth transition – without a detailed roadmap, the functionality and success of your online store are at risk.

To help you understand the steps involved, here is a Magento to Shopify migration checklist, which includes the pre-migration and post-migration processes your team should follow.

Pre-migration planning

The first step is to assess your current set-up with Magento, conducting an in-depth analysis of your online store. Evaluating the performance data will help you identify areas of improvement and features that you want to keep.

Your team can then set goals for what you want to achieve with your Shopify store development, ensuring these migration goals align with your objectives for business growth.

You must decide whether you would rather pursue the time-consuming but more exhaustive process of manual migration, or speed up data exports with automated migration.

This depends on your budget and resources, which you’ll need to evaluate before choosing the most appropriate Shopify plan and identifying all the data you want to transfer.

Back up your data

Creating a backup database of your Magento store is critical – you should never start a website migration without backing up all the data from the original platform first.

This is an essential precaution that will keep an intact copy, allowing you to restore any lost data if something was to go wrong while transferring your store to Shopify.

You can use the built-in Magento backup feature, which allows you to back up the complete system, just the database and media folder, or the database only.

To transfer the data from Magento to Shopify, you must save it in the standard format – CSV. Through the Magento admin panel, you should be able to export all entity types as CSV files, ready to import for your store transition.

Set up your Shopify store

Now you should be ready to register for a Shopify account and choose a subscription plan that suits the size and needs of your business – be it a small team or large company.

Then it’s time to get to work configuring Shopify settings and customising your online shop, building out a development store ready to import your data from Magento.

This involves selecting a theme that matches your brand (whether ready-made or completely custom) and tailoring it to replicate or enhance your original store’s design.

Make sure all the key pages have appropriate designs – including the homepage, ‘about us’ page, policy pages, ‘contact us’ page, and product and collection pages – and set up navigation, payment, and shipping options.

Import data to Shopify

When you have your properly formatted Magento data and your Shopify account all set up, you can proceed with uploading the store data to Shopify. This can be done through the Shopify admin panel or by using a third-party app. 

Depending on the file sizes, you may need to upload smaller files, which requires a lot of patience. If you’re transferring large volumes of data, this will take a while, but you should pay careful attention to the most important data like product, customer, and order information and ensure URL redirects are active.

There are migration apps that can move data in bulk, but even so, you must manually review all the imported data once complete to identify mistakes or losses.

If you don’t have your own development team to transfer and check over all the necessary data, you could save time by hiring a web development agency that provides a Magento to Shopify migration service.

Post-migration testing

Once you’ve finished customising your store and importing all the data, it’s crucial to check that everything is accurate and working as it should be. You can’t launch your new store until you’re confident there are no issues.

To start with, review all the imported data to ensure all the information is there, in the right format, with no errors or broken links that may require manual correction.

Next, while your new site is still password-locked, test all of the essential functions – product listings, checking out, payment and shipping options (in test mode), order processing, email notifications, and so on.

Testing should be carried out across different browsers and devices – including desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones – to confirm that your store looks and functions consistently for all users.

If you don’t have the capacity in-house, a Shopify SEO agency like us at Paramount Digital can help with this.

Announce the migration

Not only do you need to make sure that everyone on your team is up-to-date on the migration and fully trained on how to use Shopify, but you also have to inform your customers of the imminent platform change.

While you can import customer data from Magento to Shopify, you cannot import encrypted passwords, so your existing customers must reset their passwords to log into their new accounts on your Shopify site.

Clear and pro-active communication will help to avoid confusion or disruption – you could send a newsletter to customer emails explaining the move, any expected period of downtime, and the launch date.

It’s best to schedule the completion of your site migration for a time when your old store typically receives the least traffic – for example, while people would usually be sleeping in your time zone.

Launch your Shopify site

Once your site migration and testing are complete, with all DNS settings and website redirects configured, you can officially launch your shiny new Shopify store!

You should keep your old site on a sub-domain with a no-index tag (to prevent duplicate content affecting your SEO), then remove the password restriction from your Shopify store.

After your Shopify site is live and you begin making sales through the new platform, keep a close eye on your store’s performance. One of the biggest risks of migrating between any e-commerce platforms is losing hard-earned SEO results, which can reduce traffic to your new site and reduce sales.

Continuing to monitor your site’s performance with Bing Webmaster and Google Analytics is vital to make sure you don’t miss any opportunities to further optimise your store and improve its rankings.

Of course, if you hire professionals to guide you through the migration process and assist with SEO afterwards, you can reduce the risk of a mishandled website migration having a negative impact on your rankings, traffic, and sales!

Get help from a Magento to Shopify migration service

Re-platforming an online store is a challenging process. With so much that could potentially go wrong, it takes a lot of planning to pull off a seamless transition from Magento to Shopify.

That’s why many business owners, when faced with such a seemingly colossal task, seek help from professional migration service providers with the necessary experience and knowledge to carry out a smooth transfer.

Here at Paramount Digital, we know a thing or two about building customised e-commerce websites and running successful SEO campaigns.

So, if you’re hoping to switch from Magento to Shopify and create an optimised online store without sinking down the SERPs, you’re in safe hands with our team of talented web designers, developers, and digital marketers.

Not only can we help you to choose the best Shopify plan for your business, complete data migration while keeping your customers updated, and customise your website, but we can also take care of all things SEO and handle post-migration troubleshooting.

Ready to migrate your online store from Magento to Shopify in style? Contact us by phone or email to get started!