Tips and Tutorials
November 5, 2020

WooCommerce to Shopify: The Ultimate Migration Solution (2020)

Both Shopify and WooCommerce are notable names in the eCommerce platform industry, but Shopify proves itself as a wiser choice in some aspects, including ease of use and higher performance. If you are no longer satisfied with your store’s loading speed, or don’t want to spend time on manual customization, consider switching from WooCommerce to Shopify.

Re-platforming your store isn’t an easy task, especially if you have been running the store for a long time, and possess important data such as customer reviews. So how can you migrate data seamlessly from WooCommerce to Shopify? Stay tuned, this article will walk you through a step-by-step instruction to finish the task without breaking a sweat.  

Table of content

  1. Why is Shopify a wise choice?
  2. How to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify
  3. Final words


Why is Shopify a wiser choice? 

According to our research, people are paying more attention to Shopify than WooCommerce in the last 12 months. Let’s see why Shopify has become a wiser choice for most e-commerce store owners.

1. Ease of Use

As a fully hosted platform, Shopify is well-known for its ease of use. The platform provides an intuitive interface allowing you to navigate to anywhere you want and perform daily tasks easily. Besides, Shopify ensures your store runs smoothly with a decent uptime speed. Even if you are not tech-savvy, getting started with Shopify is an absolute breeze. In contrast, using WooCommerce is complex and requires some technical know-how because you have to handle a couple of things manually from installing to managing updates, keeping backup and securing your store.

2. Performance

According to a study by Quanta, a Shopify store loads twice as fast as a WooCommerce store (Shopify: 309 milliseconds, WooCommerce: 776 milliseconds). A fast-loading store benefits you in many ways including better buying experience and lower cart abandonment rate. Although you can optimize the loading time of your WooCommerce store, it might be costly and time-consuming.

3. Dedicated Support

Dedicated customer support brings Shopify another win. You can contact Shopify support via different channels such as forum, live chat, phone or email. Using Shopify gives you a strong sense of working in teams of professional engineers and trusted business advisors. 

The solid reasons discussed above prove that it's worth every penny to move from WooCommerce to Shopify. Now let’s find out how to perform the migration seamlessly in the following section.

How to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify 

There are 3 ways to perform data migration from WooCommerce to Shopify: 

  1. Manual migration
  2. Hiring a web agency/developer
  3. Using an automated migration tool such as LitExtension

Your technical skills and budget are important factors to determine your ideal migration method.

  • Migrating manually: export the data from your WooCommerce website then import it to a new Shopify store. As two platforms have totally different database structures, you need high technical skills to ensure an accurate migration and handle technical issues afterwards.
  • Hiring a web agency/developer: pay for a developer to finish the task. Pricing may be high since it costs you $60-$80/hour for the full migration of several days. 
  • Using an automated migration tool: the most advanced way to migrate all of your data including reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify. You don’t need any technical knowledge, just provide your cart information and you’re good to go. Plus, the price is reasonable compared to other methods. 

In this article, we will guide you through the process of migrating your WooCommerce to Shopify with the third method - using an automated migration tool. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Back up data

Backing up data is a must before any migration. Our recommended backup method is using automated backup plugins like BlogVault, UpdraftPlus, and BackupBuddy. These plugins help you simplify the process of executing and managing your backups.

Manual backup is not difficult but is risky and time-consuming, unless you would like to get your hand dirty.

This step is to avoid the worst situation you may face during the migration - data loss. However, when migrating your data with an automated migration tool, for example, LitExtension, you don’t have to worry about any distortions of your data.

Step 2: Create a new Shopify store

After backing up your data successfully, you need to create a new Shopify to perform the migration. Take a quick look at this tutorial video for all primary steps to set up a Shopify store from scratch within 10 minutes:

The process involves some simple steps:

  1. Sign up for an account on Shopify. Enter your email address, password, and your desired store name. 
  2. Fill in some information about your new store as below.
Set up a new Shopify store


Step 3: Data migration

To start the migration process, you need to log in to your account on LitExtension. If you haven’t got an account, create a new one by signing in with your existing Facebook or Google account:

Register/Log in on Litextension


1. Enter your Source Cart / Target Cart information

Once you’ve logged in, click “Create new migration”. Then choose WooCommerce as your Source Cart Type from the drop-down menu. Then fill in your store’s URL

Fill in Source cart information


In the next step, follow the instruction to download the “le_connector” file. This connector is the bridge between your WooCommerce store and LitExtension app. Extract the zip file and upload the Connector folder to WooCommerce’s root folder on your server. Once you are done, a notification will appear on your screen displaying “Connection was successfully installed“.

Moving to Target Cart, choose Shopify as your Target Cart Type from the menu, enter your store’s URL and the API password to the blank spaces.

Fill in Target cart information

Now you are ready to click “Next” and proceed to the next stage of the migration.

2. Configure the migration

This is the stage in which you choose the entities that you wish to transfer to the Target Site. Select the data you want to migrate or simply click “Select All” to migrate your data from WooCommerce to Shopify.

Product reviews are among the most important data you need to migrate. They help you build trust with your customers and clarify what makes your products or service stand out from the crowd. Reviews are also the user-generated content that help you products more visible on the search results and social media

With 5.0/5.0 ratings by over 3,400 users on Shopify app store, our Judge.me Product Reviews app helps you collect, import and display star ratings and reviews about your products and Shopify store.

First, the app is easy to install with 24/7 premium support and you can import existing reviews right away. Second, our forever free plan allows you to generate reviews via multiple marketing channels (Web form, Emails, Push notifications and SMS) with no limits on orders or requests. Then, you can display your reviews in user-friendly widgets such as Preview Badge, Review Widget, and Review Carousel, which are available in 34 languages. Last but not least, you can increase the conversion rate by showing your reviews on the Google search results with automatic rich snippets, or sharing them on social media. 

Now, let’s get back to how to migrate reviews to Judge.me app. You just need to click “Review” when it comes to choose the entities to migrate.

Choose entities to migrate


Normally, LitExtension migrates review data to the Shopify’s default Review App. However, if you would like to start using Judge.me Product Reviews, data still can be transferred from WooCommerce to the Judge.me app that you have just installed.

One last thing, remember to request LitExtension via live chat, email, or ticket before the migration, since we are performing the migration with them. 

LitExtension also offers some additional options to extend your migration such as Clear current data on Target Store before Migration or Create the 301 redirects on your Target Store after migration. The former option allows you to delete all existing data on your Shopify store before migration to prevent data duplication. The latter offers the solution to redirect your old link on WooCommerce to the corresponding page on your new Shopify store.

Don’t forget to map your order status and language so that they will be displayed correspondingly on the Shopify site.

Language and order status mapping on LitExtension

3. Perform migration

Now you are ready to run the migration. LitExtension allows you to run free Demo Migration to see how easily the migration process is. But if you don’t want to run demo migration, you can click Skip demo migration to perform Full migration.

Run full migration

Step 4: Check result after migration 

Once you’ve completed the full migration, all of your products, except for those which are out-of-stock, will be displayed on the storefront. Therefore, you can find them from the catalog or by onsite search. You should check your product details carefully including product descriptions, images, variants, and meta descriptions.

After checking data on your front-end, log in to the admin area and go through customers as well as order data from the back-end to ensure no data is left behind.

Step 5: Post- migration activities

Now that you have just finished a WooCommerce to Shopify migration, here are some post-migration activities to set up a new Shopify store after a platform switch. We can summarize these activities as follows:

  • Choose a new theme
  • Set up your shipping
  • Choose payment method
  • Change DNS and Switch domain
  • Try placing some orders

Read in detail how to perform each activity in the checklist to set up a Shopify store after a platform migration.

Final Words

In short, we’ve walked you through a detailed guide to migrate reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify website. If you need help with migrating your shopping cart from WooCommerce to Shopify or any other e-commerce platforms, we recommend LitExtension - the #1 shopping migration expert.

This tool helps you migrate all your data including products, customers, orders, reviews, etc. from one platform to another one with the highest level of speed, accuracy and privacy. 

Should you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to contact us via our support center for more information. We hope you find this article helpful and good luck with your migration!

Lily Vuong

Lily is the Marketing Writer at Judge.me. She is a tech-savvy content enthusiast who takes ownership of writing promotional and instructional content for Judge.me's Knowledge Base and Blog to help accelerate our growth. Lily holds a Bachelor's Degree in Marketing and has 3 years of experience in Marketing for international tech companies. Before Judge.me, Lily was the Marketing Specialist at IT Consultis, a digital agency specialized in omnichannel projects for clients across APAC. She loves reading books, learning new technologies, traveling around and taking great pictures.