Tactics, Gotchas, and Lessons-Learned from the Front Lines of a Real Migration

Migrating to a new e-commerce platform always feels like a great idea in the beginning. You daydream about the things you could do with a new platform — in your mind, there are no downsides to switching, only frictionless progress towards your goals. Yet as you descend from the fluffy white clouds of imagination and start down the hard, gritty path of migration, the realization of the difficulty in switching from one platform to another sets in. I recently completed one such journey.

In early 2018 I migrated a beauty care company’s e-commerce site from the Shopify hosted platform to a self-hosted WordPress/WooCommerce platform. The project was ultimately a success, but did not come without difficulties. In this retrospective, you’ll join me as I reminisce on problems encountered, solutions derived, and knowledge gained along the way.

I’ll touch on the following topics: data migration, domain management, URL redirects, choosing the right theme, noteworthy plugins, hosting considerations, and overall project costs.