Wix to Shopify migration: how to move a store without losing rankings or sales.

You move a store from Wix to Shopify by building the new store first, mapping every old Wix URL to its new Shopify page with a 301 redirect, moving the products, customers and email, rehearsing the cutover, then pointing the domain at Shopify while the old store is still trading. Done in that order there is no downtime and Google's rankings carry across. VMEP, a UK motorsport parts supplier, moved 500 products and 61 categories off Wix this way with zero downtime, then returned 6.25x on Google Ads.

Why stores leave Wix

Wix is a fine place to start a shop and a hard place to grow one. The usual triggers: Wix retiring the system a store was built on (which is what forced VMEP's move), a catalogue that has outgrown the product management, apps that don't exist on Wix, pages that get slower as the store grows, and a ceiling on how far a Wix theme can be customised. Shopify is built around a catalogue: variants, inventory, shipping rules, payments, an app ecosystem, and a theme system (Online Store 2.0) a developer can shape to the brand.

What you can lose, and how not to

Rankings, orders, customers and email, roughly in order of panic. Rankings live in URLs: every page address Google has indexed needs a 301 redirect to the matching new page, or the ranking dies with the old one. Orders are lost if the switch leaves a gap, so the old store has to keep trading until the moment the new one takes over. Customers can be imported with their addresses and order history, but passwords cannot move, so customers set a new one on first login. Business email on the domain is separate from the shop but is often hosted alongside it, so it has to be moved to a proper mail host before the domain changes; VMEP's six mailboxes and years of history came across that way.

The redirect map

Export every URL on the Wix site: the sitemap, plus Search Console's list of indexed pages, which catches old addresses the sitemap forgot. Then decide, one row at a time, where each goes on Shopify. Products map to products, categories to collections, blog posts to blog posts, and pages with no equivalent go to the closest useful page, never the homepage. Shopify's URL redirects tool imports a CSV; we build the map in a spreadsheet, import it, and test every row on the new store's own address before the switch.

Products, variants and images

Wix exports a product CSV, but it needs reshaping for Shopify's import: variants as rows, images as URLs, inventory per location. Matrixify handles large or messy catalogues; the Shopify API handles anything the CSV can't. After the import, check weights, SKUs, barcodes, tax settings and stock levels; they are where imports go quietly wrong and where a trade customer notices first. VMEP's 500 products were rebuilt and reorganised from the Wix export rather than copied as they were, which is also the moment to fix the category structure you always meant to.

The cutover

Build and test the whole store on its myshopify.com address first: checkout, shipping rates, payment methods, transactional emails, the redirects. Then rehearse the domain change: add the domain in Shopify, prepare the DNS records, confirm the SSL certificate issues cleanly. On the day, switch the DNS, verify the redirects and a real checkout on the live domain, submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing, and keep the Wix store live but unlinked for a few weeks as a safety net. Done this way there is no downtime: VMEP's shop never stopped taking orders.

What it costs and how long it takes

A migration is quoted to scope: the number of products, how messy the export is, the integrations (Klaviyo, reviews, Google Shopping, accounting) and whether the theme is custom or a tidied-up Shopify theme. VALKER's Shopify builds and migrations start at £1,500 fixed; most land between £1,500 and £5,000 and take two to eight weeks, with the price agreed before work starts. Hosting afterwards is Shopify's own plan, paid to Shopify.

After the move: Google Shopping and AI search

A clean Shopify catalogue is also a feed. Connected to Google Merchant Center and Google Ads, and limited to the countries you ship to, the products appear in Shopping results; VMEP's returned 6.25x on spend, with monthly sales between £14k and £29k across the following 14 months. Add product, offer and brand structured data, a facts page and an llms.txt, and the store can be named by ChatGPT product by product: VMEP's AI visibility went from about 2% to 30% in three months, and ChatGPT now names it for 9 of its 10 main products.