Firstly why Move from WooCommerce to Shopify?
Before diving into the checklist, let’s briefly explore why migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify could be advantageous for your business:
Performance and Scalability: Shopify is known for its superior performance and scalability, making it a great choice for growing businesses. The Shopify checkout process can perform up to 36% better than competitors. Therefore, it’s one less area to worry about meaning you can focus on optimising the rest of the user journey.
User-Friendly Interface: From a marketers perspective, Shopify makes everything so easy to work with from integrations to reporting. Their intuitive interface simplifies store management, even for non-technical users.
Security and Reliability: With built-in security features and reliable hosting, Shopify ensures your store remains secure and operational. How many times can you think of issues on Woocommerce websites?
Integrated Features: Shopify offers a wide range of integrated features and apps, enhancing functionality without needing extensive custom development. For example, Google & Meta have apps which take 5 minutes to set up then tracking, product syncing and everything needed is taken care of.If you can’t already tell, we’re huge advocates for Shopify and the world would be a better place if more businesses made the shift from Woocommerce to Shopify.
Images and Messaging
- Assess if new branding is required, especially for images, callouts, and structured snippets. Brief the designers as early as possible so they can fit your requirements in while they do similar work with different dimensions for the website, socials, etc.
- Ensure all messaging aligns with your brand identity. A messaging document is useful to outline old messaging vs the new website and getting that across to users within ads.
URLs
- Update site links at both the account and campaign levels.
- Replicate top-performing bespoke landing pages or at least plan where to redirect traffic.
- Check and update all URLs to avoid broken links, including product pages.
Bonus - Domain migrations can be an issue, make sure the DNS hosting change doesn’t impact any other websites (other countries or sub-domains). This one isn’t necessarily a paid media element but you could make yourself a hero by spotting this.
Accounts Linked
Connect Shopify with Meta and Google through appropriate apps.
Tracking
- Implement Google Tag Manager (GTM) for any additional tracking requirements.
- Ensure Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is set up.
- Integrate Microsoft Clarity.
- Verify multiple tracking methods in Google Ads. We import GA4 goals and use the Shopify integration as back ups, then hard code tracking on the checkout to ensure it’s as robust as possible.
- Enable enhanced conversions.
- Activate consent mode.
- Ensure tracking for Microsoft Ads, Meta, and TikTok is configured.
- Add secondary tracking metrics like 'add to basket rate' and 'begin checkout rate' to troubleshoot future performance changes.
User Journey
- Check the home page, key product pages, and category pages for errors.
- Test the buying journey, including adding items to the basket, viewing the basket, and checking out. Ensure the process is seamless.
Audiences
- Update remarketing audiences and their definitions.
- Integrate customer lists through Klaviyo.
Google Merchant Center (GMC) Product Feed:
- Export and store the product feed as a backup.
- Prepare a new feed for the new website, ensuring all GTINs and important information are included.
- Line up new products so they’re ready to launch.
Benchmark Performance
- Compare site speed before and after the migration using one of the page speed insight tools available.
- Export landing page data from GAds to compare landing page experience on core keywords.
- Evaluate conversion rates on core campaigns, ad groups, and keywords before and after the migration. This should provide useful insights into areas that need improving once the new site is launched.
By following this checklist, you can give yourself the best chance of a seamless transition from WooCommerce to Shopify, minimising disruptions and maximising performance.
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