Shopify Plus Migration Checklist: Data, SEO, Checkout and Launch Day

Most stores move to Shopify Plus from Magento (Adobe Commerce), WooCommerce or a custom platform because maintaining the old stack has become the bigger risk. Adobe's lifecycle policy gives each Adobe Commerce 2.4 minor release three years of standard support from general availability. Standard support for 2.4.6 ended on August 11, 2026, with extended support running to August 31, 2027, and standard support for 2.4.7 ends on May 31, 2027. A store on one of those versions has to choose between an upgrade project and a replatforming project within the next year either way.

Moving the catalogue is the easy part. The work that decides whether revenue dips after launch is everything around it: order history customers rely on for returns, URLs that carry your search rankings, checkout logic that used to live in plugins, tax settings, and the hour when DNS switches over. The checklist below follows the order Shopify itself recommends in its Shopify Plus launch checklist, with the decisions we would make explicit at each step.

Start with an inventory, not a theme. Every item on it should have an owner and a target on Shopify: a native feature, an app, a Shopify Function or a custom integration built on the Admin API. Anything without a target is a scope decision, and it is cheaper to make it now than during testing.

Shopify's Plus launch checklist gives a clear sequence: products, then customers, then historical orders, then gift cards. Order matters because imported orders need to link to products and customers that already exist. For each data type you can use CSV import, a third-party migration app, a migration service or a custom integration on the REST or GraphQL Admin API.

How much order history to move is a business decision. Shopify recommends the past two to five years, and at minimum every order still inside your return window so customers can see what they can return or exchange. Turn off new-order notifications before you import, or staff will receive an email for every historical order. Plan gift cards carefully: Shopify migrates them right before launch, shows only the last four digits after creation, and does not let you edit or delete them, so keep an external record of full numbers if your finance team needs it.

Shopify's URL structure rarely matches the one your old platform used, so most product and category URLs change when you leave Magento or WooCommerce. Google's guidance for site moves with URL changes is to map each old URL to its new counterpart, use server-side permanent redirects such as 301 or 308, avoid redirect chains, and not send many old URLs to an unrelated page like the home page. Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, and expect temporary ranking fluctuation while Google recrawls.

Older Shopify Plus guides tell you to port custom checkout code into Shopify Scripts. That advice is out of date. Shopify's developer changelog states that editing and publishing new Scripts stopped on April 15, 2026, and that all Shopify Scripts ceased to execute on June 30, 2026. Discount, shipping and payment customizations now belong in Shopify Functions, and visual changes in checkout extensions or the checkout and accounts editor. For a migrating store this is a scoping question: list each rule your old checkout plugins applied and decide whether a native setting, an app or a custom Function replaces it.

Taxes need the same attention, especially for Canadian merchants. Shopify's Canadian tax documentation says Shopify helps calculate and charge sales tax but does not remit or file it for you, and that Basic Tax is available in Canada only for stores that were collecting Canadian tax before May 13, 2026. A new Plus store therefore sets up Shopify Tax or manual tax settings, and you should confirm with your accountant which provinces you are registered in before testing checkout. Test orders should cover addresses in each province where you collect tax, not only your home province.

Shopify's checklist lists what to test before launch. Treat it as the minimum and run each case on the devices your customers actually use. Then set a cutoff date after which no new data is entered on the old platform except orders, so the final delta migration stays small.

Launch day should be a sequence of rehearsed steps with a named owner for each, not an improvisation. Pick a low-traffic window and avoid running it alongside a sale. Shopify's checklist supplies the core order; the timing notes come from its preparation steps.