Magento to Shopify Migration: The Complete Guide (2026)

Magento built a lot of great online stores. It is flexible, it handles complex catalogs and, with enough developers, it can do almost anything. That flexibility has a cost: version upgrades that turn into projects, extensions that conflict after every patch, hosting and security you manage yourself, and a backlog that never gets shorter. For many brands, 2026 is the year that cost became hard to ignore, because several Adobe Commerce release lines reached the end of support.

We have moved stores off Magento before, including Holigos, which we took from Magento to Shopify Plus with a new product page, its subscriptions moved to Recharge and a store that converted at 4%. This guide is the plan we follow: when it is time to leave, what maps cleanly to Shopify and what does not, how to handle extensions and URLs, and the order of steps that protects sales and search rankings. It uses Adobe's published lifecycle dates and Shopify's Help Center, both checked in October 2026.

Why brands leave Magento in 2026

Adobe gives each Adobe Commerce 2.4.x release about three years of standard support from its release date, and some lines get extra time after that. Here are the dates from Adobe's lifecycle policy (last updated September 18, 2026):

A few details from the same page matter for planning:

• The security-only period is a one-time exception. Adobe describes it as migration time and says it will not be extended. It includes isolated security fixes only, with no quality fixes.
• Adobe Commerce on Cloud will enforce upgrades. From June 1, 2027, Adobe says it will no longer maintain Cloud environments running unsupported versions and may suspend traffic, which takes the storefront offline.
• PHP is on a clock too. PHP 8.1 reached end of life on December 31, 2025, and PHP 8.2 reaches it on December 31, 2026. Adobe flags both as a PCI compliance risk for stores still running them.

So if you are on 2.4.4 to 2.4.6, you have three real choices: upgrade to a supported release, move to Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, or replatform. Upgrading is often the right call for stores with deep custom logic and a strong in-house team. If every upgrade feels like a rebuild anyway, it is worth pricing a move to Shopify, where hosting, security patches and checkout updates are handled for you.

What maps cleanly, and what does not

Shopify's free Store Migration app does not support Magento, so a Magento move uses a third-party migration app (such as Cart2Cart, LitExtension or Matrixify), Shopify's CSV imports or custom scripts against the Magento API. Most projects use a mix. This is how the main Magento concepts translate:

Three of these catch teams out:

• Options and variants. A Shopify product can have up to 3 options. Shopify raised the variant limit from 100 to 2,048 per product in October 2025, which helps big configurable products, but a Magento product with 4 or more configurable attributes still needs restructuring: split it into separate products, move an attribute to line item properties, or use an options app.
• Customer groups and tier prices. On Magento, wholesale pricing often lives in customer groups and tier prices. Since April 2026, Shopify's native B2B features are on Basic, Grow and Advanced as well as Plus, with company profiles, up to 3 catalogs (unlimited on Plus), quantity price breaks and payment terms. Our Shopify B2B guide covers what each plan includes.
• Passwords. Customer password hashes cannot be moved. With Shopify's customer accounts, customers sign in with their email address and a one-time code, so they do not need a password at all. Tell them before launch.

Replace extensions, don't rebuild them

A typical Magento store runs dozens of extensions, and some of them only exist to patch gaps or to connect other extensions. Before you design anything, list every extension and custom module and sort each one into four buckets:

1. Native on Shopify. Gift cards, abandoned checkout emails, B2B basics, multi-currency selling with Shopify Markets and automation with Shopify Flow often replace extensions outright.
2. An app does it. Subscriptions, loyalty, advanced search, product options and reviews usually move to an app. Holigos moved its subscriptions to Recharge, which also gave customers a self-service portal.
3. Custom work. ERP, PIM and warehouse integrations, custom pricing logic and anything unique to your business. On Shopify these become custom apps, Shopify Functions or integration middleware.
4. Retire it. Extensions that solved Magento-specific problems (caching, performance, admin tweaks) usually have no job on Shopify.

This list is the real scope of the project. It decides your plan (standard Shopify or Plus), your budget and your timeline far more than the number of products does.

Map every URL before you switch the domain

Search rankings belong to URLs, and Magento and Shopify structure them differently. Magento lets you choose URL keys and suffixes; by default, product and category URLs end in .html. Shopify uses fixed paths, so almost every URL on your store will change:

Magento-specific things to plan for:

• Several URLs per product. If "Use Categories Path for Product URLs" is on, the same product can live at /blue-hoodie.html and /men/hoodies/blue-hoodie.html. Redirect every version you find in the crawl and in the URL rewrites list (Marketing › SEO & Search › URL Rewrites).
• Store view paths. Store codes in URLs, such as /fr/ or /en_ca/, need their own redirect rows or a matching Shopify Markets setup.
• Layered navigation. Filter URLs with parameters usually should not get their own redirects. Redirect the category, and make sure the filtered versions were not your ranking pages.
• Redirect limits. Standard Shopify plans allow up to 100,000 URL redirects and Plus allows up to 20,000,000, which is one more reason large Magento catalogs often land on Plus.

Our Shopify migration SEO checklist covers the full SEO side: benchmarking, metadata, structured data and post-launch monitoring.

The migration plan, step by step

1. Audit and benchmark. Export 12 to 16 months of Search Console and analytics data, crawl every URL, export the URL rewrites and list every extension, integration and custom module.
2. Decide the plan and architecture. Standard Shopify, Plus, or headless. Base it on the extension audit, B2B needs, store views and integrations, not on habit.
3. Clean the catalog. Remove dead products, merge duplicates, decide options and metafields, and map categories to collections and menus.
4. Design the new store. Use the move to fix UX. On Holigos, we consolidated shopping into one category with custom tagging and shortened the home page by 60%.
5. Migrate products, then customers, then orders. Run a test migration on a development store first, check it, then run the final one close to launch with a delta for new orders and customers.
6. Rebuild integrations and replace extensions. ERP, PIM, shipping, tax and email. Test with real orders: successful, failed, refunded and partly fulfilled.
7. Plan subscriptions and stored payment methods. Moving active subscriptions usually means migrating payment tokens with your payment processor and the new subscription app. Start that conversation early.
8. Import redirects and test. Check your top pages and top-selling products on the development store where possible.
9. Launch. Switch the domain, submit the Shopify sitemap in Search Console, and keep Magento running privately until you are sure nothing is missing.
10. Monitor for 8 to 12 weeks. Watch 404s, rankings, conversion rate and integrations, and fix gaps quickly.

Timelines depend on the extension list, integrations and catalog. A store with a clean catalog and few integrations can move in a couple of months; stores with ERP integrations, B2B pricing and several store views take longer.

Shopify or Shopify Plus?

Many Magento stores land on Shopify Plus because they already run at a scale where Plus features matter: high redirect volume, more B2B catalogs and company-level pricing, expansion stores for separate brands or regions, combined listings, checkout customization and higher API limits for integrations. Smaller Magento Open Source stores often fit a standard plan, especially now that B2B basics are on every plan from Basic up. Our Shopify vs Shopify Plus guide walks through the decision, including pricing.

Common Magento to Shopify mistakes

• Copying the Magento architecture. Recreating every extension and custom module on Shopify rebuilds the complexity you were leaving.
• Missing duplicate product URLs. Category-path product URLs rank too. Redirect them, not just the canonical version.
• Ignoring products with 4 or more configurable attributes. Find them in the export before you design the product page.
• Waiting for the support deadline. A rushed migration costs more than a planned one. Use the security-only period as migration time, as Adobe suggests.
• Forgetting subscriptions and stored cards. Token migration takes coordination with your payment provider and cannot be done the night before launch.
• Turning Magento off too early. Migration apps and image imports pull from the old store. Keep it online until the final data run is checked.

How Startup Slang helps

We are an AI-first agency with offices in Toronto and Montreal, and we have built on Shopify since 2017. Our Shopify migration team handles Magento and Adobe Commerce moves end to end: the extension audit, architecture, catalog clean-up, design, data and order migration, integrations, redirects and post-launch monitoring. After launch, our Shopify agency team can keep going with CRO, SEO and AI automation. Tell us about your Magento store and we will give you a plan and timeline after a short audit.

Frequently asked questions