If you’re planning a Magento to Shopify migration, the short answer on timing is this: don’t wait past the point where your current Magento version stops receiving security patches. As of this writing, Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce 2.4.6 already passed their end-of-support date on August 11, 2026, and Adobe does not offer paid extended support for the Open Source codebase the way it does for select Adobe Commerce versions. If your store is still running an unsupported Magento release, that’s the real deadline driving this checklist, not a marketing preference for one platform over another.
This checklist walks through what to gather before you start, the decisions that shape the whole project, and the specific steps that get missed most often when a store moves off Magento.
Before You Touch Anything: What to Confirm First
Start by confirming exactly which Magento version and edition you’re running. In the admin panel footer, or by running php bin/magento --version from the command line, you can identify your release. Then check your composer.json file for either magento/product-community-edition (Open Source) or magento/product-enterprise-edition (Adobe Commerce), since support timelines differ between the two. Adobe’s Adobe Commerce lifecycle policy confirms that only Adobe Commerce customers on versions 2.4.4 and 2.4.5 were eligible for a no-cost, one-year extended support window. That extension was never available to Magento Open Source stores, which is why Open Source merchants on an end-of-life version face the sharpest urgency.
Once you know your starting point, pull together a full inventory before scoping the migration: total SKU count, whether products use configurable variants or custom attributes, customer account count, historical order volume, and any custom Magento extensions or theme customizations your storefront depends on. This inventory is what determines both the realistic timeline and which migration approach makes sense.
Decision One: Which Shopify Plan Fits Your Store
Shopify’s current plan structure matters here because plan choice affects staff accounts, transaction fees, and reporting depth, all of which interact with how you rebuild a Magento store’s functionality. According to Shopify’s official pricing page, the core plans run Basic at $39 a month ($29 billed annually), Grow at $105 a month ($79 billed annually), and Advanced at $399 a month ($299 billed annually), with Shopify Plus starting from $2,300 a month for larger, high-volume operations. A Magento store with a few thousand SKUs and a small team often fits comfortably on Basic or Grow. A Magento store running multiple storefronts, B2B pricing, or high order volume is a stronger match for Advanced or Plus, and that’s worth settling before you start rebuilding anything, since some features (like advanced reporting or additional staff accounts) aren’t available on lower tiers.
Decision Two: How You’ll Actually Move the Data
This is the step where a lot of migration plans run into a wall. Shopify’s own first-party Store Migration app currently imports data from Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, Clover, and Lightspeed. Magento is not on that supported list. That means a Magento-to-Shopify migration requires either a third-party migration app from the Shopify App Store built specifically for Magento imports, a paid migration service, or a manual CSV export and cleanup process for smaller catalogs. Before committing to any specific tool, check what it actually transfers: product catalogs and images usually come across cleanly, but order history, customer accounts, and product reviews are handled inconsistently between different migration tools, so confirm this against your own inventory list from the step above rather than assuming full parity.
The Core Checklist
Pre-Migration Audit
- Confirm Magento version, edition, and support status.
- Export a full product catalog, including variants, attributes, and images.
- Export customer accounts and order history.
- Document all active third-party integrations, including ERP, email marketing, tax calculation, and fulfillment.
- Map your current URL structure for every product, category, and blog page.
Data migration
- Choose and test a Magento-compatible migration app or service on a Shopify development store before touching your live store
- Migrate products and collections first, then customers, then historical orders
- Verify variant and pricing data landed correctly, not just product titles and images
- Confirm metafields or custom attributes transferred, since these often get dropped in translation between platforms
SEO preservation
- Build a complete 301 redirect map from every old Magento URL to its new Shopify equivalent before launch, not after
- Preserve existing meta titles and descriptions where they were performing well
- Resubmit your sitemap through Google Search Console once the new store is live
- Monitor crawl errors closely for the first few weeks after launch
Storefront and functionality
- Rebuild or purchase a Shopify theme that matches your brand rather than accepting a default template
- Recreate any custom functionality your Magento store relied on (custom checkout fields, B2B pricing rules, subscription logic) using Shopify apps or Shopify Plus customization if needed
- Configure your chosen payment gateways and confirm tax calculation settings match your actual tax obligations across the states where you have nexus
- Test mobile responsiveness separately from desktop, since Magento and Shopify themes render differently
Testing before launch
- Place test orders using every payment method you plan to accept
- Verify shipping rate calculations against your actual carrier accounts
- Test customer account login and password reset flows
- Confirm email notifications (order confirmation, shipping updates) are firing correctly
Launch and post-launch
- Schedule the cutover during a low-traffic window, not your busiest sales period
- Keep the old Magento site accessible but not publicly linked for a short transition window, in case you discover missed data
- Monitor conversion rate and cart abandonment closely for the first two weeks, since checkout differences between platforms can affect completion rates
- Reconcile order counts between the old and new systems to confirm nothing was lost in the transfer
