Most Shopify Plus migrations I’ve done went smoothly. The ones that didn’t had one thing in common: someone tried to do too much in the cutover weekend. Here is the playbook that’s been refined across about three dozen Plus migrations.
Six weeks out. Inventory everything that currently runs on the old platform — not just product data, but every app integration, every webhook, every customer-facing email, every transactional flow. Get it on a single Notion page. Decide what survives, what gets replaced, what gets killed.
Five weeks out. Stand up the new Shopify Plus store on a development URL. Get the theme to a launchable state — not perfect, but launchable. The temptation to keep polishing the design is the single biggest cause of migration overrun.
Four weeks out. Migrate product data. Use Matrixify or a custom CSV pipeline depending on the complexity. Verify SKUs, variants, inventory levels, metafield carry-over, image alt-text. Run the migration twice in dry-run mode to catch silent failures.
Three weeks out. Migrate customer data and order history. Shopify Plus lets you import customer accounts with hashed passwords from most platforms — do this, not a force-reset, which loses you ~30% of returning customers.
Two weeks out. Integration testing. Klaviyo, Recharge, ReCharge, ReturnGo, shipping app, ERP. Each one tested end-to-end on the dev URL with fake orders. Document every webhook URL that needs to flip.
One week out. SEO mapping. Build the full 301 redirect table from every old URL to its new home — products, collections, pages, blog posts. This is the single most under-resourced step in most migrations and it’s why brands lose 15–30% of organic traffic for six months after a cutover.
Cutover day. Tuesday morning, never Friday. Final inventory sync. Flip the DNS. Verify every redirect from a spot-check list of fifty URLs. Sign in to GA4, GSC, Klaviyo, the ERP, the shipping app, the fraud tool — all of them — and verify data is flowing within the first hour.
Cutover + 24 hours. Real-traffic monitoring. Watch error rates in Shopify’s logs, check that pixels are firing, check the top 20 organic landing pages aren’t 404ing.
Cutover + 7 days. Post-mortem with the founder. What was harder than expected? What apps weren’t actually being used? What did we forget?
The three things to never do on a Friday: launch, push a major DNS change, or migrate customer data. Nothing about commerce gets easier when the support teams of the platforms you depend on are asleep.