Moving from OpenCart to WooCommerce or Shopify

If you do move, products, categories, customers and orders can all be carried across. What needs care is customer passwords, anything your OpenCart extensions stored, your theme's features, and above all your old web addresses, so you keep your Google rankings.

WooCommerce or Shopify?

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, on hosting you control. It suits shops with lots of content alongside the products, unusual product rules, or owners who want full control of the code and the server.

Shopify handles hosting, security and updates for you. It suits shops that mainly sell products and would rather not manage a server. See Shopify vs WordPress for a small business for a fuller comparison.

What moves easily

Products and categories, including images, descriptions, prices and stock. The main migration routes all cover these.

Customers, with their names, addresses and email addresses.

Orders, so customers can see their past orders and you keep your sales history. Check the tool you use includes historic orders, because not every option does.

What doesn't move easily

Customer passwords. On Shopify, they can't be carried over. Shopify's own help pages say passwords from another store can't be migrated by CSV, and that you need to invite customers to set new ones. On WooCommerce, it depends on the tool. OpenCart 3 stores passwords in its own format, which WordPress doesn't recognise out of the box, but some migration plugins add support for it, so customers can log in with their old password.

Extensions and their data. OpenCart extensions don't run on WooCommerce or Shopify. You'll need an equivalent plugin or app for each one, and anything an extension stored, such as reviews, custom product options or extra customer fields, only moves if your migration tool supports it. List every extension your store uses before you start.

Your theme and its features. The design doesn't move. Your new store gets a new theme, and any custom features your OpenCart theme had need rebuilding or replacing with a plugin or app.

Migration tools

For WooCommerce, the FG OpenCart to WooCommerce plugin on WordPress.org imports from OpenCart into WooCommerce. Its free version covers products, images, categories, tags and information pages. Its premium version adds customers, orders, reviews and coupons, lets customers log in with their OpenCart passwords, imports page titles and descriptions, and redirects old OpenCart addresses to the new ones. It says it's been tested with OpenCart 1 to 4.

For Shopify, products and customers can be imported from CSV files, and Shopify's help centre lists migration apps for moving products, customers and historical orders. Check that any app you choose lists OpenCart as a source.

Whichever route you take, do a trial migration first and check a sample of products, customers and orders against the old store before going live.

Keeping your Google rankings

This is the part that's easiest to get wrong, and the part that costs the most if you do. Your OpenCart addresses will change, and Google has to be told where each page has gone.

Map every old address to its new one. Export a list of every product, category and information page address from OpenCart, and pair each one with its new address. Don't send everything to the homepage.

Use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect tells browsers and Google a page has moved permanently. On WooCommerce, they can be set up with a redirect plugin or on the server; see redirects that aren't working if they don't behave. On Shopify, they're under Content, Menus, View URL Redirects, and you can import them in bulk from a CSV file. Shopify won't let you redirect its own fixed paths, such as /products and /collections.

Keep your page titles and descriptions. Carry across the titles and descriptions that are already ranking, rather than starting again.

Check Search Console afterwards. Submit the new sitemap, then watch for pages Google can't find over the following weeks, and add redirects for any old addresses you missed.

I did exactly this when I rebuilt this site: every old address mapped to its new one with a single 301 redirect.

Before you start

Back up the OpenCart files and database, and keep the old store available somewhere private until you're sure everything has moved. If you're not sure yet whether to move at all, it's worth getting the current store working first: see OpenCart fixes.

If you're moving to Shopify, see Shopify web design for building the new store, with the migration quoted alongside it. If you're moving to WooCommerce and something isn't working afterwards, see WooCommerce fixes.