Shopify to WooCommerce Migration for European Stores: Done Right, EU-Hosted

I’m a WordPress developer and I’ve been building and migrating WooCommerce stores since 2009. Store owners come to me with the same underlying realization, regardless of which country they sell from: Shopify is a rental. You pay every month, you pay a slice of every order if you don’t use Shopify Payments, you pay again for each app that fills a gap in the platform — and at the end of it you don’t own the thing you built your business on. This guide is about the alternative: moving to WooCommerce, where you own the code, the data, and the server, and where the only ongoing costs are the ones you actually choose. It covers why store owners make the move, exactly how I run the migration, what it costs, and how I protect your search rankings on the way across.

This is the general guide. If you sell from a specific market, I’ve written country-specific guides that go deep on local payment methods, VAT, and consumer law — there are links to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany guides further down. What follows applies to all of them: the open-source case, the technical process, EU hosting, and what working with me actually looks like.

In This Guide

• Why Store Owners Leave Shopify
• Three Ways to Migrate: DIY, Generic Agency, or Done-For-You
• The Open-Source Advantage: What You Actually Own
• The Real Cost Comparison
• When Migration Makes Sense (and When It Doesn’t)
• How I Build Your Store: Elayne, Nynaeve, and Trellis
• The Migration Process Step by Step
• Protecting Your Search Rankings
• EU Hosting and Data Sovereignty
• Realistic Timeline and What It Costs
• What You Gain and What You Give Up
• The Most Common Mistakes to Avoid
• Maintenance: The Part That Puts People Off
• Country-Specific Guides
• Frequently Asked Questions

Why Store Owners Leave Shopify

Shopify is genuinely good software. It gets a store online fast, the admin is friendly, and for a brand-new shop with no developer it’s a reasonable place to start. The trouble shows up later, once the store is doing real volume and the bills stop being trivial. Four things tend to drive the decision to leave.

The transaction fee on third-party gateways

If you don’t use Shopify Payments — because you want a local payment partner, a specific bank method, or “buy now, pay later” coverage Shopify Payments doesn’t offer — Shopify charges an extra fee on every order, on top of your gateway’s own fees. On Shopify Basic that’s 2%. On a store doing €10,000 a month, that’s €200 every month going to Shopify for nothing but the privilege of routing your own payments. On WooCommerce there is no platform between you and your payment provider — you pay the gateway directly and keep the rest.

App-stack creep

Shopify keeps the core lean and pushes everything else into the app store. A cookie-consent banner, multilingual content, advanced shipping rules, B2B pricing, product bundles, review widgets — each one is a separate monthly subscription. It’s common to see app bills of €80–200 a month for features that WooCommerce either includes or covers with a free, one-time plugin. The subscriptions never stop, and they rarely get cheaper.

Customization limits

Shopify’s checkout, in particular, is locked down on Basic and Advanced plans. You can’t freely change field order, add custom logic, or alter the legally-required wording your market demands without hitting platform restrictions or paying for Shopify Plus. Theme customization runs through Liquid and a constrained API. When your store needs something the platform didn’t anticipate, you’re often told it isn’t possible — not because it’s hard, but because Shopify won’t let you reach the code.

Vendor lock-in

This is the one that bothers people most once they notice it. On Shopify you’re renting. Your store, your data, and your customer relationships live inside someone else’s platform, on someone else’s terms, at a price they set and can raise. If Shopify changes its pricing — as it has — you absorb it. There’s no version of “I’ll just host it myself” because you can’t. WooCommerce is the opposite arrangement, and that’s worth its own section.

Three Ways to Migrate: DIY, a Generic Agency, or Done-For-You

Once you’ve decided to leave Shopify, the next question is how. There are really three routes, and most of what you’ll find online quietly assumes one of them. The official WooCommerce documentation and tutorials like the Breakdance product-import walkthrough are written for the DIY route — they show you how to export a CSV and map fields, but they stop at the parts that actually break live stores: redirects, payment testing, caching, and hosting. Here’s the honest comparison of all three.

What matters	DIY (yourself)	Generic agency / freelancer	Done-for-you (Imagewize)
Product & data import	Your time, your risk on variants and images	Usually handled	Handled, with image re-upload and variant clean-up
301 redirects & SEO	Most-skipped step — where DIY loses rankings	Varies widely; often an afterthought	Full redirect map from a Screaming Frog crawl, served at Nginx level
Hosting	You pick a host (often a cheap, slow one)	Whatever they resell	Tuned Trellis stack on EU servers — the same one I run my own sites on
WooCommerce caching done right	Easy to get wrong — broken carts	Depends on their WooCommerce depth	Cart/checkout cache exclusions configured correctly
Local payments & EU compliance	Your research	Rarely market-specific	Mollie/Stripe setup + GDPR data residency, with country-specific guides
Typical cost	“Free” (your hours + lost-ranking risk)	Wide range, often opaque	Fixed €1,500–3,000, quoted up front
Ongoing support	It’s all on you	Sometimes	Optional maintenance plan — you own it, I keep it running
You own the result	Yes	Yes	Yes — code in a repo you control, no lock-in

DIY makes sense if you have the time, a small catalog, and no meaningful search rankings to protect. A generic agency can work if they have genuine WooCommerce and hosting depth — many don’t, and resell shared hosting that undoes half the benefit of moving. The done-for-you route is what this guide describes: a single named developer who handles the migration end to end, hosts it properly in the EU, protects your rankings, and is still there afterward. The rest of the guide is what that actually involves.

The Open-Source Advantage: What You Actually Own

WordPress and WooCommerce are open-source software released under the GPL. That’s not a licensing footnote — it’s the whole point of the move. When your store runs on open-source software that you host yourself, the relationship inverts: instead of renting access to a platform, you own a copy of it outright. Here’s what that ownership actually buys you.

• You own the code. Every line of your theme, every plugin, every customization sits in a git repository you control. There is no API ceiling, no “that’s not available on your plan,” no feature gated behind an upgrade. If something needs to behave differently, a developer can change it — because the code is right there and it’s yours.
• You own the data. Your products, orders, and — crucially — your customer database live in a MySQL database on a server you control. You can export it, back it up, move it to another host, or analyze it however you like. Nobody can hold it hostage or restrict your access to it.
• No platform fee, ever. WooCommerce takes 0% of your revenue. There is no equivalent of Shopify’s transaction fee because there is no platform sitting between you and your customers. You pay your payment gateway, your hosting, and nothing else.
• No forced subscriptions for core features. Multilingual content, GDPR cookie consent, SEO, advanced shipping, B2B pricing — these are handled by free or one-time plugins, not monthly apps. A massive ecosystem of over 50,000 plugins means almost anything you need already exists, much of it free.
• No lock-in. Because it’s open source and self-hosted, you’re never trapped. You can change hosting providers, change developers, or change nothing at all and keep running the exact version you have for as long as you like. Your business doesn’t depend on a single vendor’s pricing decisions.
• Portability. A WooCommerce store is a standard WordPress install plus a database. Any competent WordPress developer in the world can pick it up and work on it. You’re not dependent on a niche skill set or a proprietary platform that could disappear.

WooCommerce isn’t a fringe choice, either. It powers a large share of the world’s online stores precisely because this ownership model is attractive once a business is past the experimental stage. The trade-off is that you’re now responsible for hosting and maintenance — which is exactly what I handle, and what the rest of this guide is about.

The Real Cost Comparison

Here’s what a small store doing €5,000–€15,000 per month actually pays on each platform. The Shopify column assumes Shopify Basic with a third-party gateway (where the 2% fee applies); if you use Shopify Payments natively the transaction fee drops to 0% and the case rests on the other rows. For the full build-and-run picture, see how much a WooCommerce store costs.

Cost Item	Shopify Basic + third-party gateway	WooCommerce on Trellis
Platform / hosting	$39 USD/month (~€36)	€49–79/month (Hetzner EU)
Platform transaction fee	2% on every order	0%
Payment gateway fees	Gateway rate + 2% Shopify markup	Gateway rate only, paid directly
Apps / Plugins	€80–200/month (6–8 apps typical)	€0–40/month
Multilingual	Third-party app (~€30/month) or Shopify Plus	WPML or Polylang — one-time or free
Theme	€180–380 one-time or €14/month	€0–150 one-time (or custom)
SSL certificate	Included	Included (Let’s Encrypt via Trellis)
You own the code & data	No	Yes

For a store on a third-party gateway, the 2% fee is usually the headline number — €200/month on €10,000 in sales, before you count the app stack. But even for stores on Shopify Payments where that fee doesn’t apply, the app subscriptions, the theme rental, and the lack of ownership add up. WooCommerce trades all of those recurring, open-ended costs for a predictable hosting bill and a one-time build cost. The current Shopify pricing is worth checking against your own numbers before you decide.

When Migration Makes Sense (and When It Doesn’t)

Good reasons to migrate

• You’re paying Shopify’s 2% transaction fee because you use a third-party gateway, and your volume makes that a meaningful monthly number
• Your monthly app bill has crept past €100–€150 for features WooCommerce handles natively or with one-time plugins
• You want full control over the checkout, the code, and the customer experience without hitting platform restrictions or being pushed to Shopify Plus
• You want your customer and order data on servers you control, physically in the EU, for clean GDPR compliance and genuine data sovereignty
• You’re tired of renting and want to own the platform your business runs on — no lock-in, no surprise price increases, no vendor dependency
• You need integrations or custom functionality that Shopify’s API simply doesn’t allow at your plan level

Reasons to stay on Shopify

• Your store does under €3,000/month in revenue — at that volume the savings are smaller and the migration investment takes longer to recover
• You use Shopify Payments natively, you’re happy with the checkout, and you have no app-cost or customization pain — there’s less to gain
• You manage the store entirely yourself with no technical help and intend to keep it that way — WooCommerce needs more hands-on maintenance (though that’s exactly what a maintenance plan solves)
• You rely heavily on Shopify’s native POS for in-person sales
• Your store is under six months old with minimal SEO equity and traffic — the migration overhead isn’t worth it yet

I’ll tell you honestly which side of this line your store falls on. If migration doesn’t make financial sense for you yet, I’d rather say so than sell you a project you don’t need.

How I Build Your Store: Elayne, Nynaeve, and Trellis

A migration is only as good as what you land on. I don’t drop your store onto a generic premium theme and a cheap shared host and call it done — that’s how you end up with the slow, fragile WooCommerce sites that give the platform a bad reputation. I build on tooling I develop and maintain myself, hosted on the same stack I run my own sites on.

The theme: Elayne or Nynaeve

There are two routes, and the right one depends on how much custom design you need.

• Elayne is the Full Site Editing block theme I develop. It has WooCommerce support built in — product templates, shop archive layouts, cart and checkout styling — plus a library of conversion-focused patterns. If your store’s design doesn’t need to be replicated pixel-for-pixel, we apply your branding (colors, logo, fonts) to Elayne and you get a clean, fast, modern store at the lower end of the cost range. Because it’s a native block theme, you can edit pages yourself in the WordPress Site Editor afterward — no page builder, no developer needed for routine content changes.
• Nynaeve is the custom developer stack — a theme built on Sage 11 and Acorn (Laravel’s tooling, adapted for WordPress) with a set of reusable custom blocks. This is the route when you need a bespoke design rebuilt faithfully from your Shopify store, custom block development, or functionality that goes beyond what a pattern library covers. It’s the more involved build, at the upper end of the cost range.

Both are open-source, both give you full code ownership, and both are built mobile-first and optimized for Core Web Vitals from the start — speed isn’t an afterthought we bolt on later.

The hosting: Trellis

I host every store on a Trellis and Bedrock stack — the same open-source Roots.io tooling I run imagewize.com itself on. That means Nginx, PHP 8.3, Redis object cache, and FastCGI page caching, all provisioned and configured properly rather than left to a one-click installer. The full stack is documented in the Trellis documentation if you want to see what’s under the hood.

This matters specifically for WooCommerce. Cart and checkout pages must be excluded from the page cache, or you get ghost cart sessions — customers seeing items they’ve already bought, or sessions expiring mid-checkout. A correctly configured Trellis server handles those cache exclusions automatically; basic shared hosting typically does not, which is the single most common reason DIY WooCommerce migrations feel broken. Trellis also handles SSL via Let’s Encrypt, server-level security patching, and automated backups as part of the setup.

The Migration Process Step by Step

1. Audit your Shopify store before touching anything

Before any work begins, I export a full list of every URL on your Shopify store. Every product page, collection page, and blog post has a URL that may rank in Google or have links pointing to it. You need this list before migration so you can build the redirect map afterward. I crawl the store with Screaming Frog and export every URL returning a 200 status — that becomes the definitive list, far more reliable than any manual export.

2. Set up WordPress and WooCommerce on a European server

I provision a fresh Trellis/Bedrock stack on Hetzner Cloud in Germany, install WordPress and WooCommerce, and stand up either Elayne or Nynaeve depending on the design route we agreed. The new store is built and tested on a temporary URL — your live Shopify store keeps taking orders throughout, with zero downtime until the final cutover.

3. Migrate your products — and what maps to what

This is the part most “how to import products” tutorials stop at, and the part where the detail actually matters. Products export from Shopify under Products → Export as a CSV. WooCommerce has a built-in CSV importer that reads most of it directly — but Shopify and WooCommerce name and structure their fields differently, so the import is really a mapping exercise. Here’s how the main Shopify CSV columns line up with WooCommerce, which is the map I work from on every migration:

Shopify CSV column	WooCommerce field	Notes
Title	Product name	Direct
Body (HTML)	Product description	Direct; HTML preserved
Handle	URL slug	Drives the 301 redirect map (see SEO section)
Vendor	Brand	As a Brands taxonomy or product attribute
Type / Product Category	Product category	See step 4
Tags	Product tags	Comma-separated, one-to-one
Variant SKU	SKU	Direct
Variant Price	Regular or sale price	See the pricing note below
Variant Compare At Price	Regular price (when on sale)	The struck-through original
Variant Inventory Qty	Stock quantity	Direct
Variant Grams	Weight	Convert to your store’s weight unit
Option1/2/3 Name & Value	Variation attributes	Shopify’s flat rows become WooCommerce variable products
Image Src / Image Alt Text	Product images + alt text	Re-hosted off Shopify’s CDN
SEO Title / SEO Description	Meta title + meta description	Mapped into your SEO plugin — see step below
Variant Barcode	GTIN / barcode	Preserved for feeds and Google Shopping

Three things need a careful hand rather than a blind import. Variants: Shopify writes each variant as its own CSV row sharing a handle; WooCommerce expects a single variable product with variation attributes, so those rows get consolidated before import. Pricing: Shopify’s “Variant Price” is the live selling price and “Compare At Price” is the higher struck-through one — in WooCommerce terms a product on sale needs Compare At Price as the regular price and Variant Price as the sale price, which is exactly the mapping DIY imports get backwards. Images: the CSV’s image URLs still point at Shopify’s CDN, so they’re re-uploaded into your WordPress media library — manually for catalogs under ~200 products for a clean result, or automatically via WP All Import for larger ones. None of this is hard once you’ve done it a few hundred times; it’s just detail work that rewards being methodical.

4. Recreate collections, categories, and tags

Shopify calls them collections; WooCommerce calls them product categories — functionally the same thing. I set the category structure up first, before importing products, so each product lands in the right category on import rather than needing manual cleanup on every row afterward. A few specifics worth knowing:

• Manual vs automated collections. Shopify’s manual collections map straight to WooCommerce categories. Automated (smart) collections — the ones built from rules like “tag = sale” — are recreated either as categories populated during import or kept as the tag logic that drove them, whichever fits how you actually merchandise.
• Nested categories. WooCommerce supports parent/child category hierarchies, so a flat Shopify collection list can become a cleaner nested structure if that suits your catalog — useful for navigation and for category-level SEO.
• Tags carry over directly. Shopify’s Tags column maps one-to-one to WooCommerce product tags during import — no manual re-tagging. If your old store used tags purely to feed smart collections, we decide per case whether they stay as tags or become categories.

5. Preserve SEO metadata and custom fields

This is the step that quietly protects your search traffic, and it’s the reason I rarely rely on WooCommerce’s core importer alone. Shopify stores a SEO Title and SEO Description for every product and page — the meta title and meta description that show in Google’s results. WooCommerce’s built-in importer doesn’t carry those across by default, so a naive import silently drops every meta title and description you ever wrote, and your migrated pages re-enter search with generic auto-generated snippets. WP All Import can map any CSV column to any field — including the meta keys used by The SEO Framework or Yoast — so your existing meta titles and descriptions land exactly where they belong and your search snippets stay intact through the move. The same approach carries over any custom metafields (product specs, downloadable files, bespoke attributes) into WooCommerce custom fields or ACF, so nothing your store relied on gets left behind on Shopify.

6. Set up payment gateways

This is where the local specifics matter, and where the country guides go deep. In general terms, the two workhorses are Mollie (excellent for European local payment methods — iDEAL, Bancontact, SEPA, Klarna, bank-specific buttons) and the official Stripe gateway (strong for international cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay). PayPal is widely supported too. Whatever your market, the key difference from Shopify is that you connect to these gateways directly — there’s no platform fee layered on top.

7. Handle order history

Order-history migration is the most commonly skipped step — and in most cases skipping it is the right call. Shopify’s order data doesn’t map cleanly to WooCommerce’s database structure, and forcing it in creates risk for payment records, tax reports, and customer accounts. The practical approach: export Shopify order history as a CSV, archive it, and start fresh in WooCommerce from the go-live date. Your accounting records for the Shopify period stay intact in Shopify.

8. Test, then cut over

Before the DNS switch, I run end-to-end test transactions on every payment gateway, check the store on mobile, confirm order-confirmation emails send correctly, and verify the redirect map. Only once everything passes do we point DNS at the new server. The actual cutover is a few minutes of DNS propagation — the work that makes it safe all happened beforehand.

Protecting Your Search Rankings During the Migration

This is where most DIY migrations go wrong. Shopify and WooCommerce use different URL structures by default. Launch WooCommerce without redirecting the old Shopify URLs and every product page that ranked in Google becomes a 404 overnight. That’s recoverable, but it costs 2–4 months of ranking recovery time — and for a live store that’s real lost revenue.

Page type	Shopify URL	WooCommerce default URL
Product page	/products/product-name	/product/product-name
Collection / category	/collections/category-name	/product-category/category-name
Blog post	/blogs/news/post-name	/post-name (or custom)
Static pages	/pages/page-name	/page-name

Every Shopify URL with rankings or backlinks needs a 301 redirect to its WooCommerce equivalent. On a Trellis-hosted site I put these redirects in an Nginx config file — they’re served at the webserver level with zero PHP overhead and no redirect plugin needed. That’s cleaner and faster than any WordPress redirect plugin. After launch I submit the updated sitemap to Google Search Console and monitor for 404s through the first four weeks, adding any redirects that were missed. Done correctly, stores with established rankings keep them — a 301 tells Google “this moved permanently,” and PageRank transfers across.

EU Hosting and Data Sovereignty

One of the clearest, most concrete improvements over Shopify is where your data physically lives — and whose laws it answers to. Shopify is a US-headquartered platform that hosts customer data on its own global infrastructure, wherever it chooses, regardless of where your store or your customers are. That raises cross-border transfer questions that never fully go away for an EU merchant. On WooCommerce, you decide: the data sits where you put it, under your name, on your terms.

I host on Hetzner Cloud in Falkenstein or Nuremberg, Germany. Hetzner Online GmbH is a German company, the servers are physically in the EU, and the data processing agreement is straightforward to put in place. For a store of any size in Europe, EU-based hosting gives you clean, defensible GDPR data residency: your customer database, order data, and backups all sit on servers in the EU, under your control, on terms you can document to a regulator or a privacy-conscious customer. Combined with a self-hosted cookie consent solution, the whole data-protection story becomes something you own rather than something you take on trust from a platform headquartered on another continent.

This is data sovereignty, not just data residency — and it’s the part of the migration case that’s easiest to overlook until a customer, a Data Protection Officer, or an auditor asks the question. Owning the server and the database means you can answer it cleanly: here is where the data lives, here is who controls it, here is the processing agreement. That answer is far harder to give when your entire store is a tenant inside a closed, foreign-owned platform.

Realistic Timeline and What It Costs

A straightforward migration for a small store — under 200 products, no custom integrations, single language — takes 2–4 weeks from start to go-live. Multilingual stores or custom design rebuilds add to that. Here’s where the time goes:

Phase	What it involves	Time
Setup and audit	Trellis provisioning on Hetzner, WordPress + WooCommerce install, URL export	1–2 days
Product import	CSV clean-up, import, image re-upload, category assignment	2–5 days
Theme / design	Applying branding to Elayne, or a custom rebuild on Nynaeve	3–7 days
Payments + tax	Gateway setup, VAT rules, shipping zones	1–2 days
Redirects + SEO	Redirect map, Nginx config, Search Console update	1–2 days
Testing + launch	End-to-end payment tests, mobile, email notifications, DNS switch	1–2 days

A professionally done migration for a small store typically runs €1,500–€3,000. The lower end (around €1,500) covers a clean migration on my Elayne FSE theme with your branding applied — colors, logo, product templates, no design rebuilt from scratch. The upper end (€3,000+) covers a custom design rebuild on Nynaeve that replicates your existing store’s look and feel. Multilingual setup adds to the upper end. For stores currently paying the 2% Shopify transaction fee, the migration cost is typically recovered within 6–12 months from fee elimination alone — before counting app-cost savings. I quote fixed prices, not packages, so you know the number before we start.

What You Gain and What You Give Up

What you gain

• Full ownership of the code and the customer data — no lock-in, no platform fee, no API ceiling
• Elimination of the 2% Shopify transaction fee if you were on a third-party gateway — money straight back to your margin
• Lower, predictable running costs — free and one-time plugins replace a stack of monthly app subscriptions
• Customer and order data on an EU server under your control, with clean GDPR data residency
• Complete control over the checkout and every other part of the store — exact wording, field order, custom logic, no platform restrictions
• A fast store on a properly tuned Trellis stack, built to pass Core Web Vitals rather than dragged down by a bloated theme and shared hosting

What you give up

• Shopify’s built-in fraud analysis (replaceable with Stripe Radar, which is excellent)
• The simplicity of Shopify’s admin for non-technical users — WooCommerce is more powerful but more involved to manage
• Native Shopify POS for in-person sales (Square or Stripe Terminal integrate with WooCommerce but need separate configuration)
• Shopify’s hosted, “we handle the server” arrangement — on WooCommerce someone has to host and maintain it, which is what a maintenance plan covers

The Most Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Skipping the redirect map — every unredirected Shopify URL becomes a 404 the moment you switch DNS. Build the map before switching, not after.
• Caching the cart and checkout pages — WooCommerce cart sessions break under full-page caching. Cart, checkout, account, and order-received pages must be excluded from caching rules. This is the most common technical mistake on migrations from hosts that cache aggressively.
• Not testing payments end to end — every gateway needs a real test transaction in test mode before launch, with confirmation that the order status updates correctly in WooCommerce.
• Forgetting transactional emails — WooCommerce sends order confirmations via WordPress’s mail function, which most servers block by default. Set up SMTP (Postmark or Mailgun) before launch, not when customers start complaining they never got their confirmation.
• Choosing cheap shared hosting — a €5/month shared host is how WooCommerce earns its undeserved reputation for being slow and fragile. The platform is fast; the hosting it’s usually dumped on is not.

Maintenance: The Part That Puts People Off — And Shouldn’t

The number one reason store owners hesitate to leave Shopify is maintenance. Shopify handles its own updates. On WooCommerce, someone has to keep WordPress, WooCommerce, and the plugins updated, make sure backups are running, and respond when something breaks. I’ll be straight with you about this, because I’ve watched it play out from both directions.

I’ve had clients leave WooCommerce for Shopify, convinced that management and maintenance would be simpler — that handing the whole thing to a platform would make the worry go away. For some of them it did, at first. But the platform fees kept coming, the app subscriptions stacked up, the customization they wanted wasn’t possible, and the “simpler” turned out to be “less control over my own business.” Several came back. What changed their mind wasn’t a feature — it was realizing that the maintenance burden they were running from doesn’t exist when someone else carries it for you.

That’s the part the “WooCommerce is harder to manage” worry gets wrong. You’ll see it dressed up in scarier language too — “maintenance tax,” “dependency hell,” “tech debt” — usually in guides written to sell you the opposite move, back onto a closed platform. The concern underneath is legitimate, but it rests entirely on the assumption that you’re doing the maintenance yourself. You don’t have to be. The Trellis hosting setup handles server-level security patching, PHP version management, and automated backups automatically. On top of that, I offer WordPress maintenance plans covering plugin updates, monitoring, and a developer on call when something needs fixing. You get the ownership, control, and cost savings of WooCommerce and the “someone else handles the upkeep” experience that made Shopify feel easy — without the platform fees and the lock-in.

The monthly cost of a maintenance plan is usually comparable to two or three of the Shopify apps you’re already paying for — and you’re still ahead on the transaction-fee saving alone. The honest comparison isn’t “manage it yourself on WooCommerce versus relax on Shopify.” It’s “a managed WooCommerce store you own versus a managed Shopify store you rent.” Put that way, for most established stores, the math and the control both point the same direction. Maintenance doesn’t have to be your problem.

Country-Specific Guides

This guide covers the universal case. For local payment methods, VAT rates, consumer-protection law, and language requirements specific to your market, see the dedicated guides:

• Netherlands guide — iDEAL, Riverty (AfterPay), Mollie, AVG data residency, and protecting your Google.nl rankings
• Belgium guide — Bancontact, KBC/CBC and Belfius Payment Buttons, bilingual NL/FR checkout, AVG/RGPD, and BTW/TVA rates
• Germany guide — German payment methods, the strict Abmahnung-driven legal requirements, and DSGVO data residency

Frequently Asked Questions

Will my search rankings survive the migration?

Yes, if the redirect map is complete and implemented before you switch DNS. A 301 redirect tells Google “this page moved permanently” — PageRank transfers and rankings hold. The risk is missed redirects, not the migration itself. I crawl the Shopify store before any DNS change, build the redirect file from actual 200-status URLs, and monitor Search Console for 404s in the weeks after launch. Stores with established rankings don’t lose them when this is done correctly.

Do I really own a WooCommerce store outright?

Yes. WordPress and WooCommerce are open-source software under the GPL. Your theme, plugins, and customizations live in code you control, and your data lives in a database on a server you control. There’s no platform that can revoke access, raise its cut of your revenue, or lock you in. You can change hosting, change developers, export everything, or keep running exactly what you have for as long as you like. That ownership is the core reason most people make the move.

Does my Shopify store stay live during the migration?

Yes. The WooCommerce store is built and tested on a temporary URL while your Shopify store keeps taking orders. The DNS switch only happens once the new store has been fully tested, including end-to-end payment tests on every gateway. The actual cutover is a few minutes of DNS propagation.

Do I need to re-enter all my products manually?

No. Shopify’s product CSV export maps to WooCommerce’s importer for most fields — title, description, price, SKU, inventory, variants. What needs manual work is images (re-upload for small catalogs, automated via WP All Import for larger ones) and any custom metafields without a direct WooCommerce equivalent.

Isn’t WooCommerce slow?

WooCommerce itself isn’t slow — the hosting it usually gets dumped on is. A WooCommerce store on a cheap shared host with a bloated multipurpose theme will crawl. The same store on a properly tuned Trellis stack with Redis object caching, FastCGI page caching, and a lean block theme like Elayne is fast. Speed is a hosting-and-build decision, and it’s one I take seriously from the start rather than treating as a later fix.

Can I edit the store myself after migration?

Yes. On an Elayne build you edit pages directly in the WordPress Site Editor — it’s a native block theme, so adding content, swapping images, and rearranging sections needs no developer and no page builder. Day-to-day product management happens in the standard WooCommerce admin. For anything deeper — custom functionality, new integrations — that’s where I come in, but the routine content work stays in your hands.

How do I keep my domain?

If your domain was registered through Shopify, transfer it to an independent registrar like Cloudflare or your country’s registry before migration — Shopify charges a premium for domain registration and you’re better off managing it yourself. If the domain is already at an external registrar, it’s a simple DNS update pointing to the new server. Either way, the domain stays yours throughout.

If you’re tired of renting your store, watching app subscriptions and transaction fees eat your margin, or you simply want to own the platform your business runs on — send me the details of your store and I’ll give you an honest estimate of what migration would cost versus what you’d save. If it doesn’t make financial sense for you yet, I’ll tell you that too.