I have received varying advice in this sub about migrating from Magento+Wordpress to Shopify, and that keeping things simple makes the most sense.
However, in speaking with some developers, several said that Shopify simply is not going to do the job for the the 1,5000 articles we want to migrate from Wordpress (and we should therefore keep our Wordpress which was a bit deflating to me). Others have said the opposite. Does anyone have any actual experience, i.e. success, with this?
At this point we plan to export all the WP articles into CSVs, then import them into Shopify. There will be a painful cleanup process as the WP content has shortcodes to bring products in, and has lots of WPBakery markup, e.g.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]
But it seems doable, so long as Shopify does not have an upper limit in blog posts.
We plan to tie things together with Searchspring for search so are not worried about that being an issue.
Shopify doesn’t have a hard limit on blog posts, so 1,500 articles won’t be an issue from a platform standpoint.
The real work is exactly what you already identified. stripping out the WPBakery shortcodes and cleaning up the markup. CSV import into Shopify blogs works, but you’ll want to run a find-and-replace pass on all that [vc_row] stuff before importing, otherwise you’ll end up with visible shortcode text all over your posts. A script to strip those tags and convert the remaining content to clean HTML will save you a ton of manual cleanup.
One thing worth thinking about: Shopify’s native blog is functional but fairly basic compared to WordPress. For 1,500 posts you’ll want to make sure your URL structure and redirects are planned out properly so you don’t lose SEO juice in the migration. Set up 301 redirects for every old URL, Shopify has a built-in URL redirect tool, or you can bulk import them via CSV.
The developers telling you “Shopify can’t handle it” are likely thinking of the blog editor experience, not actual platform limitations. It can hold the content just fine, it’s just not WordPress-level when it comes to blog management features. But if your store and content live on one platform and you’re using Searchspring for search, you’re in good shape.
Happy to help if you hit any snags with the migration!
Hope that helps! If it did, a Like and Marking it as Solution goes a long way and helps others find the fix faster too.
Hey @budbks this is actually very doable on Shopify from a platform standpoint. 15k articles won’t be a limitation.
Where it gets a bit messy (and you’ve already picked up on it) is the WordPress side of things, especially with WPBakery content. Those shortcodes don’t carry over, so they need to be cleaned out before you import anything into Shopify. If you skip that step, you’ll basically just move the problem over as-is.
In most migrations like this, the real effort isn’t the CSV import itself it’s the cleanup layer in between. Getting everything into clean HTML first makes a big difference. Otherwise you end up fixing formatting issue by issue inside Shopify, which gets painful pretty quickly at that volume.
One thing I’d add from experience: Shopify is fine for hosting the content, but its blog setup is pretty simple compared to WordPress. So it works well as a content + commerce setup, just not as a heavy editorial CMS.
On your side, if you already have a plan for CSV export, cleanup and redirects, you’re thinking in the right direction. Just make sure URL redirects and SEO mappings are planned properly before go-live that’s usually where migrations like this either hold up or slip.
Shopify staff note: The experiences store owners have shared here are a helpful place to start if you’re considering migrating to Shopify. When you want a structured checklist and official resources, our Migrating to Shopify guide can help fill in the gaps.