Migrating from Magento 1 to Shopify: Data Migration and SEO Preservation

Magento 1 reached its official end of life in September 2020, yet thousands of stores continue to operate on the unsupported platform. Running Magento 1 in 2026 exposes merchants to unpatched security vulnerabilities, PHP compatibility issues, and a shrinking ecosystem of compatible extensions. Migrating to Shopify offers a modern, SaaS-based e-commerce platform with built-in security, hosting, and PCI compliance. This guide covers the technical steps for a successful migration.

Preparing Your Magento 1 Data for Export

The first step is a complete data audit. Use Magento's built-in export tools or a third-party migration script to extract all entities that need to move to Shopify:

• Products — SKU, name, description, price, images, categories, attributes, inventory
• Customers — emails, order history, addresses, account passwords (hashed)
• Orders — order IDs, line items, totals, status history, fulfillment data
• Reviews — product reviews and ratings with customer associations

For product data, use the Magento 1 shell/exporter.php script or the Magento MySQL data dump approach, extracting tables like catalog_product_entity, catalog_product_entity_varchar, and catalog_product_entity_media_gallery. Convert all product attributes to Shopify's metafield format using a mapping script.

// Example attribute mapping
$productData = [
  'sku' => $product->getSku(),
  'title' => $product->getName(),
  'body_html' => $product->getDescription(),
  'metafields_global' => [
    ['key' => 'material', 'value' => $product->getAttributeText('material')],
    ['key' => 'size_chart', 'value' => $product->getSizeChart()],
  ],
];

URL Structure Preservation and 301 Redirects

SEO preservation is the highest-risk aspect of any migration. Magento 1 uses a URL pattern like /catalog/product/view/id/123/ or clean URLs depending on your configuration. Shopify uses a flatter structure: /products/product-name. Every Magento URL must be mapped to its Shopify equivalent.

Export your Magento URL rewrites from the core_url_rewrite table — this table contains every product, category, and CMS page URL along with its ID path. Create a CSV mapping file with three columns: old_url, new_url, redirect_type. Use Shopify's bulk import or an app like Rewrite Manager to upload the redirects before launching the new store.

old_url,new_url,redirect_type
/widgets/blue-large.html,/products/blue-large-widget,301
/tools/category/,,301
/contact,/pages/contact,301

Test every redirect in your staging environment before cutting over. A single broken redirect from a high-traffic product page can lose significant search traffic.

Customer and Order Data Migration

Customer passwords from Magento 1 cannot be directly imported to Shopify because Shopify uses bcrypt hashing while Magento 1 uses SHA-256 or MD5 (depending on version). The standard approach is to set up a password reset flow — migrate customer accounts with a placeholder password and trigger a "Reset Your Password" email upon first login.

Order data migration is more straightforward. Shopify's REST Admin API accepts historical orders via the POST /admin/api/2026-04/orders.json endpoint. However, Shopify does not allow creating orders with past dates through the API for financial compliance reasons. Instead, use a third-party migration app like Cart2Cart or LitExtension that handles order history import with proper date preservation.

Product Data and Image Migration

Magento 1's attribute system is more complex than Shopify's, particularly for configurable products (size, color, material). Use Shopify's Product Variants API to map Magento configurable attributes to Shopify variant options. Note that Shopify supports up to 100 variant options per product and 3 option types, so Magento stores with more than 3 attribute dimensions will need product-level restructuring.

For images, batch-download all product images from Magento's media/catalog/product/ directory. Use a script to associate images with Shopify products via the POST /admin/api/2026-04/products/{id}/images.json endpoint, setting the correct position and variant_ids for color- or size-based image assignments.

Post-Migration Testing Checklist

After migrating, run through this checklist before decommissioning your Magento 1 store:

• Crawl every URL — Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to verify all redirects return 301 status codes
• Test search functionality — Ensure Shopify's search indexes return the same products as your Magento store
• Verify checkout — Process test orders for each product type (simple, configurable, downloadable)
• Check customer accounts — Confirm customers can log in, view order history, and reset passwords
• Validate analytics — Ensure Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Shopify Analytics show correct data

Timing the Cutover

Plan a DNS cutover during a low-traffic period. Set your Magento 1 store to maintenance mode, run a final delta data migration for orders and customers placed during the staging period, update DNS to point to Shopify, and monitor error logs for 48 hours. Keep your Magento 1 database accessible for at least 30 days post-migration in case of data reconciliation needs.

Migrating from an end-of-life platform is urgent. SoniNow's migration team has extensive experience moving stores from Magento 1 to Shopify with complete SEO preservation. Contact us to plan your migration today.