Migrating to Shopify Plus: The Complete Checklist

A Shopify Plus migration succeeds or fails based on the rigor of your process. The platform handles the heavy lifting, including global infrastructure, secure checkout, and a growing app ecosystem, but it still takes hundreds of details to protect SEO, data integrity, and customer experience. After supporting complex replatforms, this is the checklist we run internally at madeforshopify.

Use this document as your single source of truth, share it with every workstream lead, and turn it into tickets in your project management tool. When every task has an owner, you launch with confidence.

Phase 1: Discovery and alignment

1. Business objectives: Document target revenue, cost savings, merchandising improvements, and localization goals. Get ex ecutive sign-off early.
2. Stakeholder matrix: Assign accountability using a RACI model covering marketing, merchandising, customer support, IT, finance, and operations.
3. Data audit: Inventory products, variants, collections, customers, orders, and gift cards. Flag data gaps or required tra nsformations.
4. Tech stack mapping: List every third-party system (ERP, OMS, ESP, reviews, loyalty) and confirm API capabilities with S hopify Plus.
5. SEO baseline: Capture crawl data, top organic landing pages, and backlink profile so the SEO team can benchmark post-lau nch performance.

Phase 2: Architecture and backlog

6. Theme or headless decision: Decide whether to adopt a Shopify reference theme, buy a premium theme, or build headless w ith Hydrogen/Remix.
7. Integration contracts: Define payloads, authentication, retry logic, and owners for each system integration.
8. Content strategy: Plan for navigation, CMS migrations, translation workflows, and legacy asset redirects.
9. Payment and tax configuration: Map payment gateways, fraud tools, Avalara/TaxJar connections, and local payment methods.
10. Security and compliance: Review PCI scope, privacy policy updates, customer data retention, and accessibility guidelines .

Phase 3: Build

11. Theme development: Establish a Git workflow, preview environments, and CI checks (linting, type safety, Lighthouse).
12. Custom functionality: Plan Shopify Functions, custom apps, or middleware needed for bundling, subscriptions, or B2B.
13. Integration build: Implement each integration with automated tests. Schedule vendor certification for mission-critical systems.
14. Data migration scripts: Create repeatable ETL scripts or leverage Shopify's Transporter/Matrixify with validation repor ts.
15. Content population: Load CMS entries, navigation, metafields, and media assets. Empower marketing to QA content early.

Phase 4: Quality assurance

16. Functional QA: Test shopper flows (browse, search, PDP, cart, checkout, account) on desktop and mobile devices.
17. Regression testing: Run automated test suites covering GraphQL queries, Function logic, and third-party service webhooks .
18. Performance testing: Validate Core Web Vitals, run load tests for peak traffic scenarios, and tune caching rules.
19. Accessibility audit: Conduct WCAG 2.2 AA checks with axe DevTools, screen reader testing, and keyboard navigation verif ication.
20. SEO QA: Generate a test sitemap, validate structured data, and check canonical tags, hreflang, and meta templates.

Phase 5: Launch readiness

21. URL redirect matrix: Map every legacy URL to its Shopify equivalent. Automate testing with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
22. Payment sandbox sign-off: Run test transactions for each payment method, including edge cases like refunds and partial captures.
23. Customer communications: Draft launch emails, FAQ updates, and help center articles. Coordinate with support to staff c hat and phone coverage.
24. Analytics and tracking: Deploy GA4, PostHog, and server-side conversion APIs. Validate event naming matches your attribu tion dashboards.
25. Incident response plan: Define rollback criteria, escalation paths, and a post-launch war-room schedule.

Phase 6: Go-live and hypercare

26. Launch day checklist: Freeze code, confirm DNS, monitor error logs, and verify inventory syncs every 15 minutes.
27. Post-launch QA sprints: Run daily bug triage for the first week. Track conversion rate, funnel drop-off, and customer su pport sentiment.
28. Optimization backlog: Capture lessons learned, update roadmap priorities, and plan experiments for the next quarter.

Turn the checklist into a working plan

Assign an owner and due date to each relevant item, then review it with the people responsible for data, fulfillment, marketing, and support. We do not currently offer an automated playbook-download or follow-up email funnel for this checklist.

Automate your migration communications

If you use Customer.io, Shopify Flow, or another lifecycle tool, separate transactional migration updates from marketing messages and collect consent before adding anyone to marketing automation. Start with a small number of useful, necessary messages rather than a post-launch nurture sequence by default.

• Get migration and launch notes through the MadeForShopify newsletter only when we have an approved useful note or case study to share. Confirm your email first, and unsubscribe at any time.

Final checklist download

If you made it this far, you're ready to operationalize your migration. Download the Google Sheet version of this checklist, as sign owners, and track status in real time. Need an extra set of eyes on your plan? Book a migration review session and we'll sh are the instrumentation dashboards we rely on to keep execs informed during go-live.