WooCommerce to Shopify Migration

Overview

Newlyfe, an Australian sand-free beach towel and quick-dry bath towel brand, had outgrown WooCommerce — not in sales, but in the time and risk it took to keep the site running day to day. Growth Digital planned and executed a full migration to Shopify, moving products, customers, order history and SEO value across without disrupting trading.

The problem

Running a store on WooCommerce means running a website — hosting, PHP versions, plugin updates, security patches and backups all sit with the business (or an agency on retainer) rather than the platform itself. Every plugin update carried a real risk of breaking checkout or payments, and each new security advisory had to be actioned manually. The cost wasn’t one big bill — it was the constant, low-level maintenance overhead, and the risk sitting underneath it.

Our approach

Rather than a straight lift-and-shift, we treated the migration as a chance to simplify. Shopify is a managed platform — hosting, uptime, PCI-DSS compliance and most security patching are handled by Shopify itself, not bolted on afterwards. Our approach was to map every job a WooCommerce plugin was doing (payments, shipping rules, reviews, SEO redirects) to either a native Shopify feature or a single, well-supported app — cutting the number of moving parts the client would ever need to think about again.

The solution

We rebuilt the store on Shopify from the ground up — theme, product catalogue, customer accounts and order history migrated across, checkout moved to Shopify’s own PCI-DSS compliant payment flow, and every existing URL 301-redirected so search rankings carried over intact.

• Full product, customer & order migration
• 301 redirect map for every existing URL — no lost rankings
• Native Shopify Payments — no third-party gateway plugin to maintain
• SEO metadata and structured data carried across
• Staff training on the new admin

The results

The win here isn’t a traffic or revenue chart — it’s what disappeared. No more monthly plugin-update cycle, no more emergency patches when a security advisory landed, no more managing a hosting account directly. Shopify’s infrastructure handles uptime, scaling and PCI-DSS compliance as part of the platform itself — freeing Newlyfe’s team to focus on running the business instead of patching the website underneath it, with every order, customer record and search ranking carried across without a hitch.