Most botched migrations I get called in to rescue share one root cause: someone treated it as a data export instead of a project. You don’t just move products from PrestaShop to WooCommerce — you move URLs, SEO, orders, customers and a dozen integrations, and Google has to keep trusting the site the morning after. Here’s the checklist I run before I move anything.
1. Map every URL first
This is the step people skip and the one that costs the most. Crawl the entire PrestaShop store and export every indexed URL — products, categories, CMS pages, filtered URLs that rank. Each one needs a destination on the new site and a 301 redirect. Miss this and you drop the rankings and backlinks you spent years earning. If it matters to your traffic, it goes on the redirect map.
2. Model the data before you touch it
PrestaShop and WooCommerce structure products differently — combinations vs. variations, features vs. attributes, category trees that don’t line up. Decide the mapping before the import:
- Products, categories, attributes and variants
- Customers and their accounts
- Order history (you want it, for support and reporting)
- Media and CMS content
Get this wrong and you’ll be untangling mislabelled variants for weeks.
3. Preserve the SEO metadata
Titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags and any structured data need to carry over, not get regenerated into generic defaults. Product schema especially — if your rich results vanish on launch day, so does a chunk of your click-through. This is where migration and technical SEO overlap heavily.
4. Build and test on staging
Everything happens on a staging site first. Import the data, spot-check a sample of products against the old store, click through the redirect map, place test orders, run the payment and shipping flows. You’re looking for what didn’t come across — that’s always where the surprises are.
5. Plan the go-live, don’t wing it
Migrations go live at low-traffic hours, with a checklist: freeze the old store, final data sync, DNS/switch, redirects live, sitemaps submitted, analytics and Search Console confirmed. Then you watch — Search Console coverage, 404 logs, server errors — for the first week, because that’s when a missed redirect or a broken template shows up.
6. It’s also your chance to get fast
You’re rebuilding on a new platform anyway, so launch on a stack that’s quick from day one rather than migrating the old store’s performance problems along with its data. If you’re moving, it’s the perfect moment to sort out Core Web Vitals too.
Done properly, a PrestaShop to WooCommerce move is boring — which is exactly what you want. No ranking drop, no lost orders, no launch-day scramble. If you’d rather not carry that risk yourself, that’s what a managed migration is for. Start with a store audit and I’ll map the real scope of your move before anything happens.