How to move your store from Squarespace or Wix to Shopify

By Alex Abushanab, founder of Apex Software Engineering · Oct 9, 2026 · Shopify, Squarespace and Wix help pages checked on Oct 9, 2026

Moving a store to Shopify is mostly a data job. Products, customers and orders come across as spreadsheets that need editing first. Reviews, page content and the design do not come across at all. The part that costs you sales if you get it wrong is the old URLs: every one of them needs a redirect before the domain moves.

The short answer

• Products: export a CSV from Squarespace or Wix, edit it to match Shopify’s template, and import it. Some Wix stores can use Shopify’s Store Migration app instead.
• Customers: import by CSV. Passwords do not move, so customers set new ones.
• Orders: export a CSV, then import it with a third-party app.
• Reviews, pages, blog posts and design: rebuild or re-import them by hand or with an app.
• Google rankings: redirect every old URL to its new page before you switch the domain.
• Domain and email: both stay yours. Shopify does not host email, so record your email settings before you touch the domain.
• Cost: your Shopify plan and your time, or a fixed price if you hire someone. At Apex, new websites start at $3,000.

1. What moves, and what does not

Neither Squarespace nor Wix exports a whole store in a form Shopify can read. Each part comes out separately, and Shopify’s own guides for Squarespace and Wix recommend CSV files where they are available.

Shopify also has a Store Migration app. Its Wix guide describes it as early access, available only for some stores, and limited to products and customers. It does not support prices by location, and it skips the options of any product with more than 3. Shopify’s Squarespace guide does not mention it.

The CSVs need work before they import. Shopify’s guides call for mapping each column to Shopify’s template, deleting the ones that do not map, and converting weights to grams. Handles, the last part of a product’s URL, can only contain letters, numbers and dashes. A product missing a variant option fails to import and has to be added by hand.

The order matters. Shopify says to import products first, then customers, then historical orders. Staff who get new-order notifications receive an email for every imported order, so switch those notifications off while orders import.

2. Keeping your Google rankings

Your rankings belong to your URLs, and the URLs change. Shopify puts products under /products/, collections under /collections/ and other pages under /pages/, whatever your old site used. Shopify’s own example: a shipping policy at /policies/shipping-policy becomes /pages/shipping-policy. Without a redirect, everyone who follows the old link, including Google, gets an error page.

The fix is a 301 redirect from each old URL to its new page, which tells search engines the page has moved for good. In Shopify they live under URL redirects, and you can import them all at once from a CSV. What to know before you build the list:

• List every old URL first. Your old site’s sitemap and the pages report in Google Search Console between them show what Google knows about. Sort by traffic so the pages that earn sales get checked first.
• Map each one to its closest new page, not to the home page. A discontinued product goes to its collection.
• Add the redirects before you switch the domain, as Shopify’s guides recommend, so there is no gap where old links break.
• Shopify only redirects broken URLs. If a page exists at the old address, the redirect is ignored. Stores can have up to 100,000 redirects.
• Carry over titles and meta descriptions. Each page, product and collection should have its own.

After launch, type the old URLs into a browser and check they land on the right page, starting with the most visited. Submit the Shopify sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in Google Search Console. Shopify says indexing can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Search engines cannot read a store that is still behind its password page, so remove it at launch.

3. Payments, domain and email

Payments

Set up Shopify Payments, or another provider Shopify supports. With another provider, Shopify adds its own fee to every sale; the Shopify cost guide has the rates. Then place test orders: a successful payment, a failed one, a refund and a cancellation. Refunds for orders taken on the old site are issued from the old site, so keep that account open until you no longer need it.

Domain

Your domain can stay where it is and be connected to Shopify, or be transferred to Shopify. Either way, Shopify warns that you may need to disconnect it from Squarespace or Wix first, or you may see SSL certificate errors. A transfer renews the domain for a year, only works for a root domain such as example.com, and does not copy your custom DNS records. Connecting is the smaller change, and you can still transfer later.

Email

Shopify does not host email. It offers unlimited forwarding addresses, but a real mailbox on your domain stays with your email provider. Before you change anything, write down every DNS record: the MX records that deliver your mail and the TXT records that verify it. Shopify says an address on your domain is deactivated during a transfer, and you may need to add the MX record again to reconnect it. If you bought your mailbox through Squarespace or Wix, ask them how it moves before you cancel the site plan.

4. The pre-migration checklist

1. Export products, customers and orders. Save product photos and any page content you want to keep: Squarespace cannot export images in bulk.
2. List every old URL and note which pages get the most traffic.
3. Save each page’s title and meta description.
4. Write down your domain’s DNS records, especially the ones for email.
5. Clean the product data: consistent titles, every variant option filled in, weights in grams, handles with only letters, numbers and dashes.
6. Import products with Publish new products to all sales channels unchecked, then check prices, weights and inventory.
7. Import customers, then orders, with order notifications switched off. Plan the email inviting customers to set new passwords, as Shopify’s customer import requires.
8. Set up the theme, shipping rates, taxes, payments and store policies.
9. Place test orders, including a refund and a failed payment.
10. Import the redirects.
11. Switch the domain, then send and receive a test email.
12. Test the old URLs, submit the sitemap, and watch Search Console for errors over the following weeks.
13. Close the old site plan only after all of that holds.

5. Do it yourself or hire someone

Do it yourself if the catalog is small, the product data is already tidy, and few pages bring in search traffic. The product import and redirect tools are built for store owners.

Hire someone when the work is in the data or the details:

• Hundreds of products, or product data that needs cleaning before it goes live
• Pages that rank in Google and earn sales, so the redirect map has to be right
• A domain and email set up by someone you cannot reach any more
• Features the old site had that Shopify and its apps do not
• Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping listings that need to follow the move

Building a large catalog: Almaza Fine Jewelry

Almaza was not a migration. The business started with a static landing page, and Apex built it a full Shopify store, which now lists more than 2,000 products. The catalog work is the same work a migration needs, and it shows where the time goes.

The store runs on Dawn, one of Shopify’s free themes. The effort went into the product data. Titles follow fixed rules: karat written as “14K”, weights as “37.80g”, and a jewelry dictionary that corrects misspellings such as “Engagment”. Karat and weight live in their own product fields, because a custom app re-prices every gold piece from them and the live gold price. Daily jobs keep titles consistent, fill in missing image alt text from the product title, and clear placeholder values that broke the store’s structured data.

The lesson for a migration: importing a product CSV is the easy part. Titles, options and photos imported as they are will look as messy on Shopify as they did before. Budget for the cleanup. Read the Almaza case study.

What Apex charges to move a store to Shopify

• A fixed price in writing before any work starts, based on your catalog, your pages and what has to be rebuilt. No hourly bills.
• New websites start at $3,000. There is no minimum project size, so part of a move, such as cleaning a product CSV or building the redirect map, is quoted the same way.
• $100 a month after launch on the Website Care Plan for updates and fixes, month to month. See pricing for everything it covers.
• You own the store. It is on your Shopify account and billed to you. Apex works on it as a collaborator.

Apex is based in Austin, TX and works with businesses across the US. See what a build includes on the shopify stores page.

Frequently asked questions