What to migrate from WooCommerce, and what to leave

A WooCommerce migration should carry four things: the products, the customers you are allowed to contact, the orders you must keep, and the URLs people already use. Leave the plugins that existed to patch the old theme. They were solving a layout. They are not the shop.

The mistake is to export everything because the export button allows it. A new storefront then inherits slider scripts, abandoned coupon rules, and pages nobody chose. You get a new theme wearing the old shop’s clutter. The useful migration is an edit with a checklist.

What comes with you

Bring the catalog truth. Product name, price, description that is still accurate, variants, and the stock number you trust. Bring the images that match the crop you want on the new grid. If an image is a leftover from a photoshoot you would not publish today, leave it in the archive rather than in the new template.

Bring categories shoppers use. A category that exists so a plugin could show a widget is not a category. If you cannot explain it to a customer in one sentence, it does not need a URL on the new shop.

Bring customers you still have a reason to email or support. That reason should be one you can say out loud: they bought from you, they asked to hear from you, or you owe them an order update. A raw export of every address the old store ever stored is not a plan. Leave records you cannot explain. The new site should not launch with a list nobody is willing to mail.

Bring orders you must keep for tax, returns, warranties, and the ordinary question “where is my parcel?” Those records can live in an archive the support person can open. They do not all need to become accounts on day one. If a buyer needs to see an old order, a lookup by email and order number is often enough.

Bring the URLs that already appear in receipts, ads, packaging, and search. A product that has been linked for years should resolve. The new page should answer with the same product, at a title a person recognizes.

What to leave behind

Leave the patches. Page-builder sections, homepage sliders, mega-menu scripts, pop-up plugins, and related-product widgets were often there because the theme could not do a simple thing. The new front end should do the simple thing on purpose. Rebuilding the patch as a component keeps the old problem and gives it cleaner code.

Leave pricing rules you no longer honor. A pile of coupons, role-based discounts, and “buy nine, get the tenth” logic will smuggle old promises into a shop that has moved on. Write down the offers that are real this season. Implement those. Archive the rest where an order from last year can still be understood.

Leave content that was imported because it was easy. Thin posts, duplicate category descriptions, and manufacturer text you did not write will make the new site feel unfinished. Google’s guide to helpful, people-first content is the right test, and it does not require a search project to use. A page should be useful to someone who came directly, and it should reflect first-hand knowledge of the thing you sell. A migrated URL that only exists to keep a plugin happy fails that test. So does a product description that could sit on any store.

Leave theme settings you cannot explain to the next person. If a color, a font, or a checkout field exists because a screen in WooCommerce was checked in 2019, it is a candidate to drop. Hanabi’s public ecommerce example is Down the Cove: a restructure, a migration, and a redesign, the kind of project where leaving WooCommerce is the point. The lesson to copy is the edit. Catalog truth comes along. What the shopper feels — finding a product, understanding it, paying — gets rebuilt. The plugin list does not.

URLs, titles, and what you should not promise

Map each old product URL you intend to keep to the new URL, with a redirect that lands on that product. Do this on a staging site before the domain moves. A spreadsheet with two columns, old and new, will save the launch week. Broken links in old emails are a support problem you can prevent.

Give each product a title that names the product. Google’s documentation on title links is plain about the failure mode: boilerplate titles, the same words on every page, or a title that does not match the visible heading. Google may rewrite a title link when it detects that kind of issue. “Shop | Brand | Shop” on every product teaches nobody which result to open. A concise brand name at the end of a specific product title is enough.

The same guidance asks for a main heading that is obviously the title of the page. On the new product template, the product name should be that heading, once, in the brand’s type. Do not promise that redirects and tidy titles will hold or raise rankings. They are the work that keeps the old addresses and the old names meaningful. Rankings depend on more than a migration weekend, and a careful studio will not pretend otherwise.

Write the titles in the language of the page. If the shop is in English, the title is in English. Google notes that a title in a different language or script from the page is a reason it may choose different text.

A practical order

1. Freeze the catalog for a short window. New products wait, or they are entered twice, on purpose, by a named person.
2. Export products, the customers you will keep, and the orders you must retain. Check a sample by hand: price, variant, image, stock.
3. Build the new shop against that sample, not against the full plugin list.
4. Redirect the URLs in the spreadsheet. Click a dozen old links.
5. Place a test order. Refund it. Read the email a buyer would read.
6. Move the domain when those checks pass, with someone watching the first real orders.

The sequence of staging, payment in test, and DNS last is its own subject. Migrating a store without a week of broken checkout is the piece to read when you are ready to plan that week. This one is the inventory of what goes in the box.

If you want that edit done as a designed and built storefront, start from the shops already in Hanabi’s selected work. Down the Cove is the public migration. The fit is a brand with a catalog to carry and a theme’s worth of patches to leave.