The Enterprise Shopify Plus Migration Checklist

Most enterprise Shopify Plus migrations fail on the unglamorous parts: catalog modelling, order history, tax logic, and the 40,000 URLs that Google already knows about. This checklist is the sequence I run with enterprise clients, from discovery through the first month after cutover.

1. Discovery and architecture. Inventory every system touching commerce — ERP, WMS, PIM, CRM, subscriptions, tax, reviews, marketing automation. For each, record the direction of data flow, the owner of every field, and the volume at peak. Decide up front what Shopify owns and what stays upstream; ambiguity here creates the integration bugs you will chase for a year.

2. Catalog and data model. Map products, variants, options, metafields, metaobjects, collections, and customer entities to Shopify's model before anyone touches a theme. Shopify's variant and option limits, not your old platform's flexibility, define what is possible — resolve conflicts on paper, not mid-migration.

3. Data integrity. Migrate in batches with counts and checksums on both sides: products, customers, historical orders, gift cards, discounts, and subscription contracts. Every batch produces a reconciliation report. If you cannot prove parity numerically, the data is not migrated. Plan a delta migration for records created during the freeze window.

4. Integrations. Rebuild each interface with idempotency keys, a durable retry queue, and correlation IDs in logs. Load-test the order-create path at peak-season volume before launch, not after. Define the source of truth per field explicitly so two systems never both believe they own price or inventory.

5. SEO preservation. This is where migrations quietly lose revenue. Crawl the legacy site fully, group URLs by template, and build rule-based 301 redirects rather than one-off entries. Preserve titles, meta descriptions, canonical logic, structured data, and hreflang for every market. Keep parity on internal linking and pagination, verify sitemaps and robots.txt on the new domain, and pre-test the top 500 URLs by revenue.

6. Performance and Core Web Vitals. Set a performance budget as an acceptance criterion. Audit third-party scripts before launch, optimise the LCP element per template, and keep the storefront surface thin — app blocks and metafields rather than injected scripts.

7. Launch readiness. Freeze scope, rehearse cutover end to end in a staging store, and script the DNS and payment-gateway switch with rollback steps. A regional or brand-by-brand phased cutover gives you a real production rehearsal with a small blast radius.

8. The first 30 days. Monitor indexation and redirect coverage in Search Console weekly, watch integration failure rates and queue lag daily, and reconcile orders and inventory against the ERP until two consecutive weeks come back clean. Only then call the migration done.

Run this checklist in order and a Shopify Plus migration becomes a schedule problem rather than a risk problem — which is exactly what enterprise stakeholders need it to be.