Magento to Shopify or Squarespace to Shopify: Which Migration Is Actually Yours?

 

Two very different people land on this kind of article. One's running a Magento store with three years of custom code nobody fully understands anymore, including the developer who wrote half of it. The other built a nice-looking Squarespace site two years ago, sells maybe forty products, and just realized the platform can't do half of what they need it to do now. Both end up typing some version of "migration magento to shopify" or "migrate from squarespace to shopify" into Google at 11pm, and both get told, more or less, "yes, come to Shopify." Fair enough. But the actual move looks nothing alike for these two people, and most guides on this topic pretend it's one conversation.

It isn't. Let's split it properly.

If you're coming from Magento

Magento migrations are messy in a specific way: not because Shopify can't handle what Magento did, but because nobody's entirely sure what Magento is currently doing. Custom modules pile up over years. Someone added a shipping calculation extension in 2022 that nobody remembers the reason for. Product data lives across custom attribute sets that don't map cleanly to anything.

So the real work in a magento to shopify migration isn't the platform switch itself, it's the audit before it. Pulling every product, every customer record, every order history entry, and figuring out which of Magento's custom fields actually still matter versus which ones were built for a promotion that ended in 2023. Skip that step and you end up rebuilding a mess on new infrastructure instead of actually improving anything.

The upside, once it's done, tends to be real. Page speed improves a lot, because Magento's own hosting requirements are heavy and a lot of stores are running on servers that were adequate three years ago and aren't now. Checkout gets simpler. And maintenance costs, which for Magento often mean a developer on some kind of retainer just to keep the lights on, drop off almost entirely.

If you're coming from Squarespace

A squarespace to shopify migration is lighter in one sense, less legacy code to untangle, fewer surprises buried in custom extensions, and heavier in another: brand owners in this position often haven't thought hard about product data structure at all, because Squarespace never forced them to. So part of this move is building that structure for the first time, not migrating an existing one. Categories, variants, tags, SEO metadata, a lot of it gets created properly during this move rather than carried over.

Downtime risk is genuinely lower here too. Smaller catalogs, simpler setups, and a shorter list of things that can go wrong mid-transfer.

What's actually the same either way

Regardless of which platform you're leaving, three things matter every single time. SEO preservation comes first, and it's the thing people worry about most, understandably. URLs change, and if 301 redirects aren't mapped carefully, a store can lose months of ranking overnight. Second, customer and order history has to move cleanly, because a returning customer showing up to an empty account history is a bad first impression on a brand new site. Third, and this gets skipped constantly, is testing before launch, not after. Checkout, payment gateways, shipping rules, all of it needs to be tested with real scenarios before the DNS switch, not discovered broken the morning after.

LUMINA's handled both sides of this, Magento stores with a decade of accumulated complexity and Squarespace sites that just needed room to grow, and honestly the biggest predictor of a smooth migration isn't which platform someone's leaving. It's whether the audit happened properly before anyone touched a single line of product data.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take? 

Usually longer than people expect going in, somewhere between eight and sixteen weeks depending on catalog size and how much custom functionality needs rebuilding. The audit phase alone can take two to three weeks on a complex store.

Is a Squarespace to Shopify migration faster? 

Generally, yes. Most Squarespace migrations run six to ten weeks, mainly because there's less legacy complexity to untangle and smaller product catalogs to move.

Will I lose my SEO rankings during either migration? 

Not if redirects and metadata are mapped properly before launch. This is the single most common mistake in DIY migrations, and it's almost entirely preventable with proper planning.

Can I migrate custom Magento functionality to Shopify? 

Most of it, yes, usually through Shopify apps or custom development, though some highly specific Magento extensions may need to be rebuilt rather than directly ported over.

Do I need to rebuild my Squarespace product catalog from scratch?

Not from scratch, but expect real restructuring. Categories, variants, and metadata usually need proper setup since Squarespace rarely required that level of structure in the first place.

Which migration is more expensive, Magento or Squarespace? 

Magento migrations typically cost more, mainly because of the audit and custom code review required. Squarespace migrations tend to be more predictable in scope and cost from the start.