When you move from Shopify to WordPress, you might realise that the cost of running an eCommerce store on Shopify can become costly over time. Many people don’t realise that by the end of the year, they may end up paying anywhere between $840 and $3600 just for the Shopify platform. This price can eat into your profit margins in a very competitive market where every cent counts. If you’re managing a simple eCommerce store, you might quickly feel the strain on your budget.
As Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your margin is my opportunity.” Shopify often locks you into a pricing structure that isn’t flexible. As your business grows, you’ll encounter limitations with Shopify themes and plugins that can make it difficult to customise your site. If your business has outgrown Shopify’s restrictions, moving to WordPress makes perfect sense. WordPress offers flexibility, scalability, and a huge range of plugins to optimise your store and manage your data more efficiently.
WordPress gives you complete control over your eCommerce store’s features, security, and hosting. Unlike Shopify, which demands high recurring fees, WordPress allows you to tailor your site with the tools you need to grow your business, manage data, and keep things secure. It’s time to break free from Shopify’s limitations and make the switch to WordPress, where your online business can truly thrive.
Why Convert Your Shopify Theme to WordPress?
Familiar Design for Customers:
When you move from Shopify to WooCommerce, keeping the same theme ensures that customers instantly recognise your brand. By maintaining key design elements, like colours, layout, and the overall look, you reinforce your brand identity. Changing the design too much could confuse returning customers, leading to lower brand recall. A familiar look helps maintain customer loyalty, and encourages them to continue shopping in your store.
Avoid Customer Confusion:
If you alter the design too much when moving to WordPress, customers may feel like they have landed on a completely different website, which can lead to trust issues. By maintaining the same design, you minimise this risk and ensure your customers don’t feel disconnected from your familiar online store experience.
As you consider whether Shopify is the right platform for your business, it’s crucial to weigh the pros and cons of both Shopify and WordPress. If you’re unsure which platform better fits your needs, check out our detailed comparison in Shopify vs WordPress: Find the Best One to help you make an informed decision before making the switch. If you’re just starting out with Shopify in the UAE, you can also check out our guide on How to Start Shopify in UAE for more insights into setting up your store on Shopify.
Proven Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Tested and Optimised Theme:
When you move your Shopify theme to WordPress, make sure it has undergone various tests to optimize for conversion rates. Keeping the same theme helps preserve the optimisation already done, ensuring that the site elements work at their best. This way, you don’t have to re-test everything, saving time and ensuring the continuity of sales and overall performance.
Retain Familiar Buyer Journeys:
By keeping the same theme, you can ensure that your buyer journey remains smooth and familiar to your visitors. Over time, the journey has been refined to help users easily find what they need. This ensures that when users interact with your site on WordPress, the experience mirrors what they’re used to on Shopify, making their journey as seamless as possible.
Ease of Implementation
Faster Migration Process:
By sticking with the same theme, you can avoid spending weeks or months recreating a new layout from scratch. Instead of getting bogged down in design decisions, focus on migrating your store to WordPress and launching your WooCommerce store faster. This approach helps you generate sales sooner while keeping the transition smooth, making it easier for you to get started and start seeing results quickly.
Reduced Development Time:
By keeping your existing theme, you can skip the time-consuming process of designing a new layout from scratch. This approach simplifies the migration process, allowing you to focus on the functionality and ecommerce aspects of your WordPress store. Not only does it save you valuable time, but it also ensures brand consistency across platforms while leveraging your previous Shopify theme’s CRO efforts.
How Can You Convert the Shopify Theme to WordPress?
Converting a Shopify theme to WordPress might seem like an easy task at first, but in fact, it is not. Shopify themes are built using Liquid, a templating language based on Ruby, while WordPress uses PHP, which makes the two platforms have entirely different programming languages and structures.
This makes the conversion process more complex, especially for beginners without coding experience. However, with the right tools and approach, it’s possible to manage the challenge.
Understanding the Challenge
1. Different Programming Languages
Shopify themes are built using Liquid, a templating language based on Ruby, while WordPress uses PHP for its backend logic and rendering. These two languages are completely different, and simply copy-pasting the code won’t work.
Converting a theme requires restructuring the code to fit the WordPress platform, which involves deep understanding of both languages. Without this knowledge, it’s hard to ensure that your store and content will function properly after the migration. It’s essential to focus on the structure and logic of the code to maintain the flexibility and performance of your site.
2. Design Conversion Process
The first step in the design conversion process is to extract the Shopify theme design elements and recreate them in WordPress. Using a tool like Figma helps in creating a visual reference for the layout and design. Once you have the design files, you can turn these into PHP code to develop WordPress templates that match the look and feel of your store.
This is a detailed process that requires strong coding skills and a sharp attention to detail to ensure the site looks the same as it did on Shopify. It’s essential to follow each step carefully to preserve the design elements throughout the conversion.
3. Dealing with Custom Features
When converting Shopify themes to WordPress, you’ll encounter custom features like dynamic product displays, customised checkout, and integrations with payment gateways. These features are often built using Liquid, and in WordPress, they require additional PHP code to replicate their functionality.
For instance, you may need to find or build plugins to manage product and checkout processes or integrate payment gateways. Since the logic behind these features was originally written in Shopify’s Liquid, it’s essential to carefully recreate these systems to ensure the same functionality works smoothly in WordPress.
Step-by-Step Process to Convert Shopify Theme to WordPress
Step 1: Create a WordPress-based Website
The first step in migrating from Shopify to WordPress is to create a WordPress-based website. This involves choosing the right hosting provider and ensuring your domain is properly configured and linked to your new site.
You will need to migrate all your content and data, including product listings, images, and customer information, to the new platform. Once the migration process is complete, you’ll have a fully functioning ecosystem in place, giving you the foundation to build on and move forward with your new online store.
Step 2: Backup Your Shopify Store
Before starting the migration process, it’s crucial to back up your Shopify store. This involves downloading important data, such as products, images, descriptions, and customer information, ensuring that nothing is lost during the transition to WordPress.
A full backup acts as a safety net, allowing you to revert to the original setup if something goes wrong. To make the transfer seamless, you can use Shopify to WordPress import plugins, ensuring that the entire process from Shopify to WP happens smoothly without any issues.
Step 3: Customise Your WooCommerce Website
Once your data is safely backed up, the next step is customising your WooCommerce website to make it feel like your Shopify store. You can start by copying the layout and design, using tools like Figma or PSD to create a new version of your store.
It’s important to maintain brand consistency, ensuring your new site resembles the previous one. If needed, you can hire a designer to create the right files and replicate the design in the correct format. With the right focus on customising, your new WooCommerce site will truly reflect your brand’s identity.
Step 4: Develop the Front-End Theme
In this development phase, the focus shifts to creating the front-end of your WooCommerce site. You will need to have your design ready and coded in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery to ensure the theme is both responsive and functional.
The goal is to replicate the look and feel of your Shopify store while making sure the new site offers a smooth user experience. This process can be complex and may require a developer with the necessary skills to bring the theme to life effectively. It’s important to ensure everything is polished and performs smoothly across all devices.
Step 5: Set Up Page Builders
After your theme is fully developed, the next step is to install page builders on your WordPress site. These tools offer drag-and-drop functionality, making it easier to make adjustments and change the layout without needing a developer.
This is a game-changer for quickly updating the site, especially when launching seasonal promotions, sale events, or highlighting new product listings. The flexibility of page builders ensures you can implement changes easily, even if you need to modify your site to promote discounts or add new content. It gives you the power to manage your site efficiently and with minimal effort.
Step 6: Optimise Your WooCommerce Website
Once your WooCommerce website is set up, it’s time to optimize its design and structure. This includes installing essential plugins and adding tracking codes like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Ads scripts to ensure everything is being tracked correctly.
These tools help you gather valuable data that can guide your business and marketing strategies. If you were using Shopify before, make sure that the optimisation process includes setting up the same tracking as previously, so that your site performs at its best and you can see how it’s doing. Proper optimisation ensures that your site is ready for successful marketing campaigns.
If you’re still on Shopify or thinking about improving your store’s performance before making the switch, check out our guide on increasing Shopify website speed for tips on optimising your Shopify site.
Step 7: Set Up Domain Migration and Redirects
Once everything is ready, it’s time to migrate your domain from Shopify to your new WordPress and WooCommerce website. During this process, setting up redirects is crucial to avoid broken links and ensure a seamless transition for your customers.
Redirecting your old URLs to the new ones correctly will help prevent 404 or 403 errors, which could lead to a poor user experience. Properly handling redirects also ensures your SEO efforts remain intact, so your website continues to perform well in search engines without losing valuable traffic.
Conclusion
Converting a Shopify theme to WordPress may seem challenging, but with the right approach, it is definitely possible. Whether you choose to follow a step-by-step guide or opt for hiring experienced developers, freelancers, or agencies, the shift can be logical and efficient.
By carefully planning the conversion, you can avoid paying thousands for new services while ensuring your website performs well. This transition can increase your sales and operational efficiency, giving your ecommerce store the edge it needs to thrive.
You can DIY the migration or outsource the work, depending on the resources at hand to get your site started on WordPress.
