If you're thinking about migrating PrestaShop to WooCommerce, the first thing to know is that a PrestaShop to WooCommerce migration isn't a two-click job or a formality you can solve with a magic plugin. Some stores with 300 products migrate in a week; others with 8,000 SKUs, custom attributes, multi-store setups and ERP connections take three months of serious work. The difference isn't size: it's how much business logic you've built into the store.
What you'll read here is the playbook we've been applying on real projects for years: what to export, how to keep the SEO you worked so hard for, what to break on purpose and what never to touch on switchover day. No hype and no promises of a "frictionless" migration, because that doesn't exist.
A word of warning: if your PrestaShop store works, makes money and isn't holding you back, you probably don't need to switch. But if you've spent months fighting modules that break with every update, or you need your blog and your store under the same WordPress roof, read on.
Why more and more stores are switching from PrestaShop to WooCommerce
The question isn't whether WooCommerce is better than PrestaShop in the abstract, because it isn't. They're different tools with different philosophies. PrestaShop was born as a pure ecommerce platform: catalog, cart, payment gateway and start selling. WooCommerce is a plugin that turns WordPress into a store, which means it inherits all the advantages (and limitations) of the world's most widely used CMS.
What we usually see at Interconecta is that stores that decide to switch from PrestaShop to WooCommerce do so for three very specific reasons:
- Runaway maintenance costs. Every major PrestaShop upgrade (1.6 to 1.7, 1.7 to 8.x) typically means reviewing payment modules, breaking custom templates and paying a developer to fix things that used to work.
- The need for strong content. If your strategy relies on a blog, buying guides and long-tail SEO, WordPress gives you tools you'd have to force into PrestaShop.
- A wider plugin ecosystem. There are native integrations with Holded, Sage and MailPoet, connectors for Veri*Factu (Spain's new invoicing compliance system) and thousands of extensions proven by millions of stores.
A word of caution: if you sell 5,000 products with complex attributes, multiple warehouses and multiple stores, PrestaShop is still a very solid option. Don't migrate because it's trendy. Migrate when the numbers call for it or when you've hit a clear growth ceiling.
Pre-migration audit: what to measure before you touch anything
Before you export the first product, stop. A migration done without an audit is a migration that breaks on day two. You need an honest inventory of what you have:
Technical inventory of your PrestaShop store
- The exact number of products, combinations, categories and attributes.
- Active modules and which ones are business-critical (payment gateway, ERP, e-invoicing, shipping).
- Customizations in the theme and the core (yes, some stores have core hacks, which is a whole other story).
- Organic traffic volume and URLs that receive more than 1% of traffic.
- Order and customer history you need to keep (for GDPR reasons and for its commercial value).
SEO inventory
This is the part most often neglected and the one that costs the most. You need a full crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, a Search Console export (last 16 months) and a map of URLs by traffic, conversions and revenue. If a product page brings you 200 visits a month from Google and you migrate it without a 301 redirect, that page is gone. Period.
With that snapshot on the table, you can decide what to migrate, what to drop and what to rewrite from scratch. On projects of a certain size, this phase of a professional ecommerce migration takes up 15–20% of the total project time. Worth every euro.
How to export products from PrestaShop and prepare them for WooCommerce
There are two ways to export products from PrestaShop: the fast (and risky) way and the slow (and reliable) way. Here are both.
The fast route: migration plugins
Tools like Cart2Cart or LitExtension help move products, customers, orders and categories. Their pricing depends on volume and on which data you migrate. Review your catalog first so you don't carry over duplicates, broken descriptions or orphaned attributes.
The hands-on route: CSV + WP All Import
For medium and large catalogs, what works best for us is exporting from PrestaShop to CSV, cleaning the data in a spreadsheet (yes, by hand, with filters and validations) and re-importing it with WP All Import Pro or a custom script. It takes longer, but you reach the other side with a decent catalog.
A migration is the golden opportunity to clean up what you've been meaning to clean up for years. Take it. Deleting 800 discontinued products before migrating saves you 800 redirects afterwards.
Whichever route you take, you also need to migrate images (watch the file names and paths), SEO titles and meta descriptions, URL handles so you can generate redirects, and customer data in compliance with GDPR. Passwords can't be migrated as-is: you'll have to force a reset on first login.
Keeping your SEO: 301 redirects and a plan to avoid traffic drops
This is where the game is won or lost. A badly executed online store migration can cut organic traffic by 40–60% for weeks. A well-executed one barely shows, and after two or three months it can even improve, because WooCommerce lets you build content around your products that was harder to do in PrestaShop.
Redirect map
First: map every old URL to its new URL. Categories, products, static pages, blog posts, indexable filters. If your PrestaShop store used structures like /12-categoria-zapatos, you'll need to map them to WooCommerce's /categoria-producto/zapatos/. Everything as 301, no 302s.
Where to implement them
Three options:
- In .htaccess: fast, with optimal performance, but unmanageable once you have thousands of redirects.
- A plugin such as Redirection or Rank Math: convenient for non-technical teams, but adds load to every request.
- Nginx rules at server level: the cleanest option if you have server access and high volumes.
For medium volumes, my recommendation is to combine .htaccess for bulk URLs (products) and a plugin for one-off cases as they come up. And check Search Console daily for the first two weeks: any 404 that gets traffic is redirected within 24 hours.
Sitemap, robots.txt and internal linking
On switchover day: submit a new XML sitemap to Search Console, review robots.txt (watch out for blocks inherited from the staging environment), and point the internal links in the menu and footer to the new URLs. It sounds obvious, but half the broken migrations we see have the staging robots.txt blocking the entire live site.
Payment gateways, e-invoicing and Spanish regulations
In Spain, every online store must comply with the GDPR, the Spanish Data Protection Act (LOPDGDD), the Spanish Information Society Services Act (LSSI-CE) and, from 2026, Veri*Factu, Spain's new invoicing compliance system, for most freelancers, sole traders and limited companies that issue invoices. If your PrestaShop store already had all this covered, don't assume WooCommerce inherits it automatically.
Common payment gateways and their WooCommerce plugins
- Redsys (Spanish card payment gateway): there are several plugins (free and paid). The WooCommerce Redsys Gateway one usually works well for SMEs.
- Stripe: a very polished official integration, ideal if you sell to several European countries.
- PayPal: a must for almost any B2C store, and it still converts well.
- Bizum (Spain's mobile payment system): increasingly requested by shoppers, with integrations available through Redsys.
Invoicing and ERP integration
If you work with Holded, Sage 50, Odoo 17 or a custom ERP, the connection is key. WooCommerce has native connectors for most of them, but they usually need fine-tuning: tax mapping, invoice series, ledger accounts. A veterinary clinic in Valencia we work with spent longer getting its Holded invoice series right than migrating its 1,200 product pages, to give you a real example.
If you run ecommerce projects with recurring billing or subscriptions, consider extensions like WooCommerce Subscriptions from the start: they aren't cheap, but they save a lot of custom development.
Common mistakes we see in botched migrations
After quite a few projects like this, some patterns keep repeating. Here they are as a checklist so you don't fall into them:
- Migrating and going live on the same day. Wrong. You need a staging environment identical to production for load, checkout and integration testing.
- Not testing checkout with real customers. Do it. Have ten outside people place test orders with their own cards and phones. You'll discover things.
- Forgetting transactional email. If confirmation emails land in spam, customers think their order didn't go through and open support tickets. Set up authenticated SMTP from day one.
- Not migrating reviews. Customer reviews are SEO and social proof. There are scripts that bring them over from PrestaShop to WooCommerce.
- Skipping performance testing. WooCommerce with 50 active plugins can be a rocket or a snail. Measure TTFB, Core Web Vitals and checkout latency before and after.
The rule I always apply: if you can't roll back in under 30 minutes, you're not ready to migrate. Full backup, DNS with a low TTL and a plan B written down in a Google Doc.
And one last tip: tell your customers. An email beforehand explaining that you're upgrading the store, plus a visible notice during the week of the switch, cuts support tickets in half. People forgive problems they were expecting; what they don't forgive is landing on something strange with no explanation.
Timelines, budget and when it makes sense to hire an agency
The budget for a PrestaShop to WooCommerce migration depends on the catalog, the integrations, the design and preserving your SEO. Multi-store setups, languages and checkout customizations should all be set out in a fixed-price proposal before work begins.
Do it yourself if...
- You have a small catalog (under 100 products) and few integrations.
- You have someone technical on the team with time to dedicate to it.
- SEO isn't your main source of traffic.
Hire an agency if...
- Your online revenue exceeds €200,000 a year and a month of lost traffic would really hurt.
- You need integrations with an ERP, e-invoicing or custom payment gateways.
- You want to use the migration to redesign the UX, improve conversion and rethink your category structure.
If you decide to go the professional route, look for a WooCommerce agency that can show you real migrations from PrestaShop, not just new builds. Ask for references, ask for access to stores that migrated more than a year ago (fresh launches don't count) and insist on a post-launch monitoring plan of at least three months.
Migrating from PrestaShop to WooCommerce isn't a passing whim or an escape forward: it's a technical decision that makes sense when your store has outgrown its flexibility, when maintenance has become expensive or when you need content and commerce under one roof. If you plan the process, keep your URLs and run real tests with real customers, you'll see the difference in iteration speed, lower maintenance bills and the freedom to scale.
If you go for it, do it with a safety net. Backups, a test environment, 301 redirects and a three-month monitoring period are non-negotiable. And if you don't have an in-house technical team, rely on a WooCommerce agency with experience in real migrations, not just building stores from scratch. The difference between a well-executed migration and a disaster usually lies in the details nobody sees until they blow up.