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Shopify to Astro

Migrate from Shopify to Astro

This one is usually not a migration off Shopify. It is a decision about where the boundary sits: the pages that explain the product move into a codebase, and the cart, the checkout and the money stay exactly where they are. Moving a working store off Shopify to save on a theme is a way of turning a marketing problem into a payments problem.

Start a project

A migration like this usually takes 3–6 weeks

What actually migrates.

What you have What happens Why
Products, variants and inventory Stays put Does not move, on purpose. The old platform keeps this because it is the thing it is good at, and the new front end reads from it. Shopify remains the source of truth for anything with a price, a variant or a stock level. The Astro front end reads that data from Shopify rather than holding a second copy that can drift.
Commerce backend and checkout Stays put Does not move, on purpose. The old platform keeps this because it is the thing it is good at, and the new front end reads from it. Astro can own the storefront experience; completing the transaction hands off to Shopify Checkout. Payments, orders, tax and fraud stay where they already work, which is the whole design of the project.
Blog and marketing content Move Comes across as it is. The content survives the move and the work is transporting it, not remaking it. The content moves into whichever publishing system the new front end uses. The theme templates do not come with it: how it looks is rebuilt as components.
Theme sections and templates Rebuild Made again in Astro. The old version is a reference rather than something that can be imported. Liquid sections become Astro components, and the section schema becomes a content model marketing can actually use.
Storefront apps Reconfigure The same thing, set up again. Nothing is recreated, but it has to be pointed at the new site by hand. Each one is identified by what it does before anything moves. Reviews, loyalty, chat and recommendations are then implemented deliberately on the surfaces that use them.
URLs Reconfigure The same thing, set up again. Nothing is recreated, but it has to be pointed at the new site by hand. Existing addresses are inventoried before the rebuild. Product and collection addresses stay connected to the commerce architecture, and marketing addresses are preserved wherever practical and explicitly redirected where the routing changes on purpose.

Two scopes, and they are not the same project.

Two ways to draw the line

Marketing pages only

  • Astro owns the pages that explain the product.
  • Product, collection and cart pages stay in the Shopify theme.
  • The two are linked, and nothing reads the Storefront API.
  • Nothing that takes money is touched at any point.

A few weeks, and the right answer more often than people expect.

Astro storefront, Shopify commerce

  • Astro owns the product and collection pages too.
  • Product data, stock and prices read from Shopify at build or per request.
  • Cart state surfaces in the Astro front end.
  • Checkout still hands off to Shopify, which is not negotiable.

A storefront rebuild, and priced as one.

A quote that does not say which of these it is pricing is not a quote.

Where this migration gets complicated.

  1. 01

    Deciding the boundary is the project

    Everything else follows from where the line goes between the site that explains the product and the store that sells it. Draw it badly and you have rebuilt a checkout for no reason, or split one product page across two systems that disagree about the price.

  2. 02

    Product data is live, not exported

    Prices, stock and variants change while the site is being built, so they are read at request or rebuild time rather than copied. That is a caching decision with a business consequence: how stale a price may be before somebody is upset is a question for the merchant, not the developer.

How the migration works.

  1. Audit

    The boundary first: which pages move, which stay, and what the front end reads from Shopify.

  2. Rebuild

    Liquid sections become components, the section schema becomes a content model, and the Shopify connection is cached deliberately.

  3. Migrate

    Marketing content into the new CMS, product data connected rather than copied, checkout tested against the live store.

  4. Hand over

    The repository, the migration map and documentation written for somebody who was not here.

What is included.

Every migration includes the front-end rebuild, the content and asset move, the integration work, URL coverage, QA and post-launch monitoring. What changes with the platform is how hard each one is, which is what the rest of the page is for.

  • Design rebuild

    Rebuilt as components, not approximated.

  • Responsive development

    Desktop, tablet and mobile, built and checked.

  • CMS architecture

    Collections and fields mapped before build.

  • Content migration

    Migrated and checked against the source.

  • Asset migration

    Collected, compressed and rehosted.

  • Forms and integrations

    Tested through to the final record.

  • URL coverage

    Every known public address preserved or deliberately redirected.

  • Metadata and canonicals

    Preserved wherever possible.

  • Search footprint preservation

    URLs inventoried before and checked after.

  • Pre-launch QA

    Forms, templates and old URLs verified.

  • Post-launch support

    One week of indexing and traffic checks included.

Search visibility can move during a migration. The goal is to preserve what search engines already understand, and to catch what changed quickly after launch.

And it is yours at the end. The repository sits in your organization rather than mine, the handoff documentation is written for somebody who was not here, and nothing about the project requires me: another developer or your own team can operate it.

Decide where each kind of content belongs.

This is not a question about what replaces Shopify, because nothing does. It is a question about ownership. Products, variants, pricing and inventory stay in Shopify. Campaign pages, editorial content and resources want a model and a publishing workflow of their own, which is what a headless CMS such as Sanity is for. Content that changes twice a year is comfortable living beside the code. Getting that split wrong is the mistake people feel a year later, so it is decided before the rebuild rather than after it.

  1. 01

    Content Collections, in the repository

    For a team that publishes rarely and is happy in a pull request. The content is files beside the code, typed and checked at build time, with no service to pay for and nothing to keep running. It stops suiting you the day somebody outside engineering needs to publish without help.

  2. 02

    A headless CMS, such as Sanity

    For a team that publishes regularly, or where the person writing is not the person deploying. Editors get a real interface, the model is explicit, and the site reads it at build time. It is another system to configure and pay for, and the modeling is the part that decides whether editors can work on their own.

  3. 03

    No CMS at all

    For a site whose pages change a few times a year. Everything lives in components, changes go through the same review as any other change, and there is no editorial layer to maintain. Honest for a small site, and the wrong answer the moment a blog is added.

Content Collections against a headless CMS, and how the choice is made.

A migration is not finished when the new site looks right.

These are acceptance criteria rather than features. The codebase, the site inventory and the connected systems are each checked against what you started with, and the answer is a count rather than an opinion.

  • 01 Codebase

    A codebase your team owns

    Components, routes and styles rebuilt deliberately, not cleaned up from exported markup.

    Verified by Repository and component structure

  • 02 Site

    Everything accounted for

    Collections, content, metadata and existing addresses checked against the source.

    Verified by Source inventory and migration checks

  • 03 Systems

    Handoffs that actually arrive

    Forms, analytics and CRM checked at their destination rather than at the button.

    Verified by Submissions, events and records

The migration is complete when these pass, not when the homepage looks right.

The figures above are an illustration of the report's shape. Yours are counted from your own site.

See everything included in a migration

Built for people and agents to work on.

Moving to code changes how the site can be maintained. Marketing works through the CMS. Developers work against components and routes. A coding agent works against the same repository, the same documentation and the same review as a developer.

The important part is not that an agent can write code. It is that the project is structured well enough for its changes to be understood, reviewed and reversed.

  • Marketing

    Editor or AI assistant CMS Preview Publish

    On the headless CMS answer above. Choose content collections instead and this lane runs through the repository and the review with the developers, which is exactly why that decision comes before the rebuild rather than after it.

  • Developers

    Branch Components and routes Review Deploy

    The same workflow as any other repository, which is what makes a second developer able to pick it up.

  • Coding agents

    Project instructions Branch Review Deploy

    Against the real repository, under the same review a person gets. An agent is only as safe as the documentation and the tests it is working against, which is why those are deliverables rather than extras.

Integrations

Changing the frontend doesn't mean changing your stack.

The site is one part of a marketing stack, and a migration that leaves the rest of it broken has not finished. Each of these is a deliberate integration with a guide behind it, rather than a script pasted into a header somewhere.

All 24 integration guides

Coming from somewhere else?

Or weigh Shopify against Astro before deciding

Reach out and see if we are a good fit.

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