Magento built much of the modern e-commerce playbook, but for a growing number of merchants the economics no longer add up. Adobe's licensing for Commerce, the cost of specialist developers, and the heavy infrastructure footprint have made many teams look for a leaner, more flexible platform. Shopware 6 has become the natural destination — especially in Europe — thanks to its open-source core, strong B2B features, and an API-first architecture. This guide walks through how to migrate from Magento to Shopware 6 the right way.
Why merchants are leaving Magento
- Total cost of ownership — licensing, hosting, and the premium for scarce Magento talent add up fast.
- Magento 1 end-of-life — stores still on M1 face real security and compliance risk.
- Developer experience — Shopware 6's Symfony foundation and modern tooling make customization faster and cheaper to maintain.
- API-first design — Shopware's Store API makes headless and omnichannel projects far simpler.
Plan before you migrate
A replatform is the best time to clean house. Before touching data, audit what you actually have and what you want to keep.
- Inventory every product, attribute set, and category — flag the dead SKUs you can retire.
- Export a full list of live URLs from Magento (and Google Search Console) for redirect mapping.
- Catalogue custom extensions and identify Shopware equivalents or where custom plugins are needed.
- Document integrations: ERP, PIM, payment, shipping, marketing, and analytics.
What to migrate
- Products & catalog — products, variants, attributes, media, pricing, and category structure.
- Customers — accounts, addresses, and groups (passwords usually require a reset flow).
- Orders — historical order and invoice data for continuity and reporting.
- Content — CMS pages, blog posts, and media, rebuilt with Shopware's Shopping Experiences.
- SEO — URL structure, metadata, and redirects (the part most teams underestimate).
Preserving SEO during migration
Replatforming is where stores most often lose organic traffic — almost always because of broken URLs and lost redirects. Protect your rankings with a disciplined SEO plan:
- Map every old Magento URL to its new Shopware URL and implement 301 redirects for each.
- Preserve or deliberately improve title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structure.
- Re-implement structured data (Product, Breadcrumb, Organization) on the new store.
- Keep an XML sitemap ready and resubmit it in Google Search Console on launch day.
- Crawl the staging site to catch 404s and redirect chains before go-live.
The migration process, step by step
- 1Discovery & audit — lock down scope, data sources, and the integration list.
- 2Environment setup — provision Shopware 6, staging, and a CI/CD pipeline.
- 3Data migration — use the Shopware Migration Assistant plus custom scripts for edge cases.
- 4Theme & content rebuild — implement the storefront and rebuild key pages.
- 5Integrations — wire up payment, shipping, ERP/PIM, and analytics.
- 6QA & redirects — validate data, test checkout end to end, and verify every redirect.
- 7Launch — cut over DNS, resubmit sitemaps, and monitor closely.
- 8Post-launch — track rankings, fix any 404s, and optimize performance.
Common pitfalls to avoid
- Skipping the redirect map — the single biggest cause of post-migration traffic loss.
- Migrating junk data instead of using the move to clean your catalog.
- Forgetting to recreate structured data and losing rich results.
- Going live without a full checkout and payment test on staging.
- Underestimating content — Shopping Experiences need to be rebuilt, not copied.
How long does it take?
A straightforward catalog migration can take 4–8 weeks; complex B2B stores with custom functionality and many integrations run longer. The biggest variables are data quality, the number of custom extensions, and how much of the storefront is bespoke. A phased cutover — running both platforms briefly in parallel — de-risks larger projects.
At codexterminal we've migrated stores from Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify to Shopware 6 with zero data loss and preserved rankings. If you're planning a move, see our Migrations & Replatforming service or get in touch for a free migration assessment.