Timeline estimator
Get a realistic Shopify migration timeline before committing to a deadline.
Answer seven questions about your store and project constraints. The estimator outputs a realistic phase-by-phase timeline with the tasks that determine each phase length.
The most common reason migrations go wrong is an underestimated timeline. Use this before the project kickoff meeting, not after.
What makes migrations take longer than expected
Redirect mapping is always longer than estimated. Building a quality redirect map for a 2,000-page site requires a crawl export, URL classification, finding equivalent pages on the new store, reviewing homepage redirects, and validation. Teams routinely underestimate this by 3–4 weeks.
Staging QA reveals more problems than expected. A thorough staging QA — checking redirects, schema output, GA4 events, canonical tags, sitemap accuracy, checkout flow and mobile performance — routinely surfaces 15–30 issues per store. Each issue needs a fix and a re-test.
Decision latency is invisible until it is a problem. If every theme change needs stakeholder sign-off, if copy approval takes two weeks, if the go/no-go for launch requires a board meeting — these delays are not in most project plans. Clarify decision rights before the project starts.
Data migration complexity grows non-linearly. Moving 200 products is a weekend task. Moving 5,000 products with complex variants, historical order data, customer accounts and custom metafields can take weeks, especially if the old platform exports data in a format that needs transformation before import.