Migrating a PrestaShop shop to WordPress, like for like

A shop migration is rarely a data transfer problem. It is the rules built up around the catalogue — product variations, shipping costs, exceptions granted over the years — that make it difficult, because they are written down nowhere and you only realise they existed on the day they stop working.

The starting point

The client ran a PrestaShop shop and wanted to move to WordPress, with one firm constraint: keep the look of the existing website. No redesign, no new identity — their customers had to find exactly the shop they knew.

Variations, the real issue

The catalogue had many variations per product. The two platforms do not model variations in the same way: what is an attribute on one side may be a combination on the other, with its own references, its own stock and its own prices. An automatic migration without mapping work produces a catalogue that displays but sells wrongly — missing sizes, prices applied to the wrong variation, stock that does not decrease.

The work therefore consisted of establishing the mapping table between the two models before any transfer, then testing by sample on the most complex product families.

Shipping rules and carriers

The second hard point: the shipping tools. Shipping costs, zones, free-shipping thresholds and carrier modules are specific to each platform, and their modules do not carry over. Each rule had to be found in the original configuration, understood in its commercial intent, then rebuilt in the new environment — because a wrong shipping rule silently costs money on every order.

Reproducing the design without redoing it

Faithfully reproducing an existing interface on another platform is an underestimated exercise: there is no freedom to simplify. Every visible difference is a defect. It is demanding build work, where success is measured by the fact that nobody notices the change — except for the speed and the ease of administration behind it.

What this project really demands

Method more than speed: reconstructing undocumented rules, checking them one by one, and accepting that the invisible part of the work is most of the effort.

See also: PrestaShop to WooCommerce migration · WooCommerce expertise.