Web developer in Nuremberg for WooCommerce shops

When a shop outgrows WooCommerce

WooCommerce turns WordPress into a shop through plugins, and a growing shop adds one plugin per need: payment, shipping, invoices, variants, prices for business customers. Each plugin has its own update cycle, and any one of them can break the checkout.

WooCommerce sites also pass Google’s Core Web Vitals less often than hosted shops. In the Web Almanac 2025, 35 percent of WooCommerce sites passed them on mobile, against 76 percent of Shopify sites (Web Almanac 2025, e-commerce chapter). Signs that a shop has grown past its setup:

• The admin slows down as orders pile up.
• The checkout takes seconds to answer during a campaign.
• Updates wait because nobody knows which plugin breaks what.
• Filters and variant pickers are drawn by scripts, so crawlers that do not run JavaScript see an empty list.

What the new shop runs on

A shop needs a database, customer logins and payment, so it runs on a framework built for that, and the content pages can stay static next to it. Which framework fits depends on your catalog, your payment providers, the connection to your merchandise management and who maintains the shop afterward. The assessment settles it.

Each product page carries its name, price, availability and variant values in the HTML and as structured data for products, so Google and AI assistants read them without running a script. The checkout follows the rules I applied to order funnels at Valentins: the next step is visible on the first screen, and the form has no field that the order does not need. Details: Experienced in conversion optimization.

What moves from WooCommerce, and how

The table lists the data of a WooCommerce shop, where it goes in the new shop and what to watch. Go through it for your own shop before our call; it shows which rows apply to you.

Data	In the new shop	Watch out for
Products and variants	Imported with SKU, prices, stock and attributes	Variants built by a plugin keep their values in the plugin’s own fields
Product and category addresses	New addresses, each old one forwarded permanently	Old addresses with and without the slash at the end
Product pictures	Imported with file names and alt texts	WordPress stores each picture in several sizes, and other sites link to them
Customer accounts	Imported with their addresses	Old passwords checked once at the first login, or reset by link
Order history	Imported for customer accounts and your records	A full export of the old shop kept as well
Invoice numbers	The sequence continues	No gap and no duplicate at the switch
Coupons and gift cards	Imported with their remaining value	Codes printed on flyers keep working
Recurring payments	Stay with your payment provider	Ask the provider whether saved payment methods can move
Tax and shipping rules	Set up anew	A test order for each country you ship to

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, an IT architect for data platforms in Frankfurt with more than twenty years in IT and media. From 2011 to 2016 I was project lead and developer at Valentins, then owned by Burda Digital, and programmed the front ends and back ends of at least five e-commerce sites, among them shops for Lidl and REWE. The news channel n-tv named Valentins the best online shop for ordering convenience. I have built websites with WordPress since 2016, have run sites on WooCommerce, and hold the Google Analytics certification and the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. Details: Background.