How to Move an Ecommerce Shop From GoDaddy Website Builder to Shopify

If you’ve built a webstore on GoDaddy Website Builder and want to move it to Shopify you may have noticed this is a bit of difficult task. You are not alone. Since 2017 ecommerce store owners have been asking GoDaddy to make it easier to move over to Shopify.

GoDaddy Website Builder makes it extremely easy to build an ecommerce website with limited features offering a streamlined building process, intuitive controls, and the ability to swap themes without breaking your store. Unfortunately as a basic ecommerce platform there is a lot GoDaddy Website Builder doesn’t offer and you may find yourself wanting to move to a platform where you can have a little more control, like Shopify.

A GoDaddy support moderator informs users in 2017 there is no option to export their products to move an ecommerce store, only to import products. See Full Thread

That’s where GoDaddy Website Builder hits a major snag. While they make it easy to import products for your store, there is no easy way to export your products and categories and move those to another ecommerce store host. If you’re looking to move between GWB and Shopify (or any other host / CMS) then you’re going to have to do so manually.

To avoid making a big mistake or losing sales you’ll want to follow this process.

How to Move Ecommerce Store from GoDaddy Website Builder to Shopify

1. Setup your Shopify store. Do not add or connect a domain yet, allow it to use the subdomain. You’ll want to move fast through this process as Shopify doesn’t allow you to block the whole store from search engines via Robots.txt for some reason. If you have a lot of products you may want to build a CSV file and import your products.

2. Begin adding your products manually to your new Shopify store if you did not import them in step #1 (this may take awhile, but go as quickly as possible to avoid SEO conflicts)

3. Once you’re done adding your products check over your store’s inventory and layout to make sure it looks how you want and all products, descriptions, images, etc… are there.

4. Use a system like ScreamingFrog to crawl your current GWB website and store all urls. Build an Excel, Google Sheets, or other spreadsheet file and try to line them up with your new Shopify URLs (known as redirect mapping). You’ll use this to implement redirects later on for SEO.

5. When you are ready add your domain to Shopify and adjust the DNS settings for your store’s domain to point to your Shopify store. We recommend doing this on a weekend or late in the evening local time to avoid major disruption with your customers. Follow these instructions for adding and connecting a domain to Shopify.

6. Give it a few hours to settle and then check through your new store to make sure everything is working fine.

Alternative Method
There is a Chrome extension that claims to create an export CSV of your GoDaddy Website Builder products to import into Shopify. We can’t vouch for it and the site hasn’t been updated since 2018, but you may want to try it. Export GoDaddy Products Chrome Extension