Moving from PrestaShop to WooCommerce

The pressure is specific, not general. PHP 7.4 stopped receiving security patches, so a 1.7 store on modern hosting is running on borrowed configuration, and hosts have been enforcing PHP 8.x upgrades on their own schedules. That breaks 1.7 outright. So the store faces a forced move regardless of platform preference, and the honest framing is not "should we leave PrestaShop" but "we are paying for a rebuild either way, so which one". Anyone describing the PrestaShop 9 path as a simple upgrade has left module revalidation out of the quote, and that omission is most of the cost.

• 1.7 end of life: end of 2024
• 8.x on extended support since 4 July 2025 — critical fixes only
• 1.7 runs PHP 7.4, past end of life and increasingly refused by hosts
• PrestaShop 9 requires module revalidation, theme rebuild and integration retesting

A PrestaShop store of any age runs paid modules for the things that make it work: payment gateways, carrier integrations, invoicing, tax rules for the countries it ships to, sometimes a B2B pricing layer. Each one is a separate vendor with a separate compatibility timeline, and this is where both migration paths get expensive in the same way. Going to PrestaShop 9 means buying new versions from vendors who may or may not have shipped one. Going to WooCommerce means finding equivalents and rebuilding the configuration. Either way you inventory every module, check its vendor's current release, and price a replacement. Do this before choosing a platform, because the answer sometimes decides the platform for you.

Catalog data moves reasonably well with a migration tool: products, categories, combinations, customers, addresses and order history all have recognizable equivalents. The friction is in the structures PrestaShop models differently. Combinations map to WooCommerce variations, but a product with four attributes and 200 combinations often needs its data model rethought rather than copied. Customer passwords never transfer — they are hashed with a different scheme, so every customer resets on first login and that email needs writing before cutover, not after. Specific prices, customer groups and cart rules each need manual reconstruction.

• Transfers: products, categories, combinations, customers, addresses, orders
• Rebuilt: modules, theme, cart rules, customer groups, specific prices
• Never transfers: password hashes — plan the reset email as part of launch
• Check multistore setups early; they have no direct WooCommerce equivalent

PrestaShop's default URL structure carries IDs — the friendly-URL format still embeds the product ID, and category paths nest differently from WooCommerce's. So a migration that does nothing about this drops every ranking URL the store has. The redirect map is not a post-launch task; it is the deliverable that determines whether the project succeeds. Export every URL with impressions from twelve months of Search Console, map each to its destination, and test the map against a crawl on staging. Send a discontinued product to the homepage and Google reads it as a soft 404, which wastes exactly the link equity the redirect existed to preserve. Its category is the right destination.

Three things improve: a larger hiring pool, stronger content and SEO tooling, and a deeper extension market where modules you could not replace have two or three candidates. One thing gets worse, specifically. PrestaShop's native multistore and its built-in EU tax and invoicing are genuinely good, and WooCommerce needs plugins to reach parity — price that carefully if you run four storefronts from one back office.

We do not think everyone should leave. If your store depends on multistore with shared catalogs, if your team already knows PrestaShop and has a developer on retainer who does, or if your module stack is mostly from vendors who have already shipped 9-compatible versions, upgrading in place is cheaper and lower-risk than replatforming. The same applies under a few hundred products with steady sales: a platform migration is not worth the money when the current system does the job and the only real problem is a PHP version. In that case, upgrade, retest, and put the difference into the product pages.

Start with the module inventory and the URL export; both are cheap and both can change the decision. Build the catalog import next and run it repeatedly against staging until variations, prices and stock reconcile against the live store to the unit. Rebuild the storefront and reconfigure payment and shipping in parallel. Freeze the catalog for the cutover window, run a final delta import, switch DNS, and watch order flow for the first hours rather than watching analytics. Keep the old store running read-only for at least a month — order history questions arrive for weeks, and having the original system to answer them is worth the hosting.