Can you migrate us off a custom or homegrown commerce platform?

Yes. Moving brands off bespoke custom and homegrown stacks onto Shopify is core to what we do, front end and back end, preserving the brand experience while cutting the cost and maintenance of owning the whole platform. We did it for Everlane, Glossier, and MeUndies.

We are on a custom headless build. Will Shopify be slower?

Usually the opposite. A well-built Shopify storefront, Liquid, hybrid, or headless on Hydrogen and Oxygen where it is warranted, is frequently faster than an aging custom headless stack. We migrated Everlane onto a build Shopify reported as 4.5x faster than its previous headless platform.

Why move off a custom platform if it works?

Because the cost is mostly invisible: you maintain the frontend, backend, infrastructure, and every integration yourself, only a few engineers can change it safely, and you miss the Shopify ecosystem. Moving redirects that budget from maintenance to growth.

Will we lose our bespoke brand experience?

No. We preserve the editorial, content-led experience that makes the brand distinct and rebuild it on the right Shopify architecture, rather than flattening it into a generic theme.

Can we still go headless on Shopify?

Yes. You can run headless on Hydrogen and Oxygen, or a hybrid, where the experience genuinely needs it, with Shopify managing the platform underneath, so you get the performance without owning the entire stack.

From a Custom or Headless Platform to Shopify

Why brands abandon custom and homegrown platforms

A custom commerce platform usually starts as an advantage: total control, built exactly to the brand's needs. Over time it becomes the opposite. The stack grows into something only a small group of engineers can safely change, every feature is bespoke, and the brand is paying to build and maintain capabilities that come standard everywhere else. The decision to move to Shopify is rarely about features; it is about getting out from under the cost and fragility of owning the whole platform.

The hidden cost of a custom headless build

Headless was supposed to mean fast and flexible. For many brands it quietly became a second engineering problem: you now own the frontend, the backend, the infrastructure, and every integration, and you keep them all running yourself. Performance budgets slip, the talent who built it move on, and shipping a simple change takes a specialist. The flexibility is real, but so is the bill, and most of it is maintenance, not growth.

This is exactly the trap a custom or homegrown stack creates, and it is the reason brands like Everlane came to us to get off one.

What you gain on Shopify

Moving onto Shopify trades that ownership burden for leverage.

A managed, secure, scalable platform you do not have to keep running yourself, with the highest-converting checkout in commerce.
The Shopify App Store and ecosystem, so you stop building and maintaining undifferentiated features and integrate proven ones instead.
Platform velocity: your team ships merchandising and experience changes without a specialist release cycle.
Lower total cost of ownership, with engineering budget redirected from maintenance to growth.
Performance preserved: you can still go headless on Hydrogen and Oxygen, or hybrid, where the experience genuinely needs it, without owning the entire stack.

What to keep, rebuild, replace, or retire

A custom platform migration should not be a blunt rewrite. The first decision is what deserves to survive. Distinctive customer-facing experiences, configurators, editorial systems, product finders, loyalty mechanics, and account workflows may be worth preserving. Undifferentiated work, like basic reviews, search, forms, email capture, subscriptions, fraud tooling, and merchandising helpers, is usually better handled by Shopify-native features, mature apps, or focused integrations.

The cleanest migrations classify every feature into four buckets: keep exactly, rebuild more simply, replace with a platform capability, or retire. That exercise removes a surprising amount of technical debt before it reaches Shopify. It also keeps the new site from becoming a museum of the old platform's compromises.

Migrating without losing performance or your brand

The fear with leaving a custom build is losing the bespoke experience and the speed. Done right, you lose neither. We preserve the editorial, content-led experience that makes the brand distinct, rebuild on the right architecture (often a fast Liquid or hybrid build rather than a heavier headless one), and migrate products, customers, orders, and content with their relationships intact. URLs are mapped completely to 301 redirects so the SEO equity built up on the custom site carries over.

SEO is harder on custom platforms because no one remembers everything

Homegrown platforms often have years of undocumented URL patterns: old campaign pages, parameterized category pages, editorial templates, image paths, subdomains, retired products, and redirects buried in server config. That history matters because it is often where backlinks and long-tail rankings live.

Before cutover, we crawl the old site, export Search Console and analytics landing pages, collect high-value backlinks, and reconcile all of it into the redirect map. We also decide which pages should not move: thin archives, internal search URLs, duplicate filtered pages, and legacy paths with no value should be retired deliberately rather than recreated. The goal is not to preserve every mistake. It is to preserve the equity that still matters.

Re-integrating your systems

A custom platform is usually wired deep into the business: ERP, PIM, CRM, analytics, and a customer-data platform like Segment. The migration re-integrates all of it through governed, monitored flows, so the back office moves with the storefront rather than being left behind. Explore our integration practice for the specifics.

The proof: faster and simpler after the move

We have run this move for some of the most design-forward brands in DTC. SDG migrated Everlane off a decade-old homegrown platform onto Shopify Plus, front end and back end, on a build Shopify's own president called 4.5x faster than the headless stack it replaced. Glossier, our Shopify Build Award-winning work, and MeUndies are cut from the same cloth: brands that chose to stop maintaining a bespoke platform and put that energy into growth instead. See the Everlane case study, or our migration service.

From a Custom or Headless Platform to Shopify: The Enterprise Migration Guide