WooCommerce runs a huge share of the web's WordPress stores — estimates put its share of all online stores in the 30%+ range — which also means it's the single most common storefront migrations get asked to move off WordPress entirely. Products in WooCommerce aren't a single flat table, though, and that's where most DIY migrations run into trouble.

What a "Product" Actually Is in WooCommerce

A WooCommerce product is a WordPress post (post type product) plus a sprawl of related data: price and stock in postmeta, category and tag terms in the taxonomy tables, image galleries as attachment relationships, and — if it's a variable product — a full set of child "variation" posts each with their own price and stock overrides. Migrating "the product" means migrating all of that consistently, not just the title and description.

Products with Variations

Simple products (one price, one SKU) migrate cleanly. Variable products — a T-shirt in 4 sizes and 3 colors, each with its own price and stock level — are where migrations typically lose data, because each variation is technically its own hidden post linked to the parent. Map parent-to-variation relationships explicitly before you migrate; don't assume a flat product export captures them.

Categories and Attributes

• Product categories and tags are regular WordPress taxonomy terms — they migrate the same way post categories do.
• Custom attributes (size, color, material) can be either "global" attributes (shared taxonomy, reusable across products) or product-local — check which each one is, since global attributes need their own taxonomy migrated separately from the products that use them.

Reviews

WooCommerce product reviews are WordPress comments under the hood, filtered to show star ratings. If your migration script only moves post content, reviews get silently dropped — they live in wp_comments, not anywhere near the product's own row. Star rating data itself is stored as comment meta, so it needs its own explicit mapping too.

Orders and Customer History

Whether order history needs to migrate at all depends on whether the new platform is taking over as the live store or just the content/catalog side. If you're moving the catalog to a headless CMS while keeping WooCommerce (or another platform) as the actual checkout, orders can often stay where they are — only products, categories, and reviews need to move.

What This Means for a Real Migration Plan

• Export products and their variations together, with the parent-child relationship intact.
• Migrate category/attribute taxonomies before the products that reference them, not after.
• Pull reviews from wp_comments explicitly — don't assume they're bundled with product export.
• Decide up front whether checkout/orders are in scope, since that changes the whole shape of the migration.

This is a narrower, higher-stakes version of the same problem covered in our full WordPress export guide and migration checklist — the general steps still apply, but WooCommerce's relational data model means you can't treat product migration as "just another post type." If you're also swapping out WooCommerce extensions in the process, see our breakdown of what replaces which WordPress plugin after a migration.