In the ever-evolving landscape of digital commerce, staying competitive requires not only innovative marketing and seamless customer experiences, but also a strong technological foundation. As eCommerce platforms grow older or outlive their scalability, flexibility, or feature sets, businesses are faced with the task of migrating their store to more modern, maintainable systems. For many, Shopware 6 is that next-generation solution—a flexible, headless-ready, API-first platform that supports modern business models and provides a solid base for future growth.
Content migration, while often underestimated, is one of the most critical components of a successful platform switch. It goes far beyond simply moving data from one place to another. It’s about preserving the integrity of your catalog, maintaining your SEO rankings, and delivering a consistent user experience during and after the transition.
Whether you’re upgrading from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6, or migrating from other platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, Prestashop, or even custom-built systems, content migration will be at the heart of your project. The types of content that need to be migrated are diverse—ranging from product listings and categories to CMS pages, media assets, blog content, SEO metadata, customer reviews, and more.
Additionally, the structure of Shopware 6 introduces new paradigms—such as entity relationships, CMS page architecture with blocks and slots, custom fields, rule-based pricing, and dynamic product groups—that often require transformation or remapping of the legacy content. For instance, what was a basic product description in your old system might now involve multiple CMS blocks, media mapping, or rich content via custom snippets in Shopware.
Another critical consideration is data integrity and business continuity. A poorly executed content migration can lead to broken product listings, orphaned media files, dysfunctional navigation, poor performance, and ultimately, lost sales. Conversely, a well-planned and tested migration strategy can improve your store’s structure, performance, and content quality—giving your customers a better experience while giving your team better tools to manage and grow your catalog.
This guide serves as a comprehensive resource for planning, executing, and validating content migrations into Shopware 6. You will learn about:
Whether you’re a developer, agency, project manager, or merchant, this documentation will help you understand your options and equip you with actionable strategies to ensure a smooth, scalable, and future-proof content migration to Shopware 6.
Content is one of the most valuable assets in any eCommerce business. It drives your product visibility, informs and persuades customers, impacts SEO rankings, and ultimately supports conversion and retention. During a platform migration—such as moving to Shopware 6—it’s easy to focus on backend logic, design, or performance enhancements. However, failing to treat content migration as a priority can lead to serious setbacks.
Every product description, homepage banner, blog article, or landing page tells part of your brand’s story. When customers return to a newly migrated store, they expect a seamless experience—not missing images, broken links, or drastically altered page layouts. A thoughtful content migration ensures that the visual and structural consistency of your store is preserved, or even enhanced, during the transition.
With Shopware 6 offering a flexible CMS system built on blocks, sections, and slots, there’s also an opportunity to reorganize and improve existing content. Migrating effectively allows you to refresh your storytelling, highlight your most important products, and personalize your content—all while maintaining familiarity for existing users.
One of the biggest risks of poor content migration is damage to your search engine visibility. If content is lost, URLs change without proper redirects, or metadata is forgotten, your site can experience significant drops in organic traffic.
To mitigate this, your migration strategy must include:
Shopware 6 provides SEO-friendly URL handling, and migrating correctly ensures that Google and other search engines maintain trust in your site.
Migrating content into Shopware 6 isn’t just about copying and pasting data—it’s about adapting it to a new system that enables better content management and growth. The new architecture supports dynamic product groups, customizable CMS layouts, and rich media integrations. Clean, structured, and well-organized content is crucial for taking full advantage of these capabilities.
Poorly structured legacy content can hinder your ability to scale—be it multilingual stores, marketplace integrations, or omnichannel setups. Migration is your opportunity to standardize formats, normalize data, and use custom fields and relationships to future-proof your catalog.
For your internal teams, content also plays a key role in operational workflows. Migrated data must remain accurate and accessible across departments—marketing, fulfillment, customer service, etc. A poorly migrated catalog might lead to incorrect pricing, out-of-stock errors, or customers calling support because product details are inconsistent.
A strong content migration plan minimizes manual cleanup work after launch and reduces stress for everyone involved.
Content migration is not just a technical task—it’s a strategic project that requires collaboration between developers, content managers, marketers, and business stakeholders. Planning ahead is the foundation of a successful migration. Without a clear roadmap, you risk data loss, broken functionality, poor SEO performance, or even a failed store launch.
This section outlines a step-by-step approach to planning your content migration to Shopware 6 effectively.
Before deciding how to migrate, you need to know what you’re migrating. A content audit gives you full visibility into your current data and allows you to assess its quality, relevance, and migration complexity.
| Content Type | Location in Current System | Status (Active/Outdated) | Quality Issues |
|---|---|---|---|
| Products | Product catalog (Shopware, Magento, etc.) | Active/Obsolete | Missing images, bad SEO |
| Categories | Category tree | Outdated nesting | Needs restructuring |
| CMS Pages | Homepage, About Us, etc. | Mixed | Weak layout or outdated info |
| Media Files | Media manager, FTP, CDN | Duplicates, unreferenced | Low resolution |
| Blog Articles | CMS plugin or 3rd party system | Active | Outdated formatting |
| Reviews | Product detail pages | Mostly relevant | Needs filtering |
| Custom Fields | Attributes, metadata | Used/Unused | Inconsistent use |
Ask yourself:
This is your chance to clean up legacy data, consolidate fields, and improve structure before importing it into the new system.
Every migration should start with clear business and technical goals.
Clearly defining the scope avoids overcomplicating the migration process. You may choose to:
You may also choose a hybrid approach (covered in a later section), combining CSV imports, API calls, and manual adjustments for different content types.
Your Shopware 6 instance should be production-ready before importing live content. This includes:
Use staging environments to test your migration before deploying it to production. This allows for multiple test runs and validation.
Always create backups of both the source system and Shopware 6 before initiating the migration.
This ensures that if something goes wrong, you can revert quickly without downtime.
Understanding the types of content and how Shopware 6 stores them is key:
| Content Type | Stored In | Migration Complexity |
|---|---|---|
| Products | Database (product table) | Medium-High |
| Categories | Database (category table) | Medium |
| CMS Pages | JSON config in DB | Medium |
| Media | Filesystem + Media DB | High |
| Reviews | DB + relationships | Medium |
| Blog (via plugin) | Plugin-specific | High |
| SEO URLs | SEO URL table | Medium |
There are multiple methods and tools to help migrate content into Shopware 6:
| Tool/Method | Best For | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Manual Export/Import | Small catalogs | Excel/CSV |
| Migration Assistant | Shopware 5 → 6 | Official tool |
| API | Custom imports | Full control |
| Doctrine DB Scripts | Developers | Risky but powerful |
| Cline AI (optional) | Generating code/plugins | New & emerging |
Manual migration involves exporting data (usually in CSV/Excel format) and using Shopware’s import capabilities.
This is Shopware’s official tool to move from Shopware 5 or Magento.
bin/console plugin:install SwagMigrationAssistant
bin/console plugin:activate SwagMigrationAssistant
Database-level migration is one of the fastest—but riskiest—ways to migrate content, best suited for developers experienced with MySQL and Shopware’s data architecture.
You export your source content as SQL or CSV, analyze Shopware’s entity structure, and insert or transform it directly into the Shopware database using SQL or Doctrine.
Example: Migrating categories manually.
INSERT INTO category (id, version_id, parent_id, level, path, name, created_at)
VALUES (UUID(), UUID(), null, 1, null, 'Electronics', NOW());Shopware 6 uses a modern, powerful API system built on the Symfony HTTP foundation. You can migrate content safely using the Admin API or the Sync API.
curl --request POST \
--url https://yourshop.com/api/oauth/token \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{ "grant_type": "client_credentials", "client_id": "YOUR_CLIENT_ID", "client_secret": "YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET" }'curl --request POST \
--url https://yourshop.com/api/product \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{ "name": "New Product", "productNumber": "P001", "price": [{ "currencyId": "b7d2554b0ce847cd82f3ac9bd1c0dfca", "gross": 19.99, "net": 16.80, "linked": true }], "stock": 50, "taxId": "TAX_ID", "manufacturerId": "MANUFACTURER_ID" }'For more advanced use cases, especially when dealing with non-standard data (like migrating blog posts or review systems), writing a custom plugin gives you full control.
custom/plugins/ContentMigrationPlugin/
├── src/
│ ├── ContentMigrationPlugin.php
│ ├── Resources/
│ │ └── config/
│ └── Migration/
│ └── LegacyImporter.phpIn real-world scenarios, especially for medium to large-sized eCommerce businesses or complex legacy systems, using a single migration strategy is rarely sufficient. Different types of content often require different tools, approaches, and levels of customization. That’s where hybrid migration strategies come in.
A hybrid approach combines multiple migration methods—such as API calls, plugin scripts, CSV imports, SQL commands, and manual adjustments—into a coordinated, phased process. This approach allows you to leverage the strengths of each method while compensating for their limitations, making it possible to handle even the most complex content migrations with precision and efficiency.
Here’s a practical example of how a hybrid migration could be executed for a business moving from a legacy eCommerce platform into Shopware 6:
Tip: Use CLI commands like the following to reset indexes and caches between steps:
bin/console dal:refresh:index bin/console cache:clear
Hybrid content migration strategies are the most realistic, flexible, and scalable approach for migrating to Shopware 6—especially for businesses with varied data sources and complex catalogs. By combining the strengths of CSV import, API integration, plugin customization, and manual editing, teams can ensure a smooth transition that minimizes risk and maximizes efficiency.
Whether you’re dealing with 100 or 100,000 products, 5 or 50 CMS pages, or dozens of legacy SEO rules, a hybrid approach allows you to tailor your migration to meet the specific needs of your business—without compromising on quality or control.
bin/console dal:refresh:index
bin/console cache:clear
Migrating content to Shopware 6 is far more than a technical checklist—it’s a strategic transformation of your digital storefront. Whether you’re upgrading from Shopware 5, transitioning from a different platform, or restructuring your existing store, the way you handle content migration will directly impact performance, SEO, customer experience, and your team’s daily workflows.
A well-executed migration means more than just having your data appear in the new system. It means your categories are logically organized, your product pages are rich with consistent and optimized content, your CMS pages are flexible and beautiful, and your SEO structure is preserved or even improved. It’s about preserving what already works, eliminating what’s outdated, and optimizing what can be better.
Throughout this guide, we’ve explored multiple strategies—from simple CSV imports to powerful API integrations, from plugin development to direct SQL queries—and shown how a hybrid approach often delivers the best results. Every project is unique, and the key to a successful migration lies in choosing the methods that align with your goals, team expertise, and technical constraints.
Whether you’re managing a small store with a few dozen products or a complex enterprise system with thousands of SKUs, custom CMS blocks, and localized content, the process can be smooth and predictable—with the right preparation.
Migrating to Shopware 6 is not only about moving content—it’s also about future-proofing your business. With its modern tech stack, headless capabilities, flexible CMS, and ecosystem of plugins, Shopware gives you the tools to scale and adapt to changing market demands.
By following the structured strategies outlined in this documentation, you’re not only avoiding downtime or broken links—you’re setting the foundation for a faster, cleaner, and more powerful eCommerce operation that can grow with your business.
So take your time, document everything, and treat your content migration as a long-term investment in your brand’s success.