How to Upgrade to Shopify Plus? Without Losing Your Rankings

Deciding whether to upgrade to Shopify Plus isn’t always straightforward. Sure, the promise of advanced B2B tools, multi-store management, customizable checkout, and lower transaction fees is tempting. 

But let’s be honest—if you’re already on Shopify Advanced, it’s hard not to wonder if Shopify Plus really justifies the investment. Add to that the time and effort required for the migration, and the decision becomes even trickier.

As a certified Shopify Plus Partner, Elogic has helped multiple ambitious brands to streamline operations, expand globally with localized storefronts, and boost revenue with custom checkouts and seamless B2B integrations. Our focus is making Shopify Plus work for your specific needs.

And so here we are unpacking everything you need to know before upgrading. In this blog, you’ll get your answers to the questions like when to upgrade to Shopify Plus, why Shopify Plus might (or might not) be right for you, and what to expect during the transition. 

Stay with us to get a clear plan for whether to stick with your current setup or take the leap.

When Should You Upgrade to Shopify Plus?

Running an ecommerce business comes with growing pains. Your site might not keep up during high-traffic sales, or your team may be tripping over the 15-account limit. Or perhaps you’d like more branded experiences on your site, or managing multiple sites for different audience segments is driving up costs. 

Sound familiar?

Here are clear signs that’ll tell you when to upgrade Shopify plan to Shopify Plus:

• Your ecommerce site struggles during high-traffic periods
• Your team is outgrowing the 15-account limit on lower Shopify plans, which hinders collaboration
• Your transaction fees are cutting into your profits
• Your store checkout experience is too basic
• You’re growing a B2B channel or selling wholesale
• You’re expanding to new markets or regions
• You need more advanced, in-depth analytics to optimize your ecommerce strategy 
• Manual tasks are eating up your time, so you want to automate repetitive ecommerce workflows
• You need higher API limits and enterprise-friendly integrations to scale operations

Whether you’re expanding into new markets, diving into B2B sales, or just tired of juggling manual workflows, Shopify Plus is built to handle the challenges of scaling your business.

8 Reasons to Upgrade Your Shopify Theme: Why Now?

Upgrading from Shopify Advanced (and especially less expensive plans) to Shopify Plus does more than giving your site a sleek new design. It unlocks advanced tools that cater to high-volume businesses and demanding customers.

Here are eight reasons why leveling up your Shopify store should be at the top of your to-do list.

Optimize speed

Speed is a dealmaker in ecommerce. A collaborative study by Nitropack and Google reveals just how much every fraction of a second counts: pages loading in 3 seconds or less see 60% more pageviews. Improving your load time by just 0.1 seconds can boost conversions by 8.4%, 

When you upgrade Shopify to Shopify Plus, your store benefits from cutting-edge speed optimizations that directly impact these critical metrics.

Dedicated server resources

Shopify Plus provides access to dedicated server resources, ensuring your store has priority bandwidth and processing power during high-traffic events like flash sales, product launches, or seasonal spikes. Shopify Advanced, on the other hand, operates on shared server infrastructure, which can lead to slower load times and reduced reliability when traffic peaks.

Better multiregional speed performance

Shopify Plus enhances performance for regional markets with multi-storefront functionality, hosting each store on localized servers for faster load times in different geographic regions. In contrast, Shopify Advanced supports a single storefront for all regions, which can cause latency and slower performance for international customers accessing your store from far-away locations.

Exclusive checkout optimization

The Shopify Plus checkout is hosted separately from the main store, reducing server load on your site and ensuring faster processing times for high-volume stores — something Shopify Advanced doesn’t offer.

Global CDN with enhanced delivery

Shopify Plus leverages a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) that’s fine-tuned for enterprise-level performance. Your images, scripts, and stylesheets are delivered from the server closest to the customer, resulting in faster load times and improved site responsiveness.

While Shopify Advanced also uses Shopify’s CDN, the enhanced delivery prioritization available with Plus is specifically designed to handle higher traffic volumes and global customer bases.

Enhanced theme optimization tools

Shopify Plus gives developers unparalleled control over the theme’s code, enabling advanced speed optimizations that standard plans can’t match. These include:

• Deferred JavaScript loading to prioritize essential content, reducing time-to-interactive
• Preloading critical assets like fonts and key images to ensure they’re ready as soon as the page loads
• Minimizing unused CSS and JavaScript to keep your site lean and fast, avoiding unnecessary processing

An example of an ecommerce business that can swear by the speed optimization Shopify Plus provides is one of Elogic’s clients, Modest Maillot. Slow loads times used to be the biggest pain point of this online modest swimwear retailer. But since we identified and fixed critical weaknesses in the website’s structures, search engines have bumped the store up in rankings, generating more traffic to the site. 

Check out the full version of Modest Maillot’s success story in our case study.

Personalize checkout

Checkout is where the ecommerce magic happens — or where it can fall apart. A rigid, one-size-fits-all checkout experience can leave customers frustrated and drive up cart abandonment rates. An upgrade to Shopify Plus gives you the power to create a checkout process that’s not only seamless but also tailored to your business and your customers.

Custom checkout design and branding

An upgrade to Shopify Plus provides exclusive access to the checkout.liquid file, enabling full control over the design and functionality of your checkout page. You customize colors, fonts, and layouts in line with your brand identity, adding elements like your logo or seasonal imagery.

Beyond aesthetics, you can add practical features like trust badges, dynamic progress bars, and personalized upsell offers based on the cart contents to keep customers engaged.

Custom checkout fields

With Shopify Plus, you can add optional or mandatory fields at checkout to gather important customer information, such as order-specific details (e.g., gift messages, engraving instructions), delivery preferences, or notes for shipping. These improve order accuracy and give you actionable insights into customer needs.

Custom field validation

Shopify Plus allows you to add custom form fields and rules at checkout. You can validate customer input for shipping addresses, phone numbers, or email formats in real time, reducing the chances of errors. This way, you reduce the number of support tickets and returns, providing smoother order fulfillment.

Shopify Functions for programming checkout logic

With the enterprise Shopify upgrade, developers get a chance to customize the checkout process at a deeper level without relying on external apps. These server-side functions allow you to:

• Offer personalized discounts based on cart value, product combinations, or customer groups
• Display payment options based on the customer’s location, order total, or past purchase behavior
• Provide free shipping thresholds or location-specific shipping options automatically

Enhanced post-purchase experiences

Shopify Plus allows you to personalize the thank-you page with:

• Upsells or cross-sells based on the customer’s order history
• Loyalty program sign-ups or exclusive discount codes
• Custom messages or content that reflects your brand’s personality

Manage your high-volume store easily

When orders are pouring in and traffic spikes hit, Shopify Plus will handle the pressure and keep up without breaking a sweat. You can:

• Add as many SKUs as your store requires, while product variants are capped at 100 per item. Need more? Extend this limit with third-party apps or customizable solutions.
• Manage massive traffic spikes, with the ability to process over 80,000 requests per second — perfect for flash sales or viral campaigns.
• Ensure your customers complete their purchases without delays, even during peak sales events as Shopify Plus handles over 10,000 checkouts per minute.
• Process up to 8,000 orders per minute effortlessly, making it the ideal choice for scaling businesses with heavy demand.

Unlike regular Shopify plans, which limit staff accounts to 15, Shopify Plus provides unlimited accounts with customizable permissions. You can assign specific roles for tasks like marketing, inventory management, or customer support while keeping sensitive information secure.

To make their work as efficient as possible, merchants that upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus can rely on Shopify Flow and Launch Pad to automate repetitive tasks. Just a few examples of workflows high-volume ecommerce businesses can benefit from include:

• Sending stock replenishment alerts when inventory is low.
• Tagging high-value customers automatically for VIP campaigns.
• Automating fraud detection for large orders to reduce manual review.

Go for B2B ecommerce

If you’re in B2B, you’re not just dealing with casual shoppers. You’re working with buyers who need customized pricing, bulk orders, and payment terms that don’t leave them chasing invoices. It’s complicated, but an upgrade to Shopify Plus makes it feel anything but.

Custom company profiles

With Shopify Plus, you can create custom profiles for each business or location, complete with their unique payment terms, shipping preferences, and access rules. This level of personalization ensures that every buyer gets a seamless experience that matches their needs, whether they’re ordering from one location or managing multiple branches.

Secure customer accounts

B2B transactions require an added layer of security. Shopify Plus lets you verify customer identities before granting access to wholesale catalogs, pricing, and account management tools. Only authorized buyers can view sensitive information while easily managing orders and profiles.

Personalized product catalogs

Shopify Plus takes personalization to the next level by creating customer-specific product catalogs. Display only the products, prices, and discounts relevant to each B2B client or region. This eliminates confusion and helps streamline the buying process for every business partner.

Flexible payment solutions

Speed up the buying process with flexible payment options. Features like automatic net payment terms, vaulted credit cards, draft orders, and invoice-based payments come with an update to Shopify Plus. These tools make it easier for buyers to complete their transactions quickly and confidently.

Streamlined B2B checkout

Offer a quick, efficient checkout tailored for B2B needs. Shopify Plus can dynamically display wholesale ecommerce pricing, tax exemptions, and payment options based on the buyer’s account details, ensuring a smooth and hassle-free transaction process.

One example of a B2B business successfully leveraging Shopify Plus is Elogic’s client PetHQ, a leading pet care store in the UAE. By combining Shopify Plus’s native B2B tools with custom solutions, we helped them create:

• A streamlined order quotation flow for bulk buyers
• A custom registration process to onboard new business clients
• A quick order system that simplifies reordering for recurring customers

Click to see the full case study of PetHQ.

Do better marketing

An upgrade to Shopify Plus can make the lives of your marketing team simpler, too. Two standout features — Shopify Audiences and advanced reporting and analytics — give ecommerce businesses the tools to market more effectively and efficiently.

Smarter customer acquisition

With Shopify Audiences, your advertising campaigns can focus on customers who matter most, helping you save time, effort, and budget. 

Exclusively available for Shopify Plus merchants, Shopify Audiences is a powerful tool for finding and targeting the right customers in the United States and Canada:

1. Create audience lists tailored to your store’s products and target demographic, designed to connect with people most likely to purchase.
2. Once generated, these lists can instantly be transferred to your ad accounts, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, enabling targeted campaigns to go live without delays.

Advanced reporting and analytics

Data-driven insights are essential for effective marketing, and Shopify Plus provides advanced reporting and analytics tools to help you refine your strategy:

• Pinpoint your top-performing products and campaigns
• Analyze customer behavior, including lifetime value and purchasing patterns
• Explore regional trends to better target specific markets

With Shopify Plus, you can customize reports to spotlight the metrics that matter most to your business. For example, compare ad performance with sales data to uncover what’s driving results and where there’s room to improve.

Besides, Shopify’s marketing reports allow you to evaluate campaign success across channels — email, social media, and paid ads — so you can understand their impact on revenue and adjust your approach.

Simplify omnichannel sales management

Modern customers expect convenience at every turn, no matter where they shop. Shopify Plus introduces advanced in-store tools and integrations to meet these expectations: merchants can manage all sales channels in one centralized system. 

A standout feature for Shopify Plus merchants is POS Pro, included free of charge for every location. POS Pro enables you to synchronize your online and in-store sales, track inventory in real-time, and offer “buy online, pick up in-store” to cut shipping costs. 

On top of that, you can track individual sales performance by team members, define staff permissions for secure system access, and even customize branded receipts to reinforce your store’s identity.

Beyond POS, Shopify Plus equips you for the rise of social commerce, set to reach $1 trillion in revenue by 2028, up from $570 billion in 2023. Seamlessly integrating with Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, and even messaging apps like WhatsApp, you can sync product listings across channels, manage inventory, and track performance to see exactly which platforms drive the most sales.

Expand with multi-store management

Shopify Plus makes it easy to sell your products online internationally. After an upgrade to Shopify Plus you can set up up to 9 unique storefronts tailored to specific regions, languages, or target audiences. Each store is equipped with its own domain, currency, and product catalog. This ensures a fully localized shopping experience that resonates with your customers, regardless of their location, preferences, or needs.

Access unmatched 24/7 support

No matter when or where an issue pops up, Shopify Plus offers round-the-clock priority support for troubleshooting, optimization, or platform-specific questions. You’ll also get a dedicated account manager for strategic advice, helping with store launches and ongoing improvements to maximize the platform potential.

You can also tap into the global pool of Shopify Plus partners if your upgrade turns into a full-fledged migration project. Connect with developers, designers, and consultants to expand functionality, enhance user experience, and execute large-scale projects.

Take the maximum out of Shopify Plus.

Upgrade your store with a certified Shopify Plus partner.

Upgrade now

How to Upgrade to Shopify Plus?

Invested in the benefits of the upgrade to Shopify Plus and are wondering “how to upgrade my Shopify site to Shopify Plus”? If you’re already running a Shopify store, upgrading to Shopify Plus is a smooth process that unlocks enterprise-level features designed to scale your business. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide tailored to help you prepare for the move.

Step 1: Back up your data before the upgrade to Shopify Plus

Your store backup prevents potential data loss or compatibility issues during the transition. Choose the method that works best for your needs:

• CSV export: Use Shopify’s built-in tools to export key data like products, customers, and orders. This is simple and effective for quick backups.
• Shopify API: For enterprise-level stores, developers can use Shopify’s API to create a full backup store. This option offers comprehensive coverage but requires technical expertise.
• Third-Party apps: Consider tools like Rewind for ongoing, automated backups that provide peace of mind even after the upgrade.

This step ensures that nothing critical is lost, even in the rare event of an issue.

Step 2: Contact Shopify Plus

The next step is reaching out to Shopify’s sales team to start the upgrade process. If you’re exploring how to upgrade to Shopify 2.0 as an enterprise, they’ll provide all the details you need, including pricing and feature breakdowns. Use this opportunity to ask questions about your specific needs, from multi-store management to B2B ecommerce tools.

Step 3: Sign up for Shopify Plus

Once you’re ready, complete the sign-up process. Shopify takes care of the heavy lifting, and your store will be upgraded to Shopify Plus within 24 hours. You’ll receive a confirmation email once the transition is complete, and your store will be ready to take advantage of the enhanced features.

Step 4: Customize your store

After upgrading, you can immediately start customizing your store using Shopify Plus’s advanced tools. Here are some key areas to focus on:

• Personalized checkout: Use the checkout.liquid file for a custom checkout experience that enhances conversions.
• Automation with Shopify Flow: Streamline repetitive tasks like inventory alerts, customer tagging, or order prioritization.
• Custom integrations: Work with a Shopify Plus agency (Elogic is a certified Shopify Plus Partner) for bespoke apps and functionality to match your enterprise needs.

Switching to Shopify Plus from other platforms

If your current store isn’t built on Shopify, upgrading to Shopify Plus is more than just switching plans. It’s a technically demanding process that requires coding expertise and precision.

A certified Shopify Plus Partner can handle critical tasks like migrating data, integrating systems (e.g., ERP or CRM), and preserving SEO rankings. They’ll adapt your store’s design and functionality to Shopify Plus while minimizing downtime and avoiding errors.

For stores with large catalogs, regional complexities, or custom features, expert support ensures a seamless transition and unlocks the full potential of Shopify Plus.

What Data will be Migrated During the Upgrade to Shopify 2.0?

When upgrading to Shopify Plus, especially if you’re transitioning from another platform, ensuring all your critical data is migrated accurately is key to a seamless launch. Here’s a breakdown of the essential data that will be transferred during the upgrade:

Most Common Risks and Mistakes While Upgrading to Shopify Plus?

One of the biggest errors is failing to back up store data before the upgrade. Even though Shopify handles much of the transition process, there’s always a risk of compatibility issues or data loss.

Another frequent mistake is not addressing SEO continuity. Upgrading to Shopify Plus might involve changes to URL structures or checkout paths. If you don’t set up 301 redirects properly, you risk losing valuable organic search traffic. Ensure all redirects are mapped and tested to preserve your search rankings.

Rushing into the upgrade without a plan can lead to unnecessary disruptions. Shopify Plus comes with new tools and features, and diving in without clear objectives can result in underutilized capabilities. Take time to map out your goals for the upgrade — whether it’s enhancing checkout functionality, improving workflows, or expanding into new markets.

Merchants often make the mistake of underestimating the training required for new features. Shopify Plus offers tools like Shopify Flow for automation and advanced customizations via checkout.liquid. Without proper training, your team may struggle to leverage these powerful tools effectively. Invest time in onboarding through Shopify Plus Academy or working with Shopify experts to maximize the platform’s potential.

Finally, skipping rigorous testing before launch is a critical misstep. Even though Shopify Plus is designed to handle high performance, issues like incomplete data migration or broken customizations can occur. Test every aspect of your store, including navigation, checkout, and integrations, to ensure a flawless experience for your customers.

Afterthought

Upgrading to Shopify Plus is a smart move for any business that’s outgrowing its current setup and needs advanced tools to scale. Whether you’re an enterprise business handling high order volumes, a B2B merchant needing tailored functionality, or a growing brand looking to streamline multi-store management, Shopify Plus offers unmatched benefits. With features like lower transaction fees, customizable checkout, and powerful automation, it’s designed to help businesses of all types reach their full potential.

At Elogic, we’ve guided businesses of different sizes and industries through the transition to Shopify Plus. Whether you’re ready to upgrade now or just exploring your options, our team is here to help.

Scaling your store? Elogic is a certified Shopify Plus Partner that can build the customized solution your business needs. Let’s talk! —>