Migrating from different provider

[Houseplant]

I have an existing small site for my business, hosted with NameCheap. It's currently informational as I sell on another specific marketplace. I built the simple informational part using NameCheap's free SitePad web building thing... which is not the best but got the job done.

Demand and sales have been much larger than anticipated. I was planning on eventually redoing the site using Wordpress and Woocommerce, but I find that I don't really have time to mess with learning those in order to get the site where I want it to be. So I'm thinking of migrating to Shopify as it seems worth the extra cost to save the time and effort. I only have about a dozen products so Shopify seems perfect for my needs.

Here's where I'm a bit confused. I currently have everything - domain, hosting, and email, through NameCheap. I have run into a lot of email issues with them (spam issues and bouncebacks etc), and searching around that seems like a common complaint from many people using their email service. So I basically want to move hosting to Shopify, and move email to something else (probably Google Workspace) since Shopify doesn't provide email, while keeping NameCheap to handle the domain registration.

I'm just confused about how I make all those transitions without screwing something up. Like what is the order in which I sign up for the new services, and how to I migrate them with the least amount of headache or interruptions? Not worried about my current site going down for a short time but really can't afford to be without email going through.

Thank you in advance, this whole thing is making me feel surprisingly dumb and I can't quite wrap my brain around it.

[K_Br4]

Hi,

I think the steps you should take are the following:

1. Move the email to Google. To use Google's email service, you need to change A records in your Domain provider. The setup is not that hard, and the service will be better.

2. Sign up for Shopify and start setting up the new site there. You don't need to move the domain right away - take your time, do the site, and once it's ready, change the DNS servers for the domain to point to your new Shopify account. You should not have any downtime this way.

Good luck!

[LitExtension]

Hmm, you can follow steps below:

- Sign up, start building your store, and set up your products. Take some time to get comfortable with it before going live.

- Sign up for Google Workspace and go through the steps to verify your domain in NameCheap. Add Google’s email settings but keep the old settings active for now so emails don’t get interrupted. Send a couple of test emails to make sure everything’s working fine.

- In NameCheap, update your domain’s settings to direct it to your Shopify site. Give it a few hours, then check to see if your domain loads the new site. Once you’re confident Google Workspace is fully working, you can delete the old NameCheap email settings.

Good luckkkkkkkk