What pitfalls to avoid during Shopware 6 migration weekends?

Payment gateway cutover

Payment providers are one of the biggest migration weekend risks. A gateway can work in staging but fail in production because the live callback URL, webhook endpoint, or domain whitelist was never updated. We’ve seen stores go live with successful checkouts that never captured payment because the PSP still pointed to the old platform. Test real transactions on the live domain before announcing the launch internally.

DNS propagation timing

DNS changes rarely switch instantly everywhere. Some customers will still hit the old platform for several hours while others land on Shopware 6 immediately. If inventory or orders continue updating on the old store during that window, you’ll end up with mismatched stock and missing orders. Freeze catalog updates and put the old platform into a restricted maintenance mode before the cutover starts.

Background job processing

Shopware relies heavily on scheduled tasks, queues, and workers. If workers are not running after deployment, emails stop sending, indexing stalls, Flow Builder actions fail, and search results become incomplete. This catches teams off guard because the storefront still loads normally at first. Verify worker processes separately after deployment instead of assuming the deploy script handled them.

Cache warm-up

A cold Shopware cache can make a healthy server look broken for the first hour after launch. Category pages load slowly, Elasticsearch queries spike, and CPU usage jumps because everything is generating on demand. Warm the HTTP cache, navigation cache, and search index before opening the site publicly. Otherwise your first traffic spike becomes an accidental stress test.

301 redirect gaps

Redirect issues usually appear after search engines revisit old URLs. A handful of missing category or CMS redirects can wipe out years of indexed traffic. And it is rarely the obvious URLs that get missed. Filter pages, blog URLs, manufacturer pages, and campaign landing pages are where most migration teams fail. Run a crawl against the old store before launch and compare it against the redirect map.

Third-party integration assumptions

ERP, PIM, WMS, CRM, and marketplace integrations often look healthy because the API connection succeeds. But the actual data flow fails because field mappings changed during migration. Orders may sync without tax data. Inventory may sync without reservations. Always validate full end-to-end data movement with real records instead of relying on connection tests alone.

Admin user access

Teams regularly forget to verify production admin permissions before launch weekend. Then someone needs to change shipping rules or payment settings during go-live and discovers they only have staging access. Make sure all operational staff can access the live Shopware admin, payment dashboards, CDN panels, DNS provider, and hosting environment before the migration window starts.

Error logging visibility

You cannot fix what you cannot see. If centralized logging, server monitoring, and PHP error reporting are not ready before cutover, small failures stay hidden until customers report them. Configure log access for both developers and project managers. During migration weekends, response time matters more than perfect root-cause analysis.