Issue 01
Redirects to the homepage
Thousands of old product URLs pointed at the homepage or a generic collection. Google treats most of them as soft 404s and the rankings go with them.
Shopify migration SEO
SEO migration services planned for zero traffic loss
A new platform should not cost you the rankings you spent years earning. We crawl every URL you have, map each one to its Shopify equivalent, check the new store before it goes live and watch Search Console for 90 days after launch.
Where migrations leak
Traffic rarely disappears on launch day. It leaks.
Most lost traffic after a move to Shopify traces back to a handful of avoidable mistakes. Migrations commonly lose 10 to 30 percent of organic traffic when redirects are mishandled, and some never recover it.
Issue 02
Only the top 100 URLs mapped
Someone exported the best sellers and stopped. The long tail of old products, blog posts and image URLs that carried backlinks gets a 404.
Issue 03
Content quietly shortened
Category copy, FAQs and size guides did not fit the new theme, so they were cut. The page keeps its URL and loses its reason to rank.
Issue 04
Schema and reviews dropped
Product structured data, review stars and breadcrumb markup disappear with the old platform. Rich results fade within weeks.
Issue 05
Staging indexed, or live store blocked
A password page left on, a noindex copied from staging, or a robots rule carried over. Small switch, large damage.
Issue 06
Nobody watching after launch
The agency that built the store moves on. Crawl errors and dropped pages pile up in Search Console for months before anyone looks.
The curve
The dip most migrations accept, and the line we plan for
Nine kinds of migration
Not every migration is a replatform
SEO teams usually count nine kinds of site migration. On Shopify, each one changes something different, and several often happen at once. The more you change in one launch, the harder it is to tell what caused a drop.
01
Replatform
WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud or a custom build moves to Shopify. Every URL pattern changes because Shopify uses fixed prefixes like /products/ and /collections/.
02
Redesign or new theme
Same URLs, new templates. Risks: copy removed from collection pages, headings rewritten, internal links lost from menus and footers, heavier JavaScript.
03
URL or IA change
Renaming handles, merging collections or reshaping navigation on an existing Shopify store. Small on paper, large in Search Console if the redirects are skipped.
04
Domain change
A rebrand, a move from a myshopify or marketplace-style name, or dropping a hyphenated domain. Needs redirects plus a change-of-address in Search Console.
05
Subdomain or path change
shop.brand.com folds into brand.com, or a blog on WordPress moves under /blogs/ on Shopify. Authority can move with it if every URL is mapped.
06
Consolidation
Two brands, two stores or a legacy site merge into one. Overlapping products need a single winning URL and a decision on duplicate content.
07
International restructure
Country stores or ccTLDs move into one store with Shopify Markets, using subfolders or domains. Hreflang, currency and redirects all change together.
08
Catalog pruning
Discontinued products, retired collections and thin blog posts get removed. Each one needs a redirect to the closest live page, or an honest 410 when nothing fits.
09
Rendering change
Moving to a headless Hydrogen storefront or a heavy app-driven theme. URLs may stay the same while what Googlebot can actually render changes.
Our process
Eight steps, from first crawl to day 90
- Weeks 1 to 2
Crawl and benchmark
We crawl the old site and pull every URL with clicks, impressions or backlinks from Search Console, Ahrefs and analytics. We save rankings, traffic and revenue by page type so there is a baseline to measure against.
- Weeks 2 to 3
URL mapping
Every old URL is matched to its closest Shopify equivalent: product to product, category to collection, post to article. Discontinued items go to the nearest relevant collection, never to the homepage.
- Week 3
Redirect map
We build the CSV Shopify imports, check it for chains, loops and reserved paths, and plan how query-string and filter URLs will be handled, since Shopify redirects cannot catch all of them.
- Weeks 3 to 5
Content parity
Titles, meta descriptions, H1s, category copy, FAQs and internal links are carried over or improved, page by page. Nothing ranking today gets thinner by accident.
- Weeks 4 to 5
Schema parity
Product, Offer, AggregateRating, BreadcrumbList and Organization markup is rebuilt on the Shopify theme and validated, so rich results survive the move.
- Week before launch
Staging QA
We crawl the unpublished store, test a sample of redirects, check canonicals, hreflang, robots.txt, sitemaps and page speed, and confirm the store is not indexable before launch.
- Day 0
Launch day
Redirects imported, password removed, sitemaps submitted, key templates fetched with URL Inspection. We crawl the old URL list against the live store within hours.
- Days 1 to 90
30/60/90-day monitoring
Weekly checks on crawl errors, indexed pages, clicks by page type and revenue against the baseline. Anything that drops gets a named cause and a fix.
What you get
Deliverables you can hand to any developer
Full URL inventory
Every old URL with its clicks, impressions, backlinks and revenue, in one sheet.
Redirect CSV
Ready for Shopify import, checked for chains, loops and reserved paths.
Content parity sheet
Old and new title, meta, H1 and body word count for every indexable page.
Schema test log
Product, breadcrumb and organization markup validated on each template.
Launch-day runbook
Who does what, in which order, with a rollback plan for each step.
Monitoring reports
Day 7, 30, 60 and 90 reports against the pre-launch baseline.
Migration paths
Moving from a specific platform?
Each platform breaks in its own way. These pages cover the URL patterns, redirect details and data problems we see for each one.
WooCommerce to Shopify
WooCommerce to Shopify
A WooCommerce to Shopify migration that keeps your rankings: /product/ and /product-category/ URLs mapped one by one, Yoast data carried over, WordPress blog moved without losing its links.
Magento to ShopifyMagento to Shopify
Magento and Adobe Commerce to Shopify migrations that protect rankings: .html URLs, category-path duplicates, layered navigation parameters, store views and years of old URL rewrites all mapped.
BigCommerce to ShopifyBigCommerce to Shopify
BigCommerce to Shopify migrations that keep rankings: root-level short URLs, legacy .html paths, brand pages, faceted search parameters and custom fields all planned before launch.
Shopify Plus migrationShopify Plus migration
SEO for Shopify Plus migrations: upgrading to Plus, consolidating several stores into one, and moving country expansion stores into Shopify Markets without losing rankings.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud to ShopifySFCC to Shopify
Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify migrations that protect enterprise rankings: product-ID URLs, locale paths, variation parameters, static mappings and multi-site setups mapped before launch.
Amazon to ShopifyAmazon to Shopify
For Amazon sellers, often Chinese brands, launching a Shopify brand site that ranks on Google and shows up in AI answers: listing data rewritten for search, A+ content rebuilt, brand facts made consistent.
The fine print
What Shopify redirects will and will not do
Shopify handles 301 redirects well, but it has rules that catch teams out. We plan around them before the first line of the redirect map is written.
Limits and import#
Redirects are managed in the Shopify admin under Content, Menus, URL redirects, or imported as a CSV with "Redirect from" and "Redirect to" columns. Standard plans allow up to 100,000 redirects. Shopify Plus allows up to 20 million. A store with 30,000 products, five years of blog posts and a few thousand image URLs can get close to the standard limit faster than you would think, so we remove chains and redundant rules first.
Redirects only fire on broken URLs#
A Shopify redirect only works when the old path returns a 404 on the new store. If a page, product or collection already exists at that path, the live page wins and the redirect is ignored. This matters when old and new URLs overlap, which happens often with WooCommerce and BigCommerce stores that already used short slugs.
Paths Shopify will not redirect#
Some paths are reserved and cannot be redirected, including /collections/all, /collections/vendors and /collections/types. Collection tag URLs such as /collections/sofas/leather cannot be redirected either, because Shopify still treats them as valid pages. URLs with query strings, like faceted-search parameters from Magento or BigCommerce, "might not work as expected" in Shopify's own words. We handle those with canonical tags, clean internal links and, where needed, a theme or app-level rule.
Markets and subfolders#
If you sell in several markets with Shopify Markets subfolders, a redirect created on the primary domain covers the market subfolders too, but a locale-specific redirect needs its own rule for each subfolder. International moves get their own section in the map. For the wider picture on markets, see international SEO.
Which page should you read next#
- Leaving WordPress: WooCommerce to Shopify
- Leaving Adobe Commerce: Magento to Shopify
- Already on Shopify and growing: Shopify Plus migration
- Selling on Amazon and launching a brand site: Amazon to Shopify
We also write about migrations on the migrations blog. If you are rebuilding the store at the same time, our Shopify development team builds SEO-first from day one.
In numbers
What our SEO work has produced
- Organic revenue in 7 months
- $758,772
- Chinese automotive accessories brand, 30 products
- Organic clicks a day
- 1,000
- Chinese tech brand, from DR 12
- Keywords ranking for one client
- 21,877
- Up against a VC-backed leader
- Single order from one keyword
- $130,000
- Moved from page 3 to page 1
Questions
Migration SEO questions
How much traffic will we lose when we migrate to Shopify?
It depends on how much changes at once and how carefully URLs are mapped. A well-planned replatform often sees a short wobble of a few weeks while Google recrawls, then recovers. Migrations with incomplete redirects commonly lose 10 to 30 percent of organic traffic, sometimes for good. We cannot guarantee a flat line, but we measure against your pre-launch baseline and fix every drop we can trace.
When should we bring in an SEO before a migration?
Ideally before the new store is designed, and at the latest six to eight weeks before launch. That gives time to crawl the old site, agree on collection structure, build the redirect map and check content parity on staging. Teams that call us after launch can still be helped, but some ranking loss is harder to reverse once Google has recrawled broken URLs.
Can you migrate the store as well as handle the SEO?
Our focus is the search side: URL mapping, redirects, content and schema parity, QA and monitoring. We work alongside your developer or migration app, or our Shopify development team can build the store SEO-first. Either way, we own the checklist of what must be true on launch day for rankings to survive.
Do we need to change our domain when moving to Shopify?
No. You can connect your existing domain to Shopify, and in most cases you should. Keeping the domain removes one whole layer of risk. If a rebrand requires a new domain, we treat it as a second migration: domain-level redirects, a change-of-address request in Search Console and a longer monitoring window.
How long does it take for rankings to settle after launch?
Most stores see Google recrawl their important pages within two to four weeks, and positions settle over one to three months. Large catalogs take longer because Google recrawls deep product pages less often. We report at day 7, 30, 60 and 90, and keep monitoring beyond that if pages are still moving.
Before you pick a launch date
Bring us in before the redirect map exists
The cheapest time to protect your rankings is before the build starts. Send us your current domain and target launch date and we will tell you what the migration needs.