Moving a store to Shopify is mostly a data job: products, customers, orders, content. The part that costs money for months afterwards is search. A store that ranked well can lose a large share of its organic traffic in the weeks after launch, and almost always for the same reason: the old addresses stopped working and nobody told Google where they went.
This is the checklist we work through on every migration to Shopify, whether the store is coming from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or a custom platform. None of it is exotic. It just has to be done completely, before launch day.
1. Record what you have before you touch anything
You cannot protect rankings you have not written down. Before the build starts, collect:
- Every indexable address on the old store. Crawl the site, export the XML sitemap, and pull every page that received clicks in the last 12 months from Google Search Console. Crawls miss orphaned pages; Search Console shows the ones that actually earn traffic.
- The pages that matter most. Sort by clicks and revenue. Usually a small number of category and product pages bring most of the organic sales. These get checked by hand.
- Backlinks. Export the pages other websites link to. A link from a magazine to an old product page is worth keeping alive.
- A baseline. Rankings for your main search terms, organic sessions and organic revenue per week. Without a baseline, nobody can tell after launch whether a dip is the migration or the season.
2. Understand how Shopify addresses work
Shopify uses fixed address patterns, and you cannot change them:
- Products:
/products/product-handle - Collections:
/collections/collection-handle - Pages:
/pages/page-handle - Blog posts:
/blogs/blog-name/post-handle
Magento addresses such as /mens/shoes/trail-runner.html or WooCommerce’s /product/trail-runner/ will therefore all change. That is fine, as long as every one of them redirects to its new equivalent. You can, however, choose the handle, the last part of the address. Keep handles close to the old ones where you can: trail-runner.html becomes /products/trail-runner, not /products/trail-runner-2.
3. Build the redirect map: one old address, one new address
The redirect map is a spreadsheet with two columns: the old path and the new path. Every address from step 1 must appear in it. The rules we follow:
- Like for like. A product goes to the same product, a category to the matching collection. Sending everything to the home page is treated by Google much like a missing page, and the ranking is lost.
- Discontinued products go to the closest collection, or to a replacement product if there is a genuine one.
- One hop only. If the old store already had redirects, update them to point straight to the final Shopify address. Chains of redirects lose value and slow crawling.
- Variants and filters. Old addresses for colour or size variants usually point to the main product. Filtered category addresses with parameters normally go to the plain collection.
- Images and files. PDFs such as manuals and size guides that other sites link to should be uploaded again and redirected too.
Shopify can import redirects from a CSV file in its URL redirects screen, so the map can be loaded in one go. One detail matters: a Shopify redirect only works when nothing exists at the old address on the new store. If a redirect does not fire, check that no page or product is sitting at that path.
4. Move the content that earns the rankings
A redirect passes the address on. It does not replace what was on the page. If the old category page had 400 words of useful buying advice and the new collection has none, the ranking will slip even with a perfect redirect. Carry across:
- Page titles and meta descriptions for the pages that matter, rewritten only where they were weak.
- Category and product descriptions, including any buying guides and FAQs.
- Headings: one clear main heading per page, the same topic as before.
- Image alt text, and product reviews where the review app allows import.
- Blog posts, with their dates, so they keep their history.
5. Check the technical basics in the theme
- Canonical tags on products reached through a collection. Most good themes handle this; check it anyway.
- Structured data for products (price, availability, reviews), so search results can show stars and prices.
- Speed on a mid-range phone, not on the developer’s laptop. Every app added to a Shopify store can add scripts to every page. Install only the apps you need and measure Core Web Vitals before launch.
- robots.txt and noindex. The staging store is usually password-protected. Make sure nothing that blocked search engines during the build is still in place on launch day.
- International stores. If you sell in several countries with Shopify Markets, check that each market has its own address and the hreflang tags are correct, so markets do not compete with each other in search.
6. Test the redirects before launch, not after
Once the redirects are imported on the new store, run the full list of old addresses through a crawler against the new domain setup and check three things for each one: it answers with a permanent (301) redirect, it lands on the right page in one hop, and the page it lands on returns 200. Fix every exception. We do not launch with known broken redirects, however few.
7. Launch day
- Switch the domain at a quiet time for trading, with the team watching orders.
- Crawl the old address list again on the live domain.
- Submit the new sitemap (Shopify creates it at
/sitemap.xml) in Google Search Console, and inspect your most important pages so they are recrawled early. - Keep the domain the same if you can. A migration and a domain change at the same time are two risks at once.
8. The first eight weeks
Some movement in rankings during the first weeks is normal while Google recrawls the store. What you want to see is a return to the baseline, not a steady decline. Every week:
- Check Search Console for new “Not found (404)” errors and add redirects for any old addresses that were missed.
- Compare organic clicks for the top pages against the baseline.
- Watch the pages that dropped and compare them with the old versions. Usually something is missing: content, a heading, internal links.
Beyond search: two things store owners often miss
Customer passwords cannot be moved between platforms, because they are stored in a form that cannot be read back. Customers are moved across as accounts and invited to activate them, so plan that email carefully. And order history is usually moved for customer service and reporting, but it will not appear as Shopify payments; agree with your accountant how old orders are treated.
We plan and carry out Shopify migrations from Magento, WooCommerce and custom platforms, with the redirect map and search checks above as part of every project. If you are planning a move, we are happy to look at your current store and tell you honestly what it will involve. See also our Shopify development services.