Migrating to Shopify Without Losing Your SEO

The traffic drop after a replatform has a reputation for being unavoidable. It is not. It happens because URLs change and nobody maps them, and because metadata that took years to accumulate does not come across in the product CSV.

Both are solvable, and the work happens before launch.

Inventory what you have first

Before anything else, get a complete picture of the old site:

Crawl it. Screaming Frog or similar, full crawl, export every URL with its status code, title, meta description, and H1.

Export the traffic data. Search Console: every page with impressions or clicks over the last twelve months. This is your priority list — pages with traffic matter, orphaned pages from 2018 do not.

Export backlinks. Any page with external links pointing at it must redirect correctly, even if it has little direct traffic. That link equity is the hardest thing to replace.

Understand how the URLs will change

Shopify has a fixed structure that you cannot fully customise:

• Products: /products/handle
• Collections: /collections/handle
• Pages: /pages/handle
• Blog: /blogs/blog-handle/article-handle

If you are coming from WooCommerce with /shop/product-name/ or Magento with /category/subcategory/product.html, every URL changes. That is expected. What matters is that every old URL points to the right new one.

Build the redirect map

A spreadsheet: old URL, new URL, priority.

Rules, not rows, wherever possible. Shopify supports wildcard redirects, so a whole pattern can often be one rule instead of 4,000.

Every old URL goes somewhere sensible. A discontinued product should redirect to its category, not the homepage. Mass-redirecting to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and passes nothing.

Never chain. Old A → new B, not old A → old B → new C. Each hop loses a little and adds latency.

Include the variants. Trailing slashes, uppercase, and any old parameter URLs that got indexed.

Carry the metadata across

The product CSV moves titles and descriptions. It does not move:

• SEO titles and meta descriptions (they are separate fields)
• Image alt text
• Structured data
• Canonical tags
• Blog author and date metadata

Map these explicitly. A store that migrates 2,000 products and loses every meta description has thrown away a lot of accumulated work.

Test before launch

On the staging store, with the redirect map loaded:

• Crawl the staging site and confirm no unexpected 404s
• Spot-check the top 100 URLs by traffic, manually
• Confirm each redirect is a single 301, not a 302 and not a chain
• Confirm canonical tags point at the new URLs
• Confirm the sitemap contains only new URLs

Launch day

1. Publish, with redirects live from the first minute
2. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console
3. Use the URL Inspection tool on your top ten pages to request indexing
4. Watch server logs or Shopify's 404 report for the first 48 hours

That 404 report is the most useful thing you have in the first week. Any old URL you missed shows up there with real traffic behind it, and it takes minutes to add the redirect.

What to expect afterwards

Some fluctuation is normal for two to four weeks while Google recrawls and reassigns. A well-executed migration returns to baseline inside a month and usually exceeds it, because the new site is faster.

A migration with a broken redirect map does not recover on its own. If traffic is still down after six weeks, the cause is almost always redirects, and it is worth auditing rather than waiting.

The one thing people skip

Keep the old site accessible somewhere for a few weeks — a staging copy is fine. When you find a URL you missed, you need to know what was on it to redirect it correctly. Once the old platform is decommissioned, that information is gone.