Shopify migration SEO: how to move your store without losing rankings

Moving an online store to Shopify, from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix or a custom build, is one of the riskier kinds of redesign for search traffic. A store has far more URLs than a brochure site, many of them product pages that each bring in a trickle of searches, and Shopify's structure means nearly all of them change. The work is manageable if you know how Shopify handles addresses and redirects before you start.

How does Shopify structure its URLs?

Shopify decides the first part of every address, and you choose the last part, called the handle. The patterns are:

Products can also be reached through a collection, at /collections/collection-name/products/handle. Shopify adds canonical tags automatically (a line of code telling Google which address is the main version of a page), so these duplicate paths point Google back to the main product address.

The practical result: if your old store used /shop/oak-cabinet-handle or /category/handles/oak-cabinet-handle.html, the new address will be /products/oak-cabinet-handle, and the old one needs a 301 redirect (a permanent forward that tells Google the page has moved). Shopify's migration guide flags this directly, recommending redirects for all your important pages to help preserve rankings.

How do you map an old store to Shopify?

Start with a full inventory of the old store's URLs, from its sitemap, a crawl, and Google Search Console (Google's free tool showing which pages get clicks and from which searches). Then map each type:

• Products: one row per product. Keep the same handle where you can, so only the prefix changes.
• Categories: each old category page to its matching collection. Category pages often rank for the most valuable searches, so do not merge them carelessly.
• Information pages: delivery, returns, about, contact, size guides, each to its /pages/ equivalent.
• Blog posts: each to its new address under /blogs/.
• Discontinued products: if a product has a close replacement, redirect to it; if it has a natural category, redirect there; if it had no traffic or links, let it return a 404.
• Filtered and search URLs: old addresses with filters or sort orders in them, usually after a question mark, generally do not need individual redirects. Map the main category pages instead.

The principles behind each decision are in the guide to 301 redirects when changing website.

How do redirects work in Shopify?

Shopify has a built-in URL redirects tool in the admin, documented in its help centre. The points that matter for a migration:

• Bulk import. You can create redirects one at a time, or import them all from a CSV file, which is the sensible route for a store. Shopify provides a template.
• They only work on broken addresses. A Shopify redirect fires only when the old URL would otherwise show "page not found". If a live page exists at that address, the redirect does nothing.
• Some paths cannot be redirected from. These include the fixed /products, /collections and /collections/all paths, and addresses starting with /cart, /orders, /apps and a few others.
• Query strings are unreliable. Shopify notes that old URLs containing a question mark and parameters might not redirect as expected.
• Limits are generous. Standard plans allow up to 100,000 redirects; Shopify Plus allows up to 20,000,000.
• Export is available. You can export your redirects as a CSV, which you should do before any later move.

Shopify's guidance is to set up redirects before you move your domain, so customers never land on error pages. Import and test the full map while the store is still behind its password, then launch.

What does Shopify handle automatically, and what does it not?

According to Shopify's documentation, every store automatically gets:

• A sitemap.xml file at the root of your domain, listing products, collections, pages and blog posts.
• A default robots.txt file (the file telling search engines what they may crawl), which can be customised through a theme template if needed.
• Canonical tags to prevent duplicate pages competing in results.
• An SSL certificate, so the store runs on https.

What does not happen by itself:

• Your old titles and descriptions. Migration apps and CSV imports carry some fields and not others. Check that each important product and collection has the search title and description it had before, not one generated from the product name.
• Image alt text, the short description of each image for screen readers and search engines.
• Product reviews. Reviews usually live in a separate app on your old platform. Export and import them, because they are both selling content and, through structured data, the source of star ratings that can appear in search results.
• Category content. The paragraphs that made your old category pages rank need to be added to the new collection pages.
• Structured data (code that labels product facts such as price and availability for machines). Most themes output some; check yours outputs what you need with Google's Rich Results Test. Schema markup for AI search explains which types matter.

What is the launch sequence for a Shopify migration?

1. Import products, customers and content, using Shopify's Store Migration app, CSV files or a third-party migration tool.
2. Check every important product and collection: price, description, title, description for search, images and reviews.
3. Import the redirect map as a CSV and spot-check a sample.
4. Place test orders, as Shopify's migration guide recommends, and check forms and tracking.
5. Connect your domain and remove the store password.
6. Run the full list of old URLs through a redirect checker against the live store.
7. Submit /sitemap.xml in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and inspect a few key products with the URL Inspection tool.
8. Update links in your Google Business Profile, Merchant Center feed, social profiles, email templates and ads.

The wider list of checks, including what to record before you begin, is in the website migration SEO checklist.

What are the most common Shopify migration mistakes?

• Importing products with new handles. If the import tool generates handles from product titles that differ from the old addresses, the redirect map no longer matches. Decide handles before importing, not after.
• Redirecting every old product to one collection. Quick, and Google's site move guidance warns that mass redirects to one irrelevant page can be treated as soft 404s, meaning the old pages are treated as gone.
• Creating a page at an old address. Because Shopify redirects only fire on missing pages, a new page published at an old path silently overrides its redirect.
• Letting a theme replace your titles. Some themes and apps generate search titles automatically. Check the ones that matter by hand.
• Forgetting the files. Size guides, care instructions and catalogues saved as PDFs on the old platform need new homes and redirects of their own.

What should you watch after launch?

For the first two weeks, check Search Console's Pages report every few days for "Not found (404)" errors on old addresses and add redirects where they are missing. Remember that a redirect will not fire while a page exists at the old path, so if a redirect seems to fail, check whether Shopify has a live page there.

Then compare clicks by page and by search query, week by week, against the same period before the move. Google's guidance on site moves says some ranking fluctuation is normal while it recrawls, and that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for new addresses to replace old ones. A clear, continuing drop after a month is a fault to diagnose, and lost rankings after a website redesign covers the checks in order.

Once the store has settled, take care with later changes. Shopify's help pages advise against editing product handles often, and when you change a page's handle the admin offers a pre-selected option to create a redirect. Keep it ticked whenever you rename anything. For the principles that apply to every platform move, read how to redesign your website without losing Google rankings.