Guide
Replatforming to Shopify? Keep every ranking.
Migrations lose organic traffic for one boring reason: old URLs that stop resolving. This is the checklist that prevents it, whatever you are moving from, from the first crawl to the last post-launch check.
Before you build
- Crawl the live old site and export every URL: products, categories, pages, blog posts, filters that Google has indexed. Screaming Frog, or a trustworthy sitemap.xml as a starting point.
- Pull your top pages by organic traffic from GA4 or Search Console, and your top pages by backlinks from the Search Console links report or Ahrefs. These get mapped by hand, first.
- Export your existing SEO titles and meta descriptions from the old platform. Shopify will not carry them over for you.
- Record your current rankings and organic traffic baseline so you can tell, after cutover, whether anything actually moved.
While you map redirects
- Map every old URL to exactly one new URL. Categories usually become collections, product pages become /products/ handles, articles become /blogs/.
- Never bulk-redirect to the homepage. Google treats mass homepage redirects as soft 404s and the page-level equity is lost anyway.
- Map both cases if the old site served mixed-case URLs. Shopify redirects are case-sensitive by default.
- Map localized paths (/fr/, /de/) to the matching localized Shopify pages, and keep them out of any bulk rule so hreflang equity survives.
Before cutover
- Request every old URL against the new store and confirm a single 301 that lands on a 200. Not a 302, not a redirect chain, not a 404. This is the step almost everyone skips and the one that decides whether rankings hold.
- Set the exported titles and meta descriptions on the matching Shopify products and pages. A blank meta description is a rewrite invitation and a CTR drop.
- Take a full backup of the new store before bulk imports, so a bad import is a one-click undo rather than a rebuild.
- Plan the cutover for a low-traffic day and keep the old site reachable on a staging subdomain for a month.
After launch
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing of your top pages.
- Check the Coverage and 404 reports daily for two weeks. New 404s appear as Google recrawls paths you missed. Fix each with a redirect the day it shows up.
- Watch rankings and organic traffic against the baseline you recorded. A short dip while Google recrawls is normal; a sustained drop means URLs are not resolving.
- After two weeks the crawl settles. Drop to weekly checks and keep the redirect list under version control.
Why the redirect map is the whole game
You cannot keep your old URL structure. Shopify forces its own prefixes: /products/, /collections/, /pages/, and /blogs/, and no app can change that. The good news is that a clean URL change does not cost rankings by itself. Google follows a single 301 to a new path without complaint. What costs rankings is old URLs that return 404, redirect chains that leak signal at every hop, and 302s that tell Google the move is only temporary. Every hour you spend belongs in the redirect map and its verification, not in fighting Shopify's URL shape.
Coming from WooCommerce
The permalink patterns and mixed-case URLs need specific handling. We wrote a WooCommerce-specific walkthrough with the exact mapping rules:move from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO.
Coming from Magento, BigCommerce, or custom
The checklist above is the same. The two things to watch are deep category trees, which often collapse into fewer Shopify collections and need careful one-to-one mapping, and faceted or filter URLs that Google indexed on the old platform. Crawl for those before you build so they do not become a wall of 404s after cutover.
Doing it by hand vs. with an app
Everything here works with Screaming Frog, a spreadsheet, and Shopify's native redirect importer. It is tedious but it is real, and for a few hundred URLs it is a reasonable day of work. We also build Pathkeeper, a paid app ($29 a month, 14-day trial) that does the import, auto-mapping, pre-launch verification, and publish-with-rollback for you. It tests every redirect against your live store before anything goes live, and every publish is a version you can roll back in one click. It exists because the verification step by hand, on a few thousand URLs, is miserable. Backing up the new store first? We compared the options ina separate guide. Use whichever fits your migration.
Migrating soon?
Pathkeeper imports your old URLs, maps the redirects, and verifies every one against your live store before it goes live. 14-day free trial.