Guide
Move to Shopify. Keep your rankings.
Replatforming from WooCommerce does not have to cost you organic traffic. Migrations lose rankings for one boring reason: old URLs that stop resolving. Here is the process that prevents it, start to finish.
1. Crawl the old site first
Before you build anything, get the complete inventory of URLs your WooCommerce site serves. Run Screaming Frog against the live site, or start from sitemap.xml if it is trustworthy. You want every product, category, page, and blog post URL in one list. The pages you forgot exist are the ones that quietly hold rankings, and they are exactly the ones that die in a migration.
2. Accept that your URL structure will change
Shopify forces its own URL prefixes: /products/, /collections/, /pages/, and /blogs/. You cannot keep your WordPress permalinks, and no app can change that. The good news is that this does not cost you rankings by itself. Google follows a clean 301 to a new path just fine. What costs rankings is old URLs returning 404. All the effort belongs in the redirect map, not in fighting the URL structure.
3. Build the redirect map, one to one
Every old URL gets exactly one new home. Start with the pages that matter most: pull your top pages by traffic from GA4 or Search Console and your top pages by backlinks from the Search Console links report or Ahrefs, and map those by hand first. Then work through the long tail. Category pages usually map to collections, product permalinks to /products/ handles, blog posts to /blogs/. Resist the urge to redirect everything to the homepage. Google treats mass homepage redirects as soft 404s and you lose the page-level equity anyway.
4. Verify every redirect before launch
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that separates migrations that hold rankings from migrations that bleed for months. Before cutover, request every old URL against the new store and confirm you get a single 301 that lands on a 200. Not a 302, not a chain of redirects, not a 404. On a list of a few thousand URLs there will be surprises, and you want to find them before Google does.
5. Carry over your titles and meta descriptions
Shopify will not copy your SEO titles and descriptions from Yoast or RankMath. Export them from WordPress and set them on the matching Shopify products and pages. A migrated page with a blank meta description is a rewrite invitation for Google and a CTR drop you did not need to take.
6. Watch Search Console daily for two weeks
After cutover, check the Coverage and 404 reports every day. New 404s show up as Google recrawls paths you missed. Fix each one the day it appears with a redirect to the right page. After two weeks the crawl settles and you can drop to weekly checks.
The four failure modes that actually cost traffic
Redirect chains
Old URL redirects to an intermediate URL that redirects again. Each hop leaks signal and slows the crawl. Point every old URL directly at its final destination.
302s where you meant 301
A 302 says temporary, so Google keeps the old URL indexed and waits. Some redirect plugins and some hosting layers default to 302. Check the actual status codes, not the plugin settings.
Case mismatches
WooCommerce sites often serve /Category/Widget and /category/widget as the same page. Shopify redirects are case-sensitive by default. If your old site has mixed-case URLs in the wild, map both forms.
Language and market pages
If the old site has /fr/ or /de/ paths, a naive redirect map sends international shoppers to English pages, and hreflang equity dies with it. Map localized paths to the matching localized Shopify pages, and exclude native locale paths from bulk redirects.
A realistic timeline
For a store with a few hundred URLs, budget a day for the crawl and map, a day for verification and fixes, and two weeks of light post-launch monitoring. For thousands of URLs, the mapping is the long pole and the verification step is where you will find the problems. Plan the cutover for a low-traffic day and keep the old site reachable on a staging subdomain for a month in case you need to check how something used to work. Take a full backup of the new store before you start bulk imports too. If you want the reasoning, we compared the backup options ina separate guide. Moving from a platform other than WooCommerce? The same process, as aplatform-agnostic migration SEO checklist.
Tools
Everything above works with Screaming Frog, a spreadsheet, and Shopify's native redirect importer. It is tedious but it works. We also build Pathkeeper, a paid app ($29 a month, 14-day trial) that does the import, auto-mapping, verification, and publish-with-rollback steps for you. It knows WooCommerce URL patterns, tests every redirect against your live store before anything goes live, and every publish is a version you can roll back in one click. The app exists because step 4 by hand is miserable. 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.