A Shopify migration goes fine 9 times out of 10. The problem is the 10th.
And when it breaks, it breaks in the same place every time: SEO. You change platform, your URLs change, and if nobody prepared the redirects, Google walks into hundreds of dead pages. Organic traffic drops and takes months to come back. I've watched brand new sites lose their rankings on launch day because that part got handled last, in a rush.
So this guide is built around the part that decides the outcome, the redirect plan.
Why move to Shopify
Shopify runs the hosting, the security, the payments and the updates for you. For a merchant who'd rather sell than babysit a server, that's a real relief. The app ecosystem covers most needs, and the checkout is one of the strongest pieces of the platform.
Check that it fits your model before you commit, though. If you're still weighing options, I compared them in how to choose your e-commerce platform. A migration costs enough time that you don't want to run it twice.
The real risk: your Google traffic
Here's what happens when a migration is badly prepared.
Your old site had URLs like /category/product-123. Shopify hands you its own structure, /products/name and /collections/name. Do nothing and every old address returns a 404. Google indexed those addresses, recrawls them, finds nothing, and drops them out of the index. The rankings and the traffic you spent years building go with them.
All of it is avoidable. Gary Illyes said it in 2016 and Google has never walked it back: 30x redirects don't lose PageRank. An old URL pointed at the right new page hands its value over. The work is methodical, nothing more. List, map, redirect, verify.
Step 1: the audit, before you touch anything
You can't redirect what you haven't listed.
Run a full crawl with Screaming Frog and pull your Search Console export. You want 3 things:
- every indexed URL
- the ones that bring in traffic (Search Console, Performance tab)
- the ones that carry backlinks (Ahrefs, or the Links report in Search Console)
Those last 2 groups get priority. A page pulling 200 visits a month, or carrying a decent external link, deserves a redirect mapped by hand. The rest goes through in bulk.
While you're in there, inventory what has to move: products with their variants, images and prices, customers, order history, blog posts, CMS pages. And back it all up before you start. Migrating without a backup is jumping without a rope.
Step 2: the 301 redirect plan
This is where most migrations go off the rails.
You build a mapping file, old URL on one side, new Shopify URL on the other. Every row is a 301. In the admin, the table sits under Content, Menus, URL redirects, with a CSV import for volume. Two limits worth knowing before you generate a 20,000 row file. The table matches exact paths with no wildcards, so every old URL needs its own row. And a standard Shopify store caps at 100,000 redirects, where Plus goes up to 20 million.
Three rules I hold to on every project.
- One redirect per URL. Skip the chains (A to B to C). Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but Google still tells you to point at the final destination directly, and a chain slows the crawl down for no gain.
- Point at the closest equivalent page. Sending 400 product pages to the home page is the reflex that kills a migration. John Mueller has said it repeatedly: redirects to the home page or to unrelated pages get treated as soft 404s, and a soft 404 passes nothing along. A discontinued product goes to its category, or to the product that replaced it.
- Leave the redirects in place. Google's guidance is a year minimum, long enough for the signals to transfer. I leave them for good, because old links keep pointing at the old addresses well past that.
On the new URLs, Shopify gives you little room but you own the handles. Keep them short, descriptive, and as close to the old slug as you can. Mapping gets easier and the URLs stay readable. One small mercy: when you edit a handle in the admin, Shopify offers to create the redirect for you with a checkbox. Leave it checked.
Coming off WooCommerce specifically? The URL patterns, the nested categories that don't survive, and what the migration tools quietly skip are all in my WooCommerce to Shopify guide.
The last project of this kind I ran was for L'Enjeu RSE Jeunesse, a nonprofit I moved from WordPress to Shopify. Full rebuild, plus a page by page redirect map so its search history followed the switch. That invisible work is why a migration doesn't show up in the Google rankings.
Step 3: moving the data without breaking it
Two routes for products. Shopify's CSV import for simple catalogues, or a migration app (LitExtension, Cart2Cart, Matrixify) once there's volume and complexity. For the genuinely tangled cases, custom product relations and business data, the Admin API is the only clean way through.
Whichever tool you pick, import in batches and check after each one. The classic traps: variants mapped wrong, images that don't follow, prices in the wrong currency, accents mangled in the descriptions. Catching that on 50 products beats catching it on 5,000.
Migrate the blog and the content pages too. They're often the ones carrying your long tail search traffic, and they get forgotten in catalogue-first migrations.
Big catalogues and B2B: where it hurts
Past a few thousand SKUs, the migration changes nature.
The redirect mapping stops being doable by hand. I run a script that joins the old sitemap with the new one, generates the mapping file, and flags the URLs with no obvious target for a manual pass. At that volume the native CSV import runs out of road too, so Matrixify or the API stop being optional.
B2B adds its own layer. Customer-specific pricing, restricted catalogues, payment on invoice, company accounts, all of that lives in Shopify through the B2B features (Plus plan) or dedicated apps. It gets prepared upstream, before the switch, because it's exactly what holds your biggest customers. A B2B store that loses the order history or the negotiated prices of its key accounts on launch day has a commercial problem on its hands, and a technical apology won't fix it.
Step 4: testing before you switch the domain
Before you point your domain at Shopify, validate everything on the temporary .myshopify.com URL.
The checklist I run:
- full purchase flow, cart to confirmation
- payments in test mode (card, and your local methods)
- transactional emails (confirmation, shipping)
- mobile rendering on real screen sizes
- load speed (a badly set up theme drags your Core Web Vitals from day one)
Import the redirect file while the old site is still running, before the DNS change. The second the domain flips, every old URL finds its target and there's no 404 window.
On speed, this is the moment to start clean rather than patch it later. I wrote up the method in my guide on making a Shopify store load faster.
Once you're live, check the crawlability of the new site: sitemap submitted, robots.txt clean, canonical tags correct. That's the subject of my article on improving crawlability and indexing.
The 2 weeks after launch
A migration doesn't end on launch day. It gets watched.
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing on the key pages. Then open the indexing report every day for 2 weeks. You're watching 3 signals: 404 errors climbing (a redirect got missed), pages dropping out of the index, and organic traffic.
A slight dip at the start is normal. Google says a medium-sized site takes a few weeks for most of its pages to move across in the index, and bigger sites take longer. If the drop is steep and it keeps going, it's the redirects. Go back to the mapping file and find the hole. It's almost always that.
How long it takes, and what it costs
A small store, a few hundred products and a simple structure, migrates cleanly in 1 to 2 weeks. Past that, on a big catalogue or a B2B store, count several weeks, mostly because of the redirect mapping and the testing.
The line you don't cut is the SEO one. It's the invisible part that costs the most when it's rushed: nothing looks wrong on launch day, and you pay the bill 3 months later in lost traffic.
If you want to know where your current store stands before you start, or have a migration plan that's already in flight checked over, that's what my audit is for. I look at the code, the redirects and the structure, and I tell you where the risks are.
