Shopify SEO Migration: How To Preserve Organic Traffic

Kyle Risley is senior lead of SEO at Shopify.

One of the things we get asked all the time is: Will migrating from another ecommerce platform to Shopify impact our website SEO? The short answer is yes—any time you change URLs, there will be some impact on SEO traffic. The good news, however, is that your traffic should fully recover within a few weeks (for small sites) to months (for large sites).

In this article, I’ll break down some of the most common SEO pitfalls associated with migration and how to avoid them so that you can migrate your site to Shopify with confidence. I’ll also share a formula for estimating how long it will take your traffic and revenue to recover after a website migration.

Common migration pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Making unnecessary changes
• Forgetting to redirect some URLs
• Changing title tags
• Modifying internal link structure
• Hitting redirect limits
• Migrating right before the busy season

Here are some of the most common SEO mistakes that can happen during a migration and how you can mitigate them:

Making unnecessary changes

When you migrate your site, you will most likely need to select a Shopify theme to replace your current template. Choosing the theme closest to your existing site will make it easier to keep things consistent. With a new theme, you might be tempted to make other changes to your site, but it’s crucial to exercise caution at this stage. 

Decisions that seem innocuous can end up being bad for SEO, like moving text further down the page to accommodate larger images, putting text behind accordions, or adding new third-party plug-ins. The more variables you change, the harder it is to pinpoint which decision impacted your SEO.

Be very intentional about any changes you make to your site during a migration. Keep things the same by default so that when you do make a change, you’re aware of it. And before making any changes, do a little research: Could this be bad for SEO performance?

Forgetting to redirect some URLs

When you migrate your site, you will probably have to redirect some URLs. This is because most platforms have different URL structures. 

Let’s say you sell stickers and one of your product categories is fuzzy stickers. Your old CMS uses the URL structure /categories/. But Shopify has the URL structure /collections/ for category pages. When you migrate, you’ll create the new page your-site.com/collections/fuzzy-stickers and redirect the old page (your-site.com/categories/fuzzy-stickers) to the new page.

If you forget to redirect, anyone clicking on a link to the old page will receive a 404 error page, and you’ll lose traffic from those broken links. Worse, the rankings from the old URL won’t transfer to the new URL. 

The solution is to use a site crawler like Screaming Frog or JetOctopus to crawl the old site and take a snapshot of your entire site before you migrate. After the migration, crawl the old list of URLs again. If an old URL redirects to its new counterpart, good. If it redirects, but not to the correct new URL, fix the redirect target. If it 404s, add a redirect.

Changing title tags 

If you’ve spent time optimizing your title tags for search, you don’t want to lose that work when you migrate your site. Unfortunately, this can happen. If you don’t intentionally set your new SEO title tags, they will reset to a fallback SEO title that may not be as relevant and optimized as the previous title tag.

The way to avoid this is by exporting your title tags as part of the snapshot spreadsheet you create with your site crawler tool. Compare your pre-migration title tags to your test-run title tags, and make sure they match.

Modifying internal link structure

A core SEO best practice is that you should be able to navigate from your homepage to any page on your site simply by clicking links. Any page this isn’t true for is called an orphan page, and it’s bad for SEO.

Any time you move things around, you risk orphaning pages. Let’s say on your old website, you linked out to all of your collections from the main navigation menu. With your new site, you decide to use a more streamlined menu and link to just the most important collections. This could lead to orphaned pages or affect their ranking. When their new position in your website structure changes, search engines may see them as less relevant.

When you crawl your site pre-migration, you can include the number of links per page in your spreadsheet. During your pre-launch test, make sure the number of links stays similar. You should also look out for significant changes in crawl depth, which is the number of clicks it takes to reach a given URL from the homepage. All good crawling tools will provide this metric.

Hitting redirect limits

If you have a large product catalog, you might encounter redirect limits when migrating. The best way to handle this will depend on the platform you are migrating to. With Shopify, it mostly comes down to selecting the right plan.

Standard Shopify plans offer up to 100,000 redirects. With Shopify Plus, you get up to 20 million redirects. If you’re changing your domain name as part of your migration to Shopify, you can use a third-party service like Cloudflare Bulk Redirects to manage redirect mapping.

If you find yourself bumping into a redirect limit, prioritize your top URLs based on revenue from organic search. You may find that you’re able to capture all or most of your organic search revenue in your top 100,000 URLs.

Migrating right before the busy season

It’s normal to experience some organic traffic loss after a migration, but migrating at the right time can avoid unnecessary pain.

Try to migrate at least six months before your busy season or immediately following the busy season. This will allow plenty of time for your site to recover, and be ready for when it matters the most. 

Shopify SEO migration checklist

• Phase 1: Preparation and data gathering
• Phase 2: Site setup and migration
• Phase 3: Launch
• Phase 4: Immediate QA and validation
• Phase 5: Post-migration monitoring

Remember how I said a migration is all about execution? A checklist like the one below can help shape your SEO migration strategy:

Phase 1: Preparation and data gathering

In the first phase of your migration, create a complete inventory of what currently exists so nothing is lost:

Build a master URL and content list

Create a single spreadsheet containing every URL on your site. To do this comprehensively:

• Crawl your site. Use a site crawler tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to capture all pages and key SEO data for each, such as title tags, H1s, meta descriptions, word count, structured data, and PageSpeed scores.

• Export from your analytics platform and Google Search Console. Export your top URLs from Google Analytics (or whichever analytics platform you use) and Google Search Console to ensure you catch orphan pages that the crawler might miss.

• Check sitemaps. Cross-reference the crawler’s results with your current XML sitemap. They’re often linked from the robots.txt file, and most crawlers have a setting to automatically discover and crawl them.

Export external data

Export product reviews and any other third-party data you plan to migrate. Keep this in a separate spreadsheet as a backup in case you lose external data when migrating.

Google Search Console setup

If you’re changing your domain name, create a new property or account in Google Search Console. You can skip this step if you are keeping your domain name.

Phase 2: Site setup and migration

Now it’s time to move your data, set up your site structure, and prepare your URL redirects:

Define new structure

Confirm the URL structure of the new site. Shopify uses the following URL structure:

• Product pages: your-site.com/products/product-name

• Category pages: your-site.com/collections/collection-name

• Blog posts: your-site.com/blogs/blog-name/article-title

Map redirects

Mapping your redirects is a crucial step for maintaining SEO.

Create a spreadsheet mapping every old URL from your master URL list to its corresponding new URL. For example, your-site.com/categories/fuzzy-stickers would become your-site.com/collections/fuzzy-stickers.

Migrate content

After you map redirects, you can migrate your content:

• Products. Import product data, ensuring title tags, H1s, and descriptions match the old site where possible.

• Collections. Rebuild collection pages, ensuring title tags and H1s are retained.

• Customers and orders. Import historical customer accounts and order history.

There are a number of Shopify apps you can use to make this process easier.

Technical setup

For the technical SEO setup:

• Load your URL redirect mappings into Shopify.

• Ensure any critical apps are properly configured in your new ecommerce store (if relevant).

• Prepare the new robots.txt and XML sitemap files for launch. Shopify can build these for you, and the default versions work for most merchants.

Phase 3: Launch

In the launch phase, the goal is to flip the switch and set your new site live. There are two things you need to do:

Update DNS

Domain name system (DNS) connects domain names to IP addresses. When you’re ready to launch, you’ll need to update your A Record and CNAME in your domain registrar to point to Shopify. Shopify has a step-by-step guide to doing this.

Remove store password

If you used a store password to keep your new site private while in testing, now is the time to disable this password to make the site publicly accessible to users and bots.

Phase 4: Immediate QA and validation

Immediately after you go live, verify that the site is working and Google can read it.

Verify Redirects

Crawl the old URLs using your preferred site crawler tool to ensure they return a 301 status code and redirect to the correct new URL (which should return a 200 status code).

Manual QA

Conduct quality assurance (QA) by manually clicking through critical flows to ensure functionality. I recommend performing manual QA on the following flows:

• Add to cart

• Checkout

• Payment gateway

• Contact forms 

Crawl the new site

Run a full crawl with your preferred tool. Verify:

• Analytics tracking code is present on all pages

• No pages are blocked via robots.txt (unless intentional)

• No pages have accidental noindex tags

• Canonical tags point to the correct self-referencing URLs

• Internal links point to new URLs (not old ones)

• Images are loading correctly

• Structured data (schema) is rendering correctly

• Hreflang is configured correctly (if applicable)

• Page speed shows no significant degradation compared to the old site

Phase 5: Post-migration monitoring

The post-migration phase consists of two important steps: updating Google Search Console and ongoing monitoring to ensure the migration went smoothly.

Search Console actions

• Submit the new XML sitemap to Google Search Console.

• If switching domain names, submit a “Change of Address” in Google Search Console.

Ongoing monitoring

• Monitor 404 errors. Check Google Analytics or Shopify reports daily for 404 errors to catch any broken redirects you missed.

• Check key pages. Monitor traffic to key pages and search engine rankings over time.

• Keep URL redirects live. After a successful migration, keep your redirects live for a minimum one year, ideally indefinitely.

Post-migration timeline for recovering rankings and revenue

How long it will take your site to recover any ranking or traffic losses post-migration depends on two key variables: 

• The number of pages you have

• What percent of your site traffic comes from non-branded queries

The more pages you have and the more you rely on non-branded traffic, the longer it will take to recover. Branded traffic is much more stable, so this model assumes that all branded traffic will be completely retained immediately following the migration.

I use this rough formula for estimating “revenue at risk” from a migration:

(% of all traffic from SEO) x (% of SEO traffic that is non-branded) x (15% to 30%) = % revenue decline for 1–6 months, depending on page count + % of non-branded traffic

This is a conservative “prepare for the worst” estimate. Most migrations see declines of 10% or less. Here’s an example to show you how to apply this formula to your site. 

Let’s say a website has the following metric breakdown:

• 20% of website traffic comes from SEO

• 70% of SEO traffic is non-branded

• 500 URLs receiving organic search traffic

20% x 70% x 15% = 2.1%

20% x 70% x 30% = 4.2%

Therefore, this example company could see a 2.1% to 4.2% decline in total revenue in the time period immediately following a website migration. 

How long will it take to recover this lost traffic and revenue? You can use this graph to estimate recovery time based on your site’s page count and the percentage of prior traffic that came from non-branded organic search. The higher your page count and the higher your percentage of non-branded traffic, the longer it will take to regain your prior rankings.

In the example above, 70% of the company’s SEO traffic is non-branded, so I’d place them on the upper end of the X axis. But because the site has fewer than 10,000 URLs receiving organic search traffic, I’d place them in the lower side of the Y axis. This means the potential dip of 2% to 4% of total site revenue should recover within one to three months.