What to do and what to avoid when migrating to Shopify

At Ewheron we run every Shopify migration through the same five steps. Most of the damage in Shopify migration SEO comes from a short list of avoidable mistakes, so each step below has its do's and its don'ts.

Step 1: Find every URL that has ever earned you something

Before any design work, you need the full list of addresses your old store has. A crawler like Screaming Frog is the obvious start, and it's also where most migrations stop. A crawler only finds pages that are linked from somewhere on your site. Take the product you discontinued two years ago, the one a magazine still links to: it doesn't show up in any crawl, but it still has authority, and it still gets clicks.

Do:

• Crawl the whole site with Screaming Frog.

• Export the Pages report from Performance in Search Console (it keeps 16 months), plus your most linked pages from the Links report.

• Pull every page with backlinks from Ahrefs or Semrush, and the landing pages from Google Analytics.

• Add the old XML sitemap, the links inside past email campaigns, and any ads still running.

• Mark each URL by clicks, impressions and backlinks, so the pages that carry money get checked by hand at every later step.

Don't:

• Build the redirect map from the crawl alone.

• Start designing the new store before this list exists.

The email one sounds like overkill until you remember that a newsletter from two years ago still sits in thousands of inboxes, and people do open old newsletters (more often than you'd think). Anyway.

Step 2: Map every old URL to its closest new page

The map is a spreadsheet with three columns: old URL, new URL, status. Every line of the inventory gets a destination. (Honestly, this is the most boring part of the whole project, and it's the part that decides whether your rankings survive the move.)

Then there's the status code. A 301 has a name in the HTTP spec: Moved Permanently. Google reads "permanently" and transfers the old page's signals to the new address. A 302 means Found, as in temporarily somewhere else, and Google tends to hold on to the old URL. Shopify creates 301s by default, which is one less thing to worry about.

Do:

• Send each old URL to the page closest to it in meaning. A discontinued product goes to its replacement or to its collection.

• Keep the old handles wherever Shopify allows it. The map gets much easier to build and check.

• Point merged pages to the single page that replaces them. For example, if five colour versions of a product become variants of one product on Shopify, all five old URLs go to that product.

• Flatten any redirects your old store already had, so every original address reaches its final Shopify page in one hop.

Don't:

• Redirect everything to the homepage. Google reads a hundred products all pointing at / as a hundred missing pages.

• Use 302s for pages that moved for good.

• Map only your main language and forget the rest.

Step 3: Move the content that ranks exactly as it is

A migration usually comes with a redesign, and a redesign tempts everyone to rewrite. Resist it on the pages that rank. Say your care guide sits in position 4 for "how to wash linen": Google ranked those words, that H1, that title. Change the address, the layout and the copy on the same day, and you've given Google three reasons to re-evaluate the page at once. If it drops, you won't know which change caused it.

Do:

• Carry across the H1, meta title, meta description and body copy of every page with traffic.

• Keep product descriptions and image alt text as they were.

• Improve the copy later, one page at a time, once rankings have settled on the new store.

Don't:

• Rewrite the pages that rank in the same launch as the new design.

• Delete old blog posts that still bring clicks just because nobody on the team reads them anymore.

Step 4: Load the redirects and test every single one

Shopify has a native URL Redirects tool that accepts a CSV with two columns: the path to redirect from and its destination. The "redirect from" field takes a path (/shop/linen-shirt), without the domain.

Then we test all of them. Screaming Frog has a list mode: paste every old URL, crawl, and read the result. We run it against the store's .myshopify.com address before launch, and again against the live domain after. Every line should show a 301 followed by a 200, in one hop.

Do:

• Import the full map through the CSV.

• Test every old URL in list mode, and fix any 404, chain or stray 302 before the domain switches.

• Rewrite internal links (menus, footer, product descriptions, blog articles) so they point at the new URLs directly.

Don't:

• Spot-check twenty redirects and assume the rest work. The one you skip will be the category page with two hundred backlinks.

• Leave a live page at an old path you're redirecting. The redirect won't fire.

Step 5: Launch and tell Google what you changed

This is where a lot of migrations stop too early. Once the redirects are live, Google will find them eventually, at its own pace. Search Console is how you tell Google what changed, and how you watch it process the move page by page.

Do:

• Switch the domain at the lowest-traffic hour of your week.

• Remove the storefront password, and check that no noindex tag survived from staging.

• Submit your new sitemap in Search Console (Shopify generates it at /sitemap.xml).

• If the domain itself changes, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.

• Request indexing through URL Inspection for the pages that carry most of your clicks. There's a daily limit, so start with the ones that matter most.

• Re-run the list-mode crawl on the live domain.

• Check the Pages report every day for the first two weeks, watching "Not found (404)" and "Page with redirect".

• Set up Bing Webmaster Tools by importing your Search Console property. ChatGPT's search leans on Bing's index, so this helps AI search find your new store sooner.

Don't:

• Delete old redirects later to "clean up". Google recommends keeping them for at least a year, and we keep them forever.

• Cancel your old platform the day you launch. Keep access for a few weeks in case some content needs recovering.

• Change handles on the new store during the first weeks without adding a redirect.