Platform migrations are where many stores quietly lose a third of their search traffic. Almost every loss is avoidable. It comes down to preparation and redirects.
Before you build
- Crawl the current site and export every URL: products, categories, pages, blog posts, images.
- Pull your top pages from Search Console and analytics — the URLs that bring traffic and sales deserve the most care.
- Record metadata: page titles, meta descriptions, headings and structured data for important pages.
- Check backlinks so pages that other sites link to keep their value.
During the build
- Design the catalogue in Shopify — product types, variants, collections, metafields — before importing data.
- Map every old URL to a new one. Shopify uses fixed URL patterns (
/products/,/collections/,/pages/,/blogs/), so most URLs will change. Each needs a 301 redirect to its closest equivalent — never all to the home page. - Carry over content and metadata for important pages, and rebuild structured data for products, reviews and organisation.
- Migrate customers and orders so returning customers keep their accounts and history.
Launch
- Test redirects against your full URL list before switching DNS.
- Launch at a quiet time with a rollback plan.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
After launch
- Watch Search Console daily for crawl errors and 404s for the first two weeks, then weekly for two months.
- Fix missed redirects as they appear.
- Compare traffic to the same period last year, page by page.
Common mistakes
- Redirecting everything to the home page.
- Forgetting image and PDF URLs that rank or are linked.
- Changing URLs, design and content all at once, making problems hard to diagnose.
- Installing dozens of apps on day one and slowing the new site down.
We migrate stores to Shopify for brands worldwide, with redirect mapping and post-launch monitoring included. See Shopify development or start with a free audit of your current site.