Moving to Shopify from Wix, WooCommerce or Squarespace without losing search traffic

This guide covers what is specific to Shopify: its address patterns, what the import tools leave behind, how its redirect tool works, and the order that keeps the old store's traffic pointed at the right place. For the general method of mapping addresses and redirecting them, our guide to redesigning a website without losing search traffic applies, and this one builds on it.

Say you sell loose-leaf tea and ceramics from a WooCommerce shop with about three hundred products. The site brings steady orders from people searching for particular teas, and some from your blog posts on brewing. You decide to move to Shopify for easier day-to-day running.

Shopify's import tools bring across the products and customer records. A few weeks after launch, you notice that orders from search have dropped. The causes are unglamorous. The category pages that matched searches like “green tea” no longer exist. The product pages have default titles. Twenty of the old blog posts were never rebuilt. And every old address that had links pointing at it now returns an error, because nobody loaded redirects.

None of that is a Shopify problem. It is the gap between moving data and moving a search presence.

Shopify sets the pattern for its own addresses. Its help center gives an example: a shipping policy page that lived at example.com/policies/shipping-policy on the old platform might be example.com/pages/shipping-policy on Shopify. Two of its fixed address paths are /products and /collections, and Shopify does not let you redirect from them.

The result is that most addresses on the old store change, even though the product names stay the same. How they changed on your old store depends on that platform, and you should not assume. Take the real list of old addresses from the places that know them: the old site's sitemap, Search Console's page report, your analytics, and a crawl of the live site. Google's own guidance for a site move names the same sources: sitemaps, server logs, analytics, and the content system itself.

Shopify describes five ways to bring content across, from the least to the most technically complex: copy and paste, a CSV file, a migration app, a Shopify Partner, or a custom solution through its API. It also says some data cannot be migrated and that the order of an import matters: products first, then customers, then historical orders.

Shopify's own Store Migration app is the usual starting point. According to Shopify, it supports Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Clover and Lightspeed. It moves product titles, descriptions and variants, prices, inventory, images, SKUs, customer names, emails and addresses. Shopify's blog about the app lists what it does not import: orders and order history, collections, navigation menus, SEO data, blog posts and pages, reviews, and integrations. It also says URL redirects, meta fields and canonical tags need to be set up manually afterwards.

Other methods have different coverage, and Shopify's migration guide says products, customers, historical orders, gift cards, blogs and pages can all be moved. So the question to ask of whichever method you or your developer choose is concrete: which of these items does it carry, and which do we rebuild by hand? Get that answer in writing before the work begins.

On a shop, category pages usually match the broader searches (“green tea”, “ceramic teapots”), and product pages match the narrower ones. That is our reasoning from how shoppers search, not a measured figure, so check your own Search Console data before relying on it. If your category pages bring visits and Shopify's migration does not carry them over, the traffic they brought has nowhere to land.

In Shopify these are collections. Each collection that matters needs a title, a short helpful description, and the right products. Redirect an old category address to its matching collection or a relevant collection that genuinely replaces it. If there is no suitable replacement, return a 404 or 410 status rather than redirecting to an unrelated collection or the home page. Google advises against redirecting many unrelated old pages to a single page such as the homepage.

Shopify's help center describes the tool in plain terms:

One thing the help page does not say is which status code the redirects use. Google treats permanent redirects (301 or 308) as the signal that the new address should replace the old one in its results, and temporary ones as the opposite. After you load your first batch, test one old address with a redirect checker and confirm it returns a permanent redirect with one hop. If it does not, stop and find out why before loading the rest.

Shopify's migration guide recommends setting up redirects in advance, for pages “that your customers might have bookmarked, or links from third-party sources”. Once your domain points to Shopify, requests for old addresses are answered by Shopify, so every redirect has to be in place there before that switch. There is nowhere else for them to live.

1. 1
   Record a baseline. Export Search Console's performance data by page. It reaches back up to 16 months, and after launch it is your only fair comparison.
2. 2
   List every address on the old store, including blog posts, pages, categories and old campaign pages.
3. 3
   Import the products, then customers, then any order history.
4. 4
   Rebuild what the import skips: collections, menus, pages, blog posts, titles and descriptions.
5. 5
   Build the URL map: each old address, its new Shopify address, and “retired” with a reason where a page has no successor.
6. 6
   Load the redirects in Shopify, in batches, testing a sample after each.
7. 7
   Keep the new store out of search while you build it, and make sure that block is removed at launch. Google's move guide tells owners to remove noindex tags and robots.txt blocks from the new site.
8. 8
   Connect the domain. Shopify says a connected domain usually updates within two hours and can take up to two days. It also says to disconnect the domain from your previous platform first, to avoid certificate errors.
9. 9
   Test on the live domain: your most important old addresses, a test order, the contact form and tracking.
10. 10
    Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, listing the preferred canonical URLs. Check that each preferred canonical page names itself, and that duplicate product addresses point to the preferred product URL.
11. 11
    Monitor for months, comparing clicks per page with your baseline, and against the same period last year.

For the launch-day checks that apply to any site, see our website launch checklist.

• Redirecting everything to the home page. It looks tidy and sends visitors and Google to a page that does not answer what they were looking for.

• Cancelling the old store too early. Keep access until you have exported everything and checked the redirects. Its data may be the only copy of an order history or a blog.

• Changing everything at once. A new platform, new addresses, rewritten text and a new design in one launch makes any later drop hard to explain. Google suggests moving a small or medium site all at once, and the tradeoff is that you will not know which change caused what. If a page is performing, keep its text as it is.

• Expecting zero change. Google says rankings may fluctuate while it recrawls and that, for a medium-sized site, new addresses can take “a few weeks or more” to replace the old ones. If traffic does fall, our guide to what to check first gives the order to work in.

If the shop has a small catalog, few pages with search traffic and a short list of addresses, the steps above are a careful spreadsheet job that one person can follow. The risk rises with the number of addresses, with the amount of content on the old store, and with how much of your income comes from search. A move that includes a restructure of your categories is a project, not a task. If you are still choosing a platform, our guide to Shopify, WooCommerce and custom builds compares them first.

It cannot predict what your traffic will do. A careful move protects what the old store earned, and it does not add rankings the old store never had. It also does not teach every old platform's address pattern, because the pattern on your store is something to read from your own data and not to assume. And a rebuilt page that says less than the old one did may rank for less, whatever the redirects do.

The general method for mapping, redirecting and monitoring is in redesigning a website without losing search traffic. Once the store is live, our guide to ecommerce SEO covers what helps a shop's pages be found. For how we approach Shopify work, see Shopify store design and redesigns. When a platform move is on the table, we can plan the inventory, URL map and redirects with you, and you can discuss your project with us without a technical brief.

1. Shopify Help Center, “Migrating to Shopify”

2. Shopify Help Center, “URL redirects”

3. Shopify Help Center, “Connecting a third-party domain” (propagation time)

4. Shopify blog, “Store Migration app”

5. Shopify App Store, “Store Migration”

6. Shopify developer documentation, Liquid filter within

7. Google Search Central, “Site moves with URL changes”

8. Google Search Central, “Redirects and Google Search”

9. Google Search Central, “How to specify a canonical URL”

10. Google Search Central, “Influencing your title links in search results”

11. Google Search Central, “Debugging drops in Google Search traffic”

12. Search Console Help, “Page indexing report”