A WooCommerce migration that kept every ranking
The redirect map, the QA pass and the post-launch monitoring we run on every platform move.
Build the redirect map before you build anything else
Export every indexed URL from Search Console and your sitemap, not just products. Categories, tags, paginated archives, blog posts and old campaign landing pages all carry links. Map each to its Shopify equivalent, and where there is no equivalent, map to the nearest collection — never to the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft 404.
URL structure differences that bite
Shopify adds /products/ and /collections/ prefixes and does not support nested category paths. Your old /shop/skincare/serums/vitamin-c URL becomes a flat product URL, and the category depth has to live in collections and filters instead. Decide this early: it changes your internal linking and your breadcrumb structure.
Data order matters
Customers, then products, then orders, then content. Import products with their handles set from the old slugs where possible — it makes the redirect map shorter and keeps some link equity on the exact path. Verify variant inventory against the source system before go-live, not after.
The QA pass we run on launch day
Crawl the new site, crawl the redirect list, and check that every old URL returns a single 301 to a 200 page. Chained redirects are the quiet killer — three hops and crawlers stop passing value. Then re-submit the sitemap and watch coverage in Search Console daily for two weeks.
What normal looks like afterwards
Expect a dip. A two to four week wobble in rankings is routine on any platform move, and it recovers if the redirects are clean. What is not routine is a dip that keeps going in week five — that is usually a redirect chain, a blocked robots.txt left over from staging, or duplicate content from collection filters that need canonical tags.
Want this checked on your own store?
We'll run the same review on your storefront and send you the findings in three business days. Free, and yours to keep.
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