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Moving to Shopify: A Redirect Plan for Search Traffic

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Moving a store to Shopify usually gets planned around products, themes and payments. The part that quietly decides whether organic traffic survives is much less visible: what happens when someone, or a search engine, requests an old address. Shopify’s URL structure differs from most other platforms, so almost every old link needs a new destination. Here is a plan that treats redirects as a first-class project.

Know the Shopify URL rules first

An industry review of Shopify SEO in 2026 notes that the path prefixes for products, collections and pages are fixed and cannot be renamed. Your new URLs will therefore follow Shopify’s pattern whether or not you liked your old one. That makes a complete mapping from old to new addresses the central piece of the migration, not an afterthought.

An agency guide to moving from WooCommerce, published in January 2026, makes the same point. It calls the 301 redirect mapping the most crucial step and lists the risks of neglecting it: pages returning errors, lost authority, changed titles and descriptions causing ranking swings, internal links and images still pointing at the old structure, and no one watching after launch.

Phase 1: Before you build

  1. Record your baseline. From Search Console or an SEO tool, save your top landing pages, keyword positions and organic traffic. You cannot judge the migration without this.
  2. Back up the old store. Keep a full copy of the database and files as a restore point.
  3. Crawl the live site. A crawler such as Screaming Frog, which the guide mentions, will list every URL that exists. Include products, categories, blog posts and static pages. Do not trust memory or the sitemap alone.
  4. Mirror your structure. Recreate collections and navigation on Shopify, then import products and customers with Shopify’s importer or an app, checking variants, SKUs and order history.

Phase 2: Build the redirect map

Create a spreadsheet with two columns: the old path and the new one. Match each old page to its true equivalent, a product to the same product, a category to the closest collection, an old blog post to its migrated post. For pages that no longer have an equivalent, choose the nearest relevant page rather than the home page where you can. Also keep the content signals constant: titles, meta descriptions, headings and image alt text. If you rewrite everything at the same moment as the move, you will not be able to tell which change affected rankings.

How Shopify handles redirects

Shopify’s help center describes the tool, under Content, then Menus, then URL redirects. A few details save headaches:

  • CSV import. You can upload redirects in bulk using Shopify’s sample template, and review them before confirming. For very large volumes, the help page suggests a third-party app.
  • Limits. Standard stores can hold up to 100,000 redirects; Plus stores up to 20 million.
  • Redirects only fire on broken URLs. If the old address still loads a live page, the redirect is ignored. To redirect a live page, hide it or draft it so it returns a 404 first.
  • Restricted paths. Paths beginning with certain prefixes, such as the cart and orders paths, and fixed paths such as /products and /collections cannot be redirected.
  • Quirks. A .html address cannot redirect to its own non-.html twin, and addresses with query strings may not behave as expected.
  • Caching. Browsers and search engines may cache a 301, so deleting one does not always take effect immediately.
  • Markets. If you use market subfolders, the help page says separate redirects may be needed for each case.

Phase 3: Launch and watch

  1. Update internal links in content, menus and image references so they point to the new addresses directly rather than relying on redirects.
  2. Check the basics on a staging or unpublished setup: homepage title and description under the online store preferences, HTTPS, and a full test order through checkout.
  3. Test the redirect map. Run a sample of old URLs, especially your top landing pages, and confirm each lands where it should.
  4. Switch DNS by updating your domain records as Shopify instructs.
  5. Submit the new sitemap to Search Console. Shopify provides it at the sitemap.xml path of your domain.
  6. Monitor for a month. The guide recommends watching Search Console for 404 spikes and drops in impressions for 30 days, and fixing crawl errors and broken redirects quickly.

Common mistakes

  • Redirecting everything to the home page. It is easy, but it throws away relevance.
  • Forgetting old blog and image URLs because they were not in the product export.
  • Adding redirects for pages that are still live, then wondering why nothing happens.
  • Skipping the post-launch check because the launch itself went smoothly.

The agency guide gives no migration statistics, so we have not cited any: results will depend on your catalogue, your links and how carefully the mapping is done.

If you would like help planning or building a migration, our services page describes how to get in touch, and our themes are worth a look when you are choosing the new storefront.

Further reading

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