E-Commerce OperationsMigrating to Shopify: a step-by-step checklist that protects your SEO
Replatforming should grow revenue, not erase the organic traffic you spent years earning. SEO loss comes from avoidable execution gaps, mostly redirects, staging leftovers and thin monitoring. Here is the 12-step checklist we run.
Search engines don't care that your new store looks better. They care whether the URLs they already know still resolve, still carry the same content, and still link to each other. Protect those three things and the migration becomes a non-event for rankings.
30%organic traffic decline linked to poorly executed migrations
≤10%typical dip when a migration is well executed
12 mo+minimum time to keep your redirects live
Execution decides the outcome
Reported change in organic traffic after migration
The checklist
Twelve steps, three phases
01Before you build
1
Crawl and benchmark the old site
Export every URL, title, meta description, canonical and status code. Pull 12 months of traffic and rankings per page.
Screaming Frog
Search Console
2
Rank pages by value
Sort by organic traffic, revenue and backlinks. Those pages get hand-checked; the long tail gets rules.
3
Plan for Shopify's URL structure
Products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, articles under /blogs/. Old paths almost always differ, so every valuable URL needs a mapped destination.
4
Choose a quiet launch window
Avoid peak season. Launch at least six months ahead of it, or straight after it.
02Build and map
5
Build a one-to-one 301 redirect map
Old URL to the closest equivalent new URL. Never dump everything on the homepage. Standard plans allow up to 100,000 redirects.
Shopify URL Redirects
CSV import
6
Carry over titles, metadata and content
Rewrite nothing on your top pages until after launch. Replace placeholder titles and restore descriptions.
7
Audit apps, canonicals and structured data
Shopify generates canonicals and the sitemap automatically, but apps and custom themes can break them. Confirm product schema survives.
8
Set up Markets and hreflang properly
Each market subfolder needs its own redirects, self-referencing canonicals and a manual QA pass.
03Launch and monitor
9
Remove staging blocks
Lift the storefront password, switch noindex to index and re-check robots.txt. Leftovers here are the classic launch-day disaster.
10
Test redirects on the live domain
Re-crawl your old URL list and confirm each returns a single 301 to a 200 page. Check Core Web Vitals too: LCP under 2.5 seconds.
11
Submit the sitemap and watch indexing
Submit Shopify's sitemap.xml in Search Console and track coverage, crawl errors and key rankings daily.
12
Run 30 to 90 days of hypercare
Check 404s daily for the first two to four weeks, fix gaps fast, and keep every redirect live for at least a year.
Where to start
Match the risk to the response
Your situationPrioritiseWhy
Thousands of indexed URLs
Redirect map + automated testing
Scale hides broken paths
Selling in several countries
Markets, hreflang, redirects per subfolder
Each market needs its own
Heavy app and script usage
App audit + speed check
Scripts hurt Web Vitals
Peak season is near
Delay the launch
No time to recover
One pre-migration rule beats the rest: if a URL earns traffic, revenue or links today, it needs a deliberate home on the new store. Everything else is detail.
Where Glyde fits
Migration as a growth project, not a lift-and-shift
We treat the move as the moment to fix what the old platform hid: slow themes, messy catalogues, weak collection pages. SEO sign-off sits inside the build plan, so rankings are protected while the store gets better.
The Glyde Growth Framework
01
PositionBrand strategy02
DesignVisual identity03
BuildWebsite & assets04
MarketSEO · Ads · Social05
ScaleSustainable growthPlanning a move to Shopify?
Glyde runs SEO-safe migrations from audit to hypercare, so launch day is boring in the best way.
Book a migration audit →
