We’ve worked migrations from Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, custom builds and even older Shopify versions onto Shopify Plus. The pattern of traffic loss is so predictable it’s preventable. This is the working playbook.
1. Pre-migration audit (the most-skipped step)
Before you touch staging, catalogue:
- Every URL that ranks (Google Search Console export).
- Every URL with backlinks (Ahrefs / similar).
- Top 1000 traffic-driving pages.
- Current schema implementations.
- Current category copy and meta descriptions.
If you migrate without this list, you don’t know what you’re preserving.
2. URL strategy decided early
Shopify Plus enforces /products/ and /collections/ URLs. If your current URLs don’t match (e.g., Magento’s /catalog/category/), every URL needs a 1:1 redirect. Decide the URL strategy in week 1, not launch week.
3. Redirect map: written, tested, deployed in staging
Build the full redirect map in a spreadsheet. Test it on staging. Don’t plan to write it on launch day — that’s how 40% of migrations lose 40% of traffic.
4. Content parity before launch
Every category description, product copy, blog post, FAQ and meta tag from the old site needs to exist on the new site before launch. ‘We’ll add the category copy in phase 2’ is how rankings vanish.
5. Schema parity
If your old site had FAQPage, Review or Product schema, make sure the new site ships with equivalent or better. Schema gaps cost rich results almost immediately.
6. Staging crawl + validation
Crawl staging two weeks before launch. Check that:
- Redirects fire correctly.
- Internal links don’t hit redirect chains.
- Canonicals point to the right URLs.
- Schema validates.
- Sitemap reflects the production URL structure.
7. Launch-day monitoring
Watch in real time: Search Console for crawl errors, server logs for unexpected 404s, Core Web Vitals for regressions, sales dashboards for revenue impact.
8. Post-launch recovery
Some ranking volatility is inevitable for 4–8 weeks post-migration. The difference between a successful migration and a failed one is whether you act on the data in those weeks — or wait six months hoping things stabilise.
For migrations done with this discipline, see our Migrations & Platform SEO page. The corresponding platform work happens on Shopify SEO.
