The SEO checklist for migrating to (or off) Shopify

Replatforming an online store — moving onto Shopify, or off it to something else — is one of those projects where the new site looks fantastic and the traffic quietly falls off a cliff a fortnight later. It’s avoidable. Almost every horror story comes from skipping the unglamorous SEO work that protects the rankings you already earned. Here’s the checklist we’d run.

Note this is different from changing your domain — there, the address changes. Here, your domain often stays the same but the platform changes underneath it, which reshuffles your URLs, templates and structure. That reshuffle is exactly where rankings leak.

Before you migrate

Benchmark everything first. You can’t protect what you haven’t measured. Record your current top organic pages, the queries driving them, your rankings, and your traffic — before anything changes. This is your safety net and your proof afterwards.

Inventory every URL. Export a full list of your existing indexed URLs — every product, collection, blog post and page. Shopify has its own URL conventions (for example, product and collection paths follow set patterns), so many of your addresses will change in a migration. You need the complete old list to map from.

Build a 1:1 redirect map. This is the single most important step. Every old URL that’s changing needs a 301 redirect to its closest equivalent on the new site. No orphan pages, no redirect chains, no dumping everything to the homepage (which tells Google those pages are gone). Product-to-product, collection-to-collection.

Preserve your on-page SEO. Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, image alt text and — critically — your actual page content should carry across and improve, not silently get dropped in the redesign. A lot of ranking loss is simply content that didn’t make the move.

Match the technical setup. Structured data (product, review, breadcrumb schema), canonical tags, your XML sitemap and robots.txt all need to be correct on the new platform before launch, validated on a staging version search engines can’t index.

At launch

• Remove any “no-index” protection from staging, publish the new sitemap in Google Search Console, and request indexing on your priority pages.
• Test that every redirect actually fires — a single clean hop from the old URL to a live page, not a chain or a dead end.
• Confirm the store renders and performs well on mobile, and that Core Web Vitals haven’t regressed (Shopify is generally solid here, but custom themes vary).

The first few weeks after

• Watch Search Console closely — daily at first. Compare rankings and coverage against your pre-migration benchmark so any drop gets caught in days, not months.
• Hunt down 404s and fix any redirect you missed — there’s always one.
• Re-check that your priority products and collections are indexed and chase anything stuck.

The honest takeaway

Done properly, a platform migration holds your rankings and often improves them, because the new store is usually faster and cleaner. Skipped, it can wipe out years of accumulated SEO in a fortnight — and by the time the traffic drop shows up in sales, the damage is done and expensive to reverse. This is the same discipline that let us grow an ecommerce store from a standing start: protect what’s working, then build on it.

If you’re planning a Shopify migration (either direction) and want to make sure your rankings survive it, that’s exactly the kind of project worth getting right up front. We’re happy to look at your situation honestly before anything moves.