Migrating to Shopify without losing rankings
Haniel Singh
Founder, Creative Labs · Published Sep 2026 · 2 min read
Summarize with AI
Rankings are lost in a migration three ways: URLs that break, on-page signals that vanish, and crawl problems after launch. Each one is preventable, and none of them is prevented by a good design.
This is the SEO half of our migration process, written so a store owner can check that whoever is doing the move has done it.
TL;DR
- •List every URL with clicks and backlinks before design starts.
- •One 301 per changed URL, to the equivalent page, imported from a sheet.
- •Carry titles, descriptions, headings, alt text and schema page by page.
- •Submit the sitemap at launch and watch 404s and rankings daily for 30 days.
The three ways rankings get lost
Broken URLs are the obvious one: a product that ranked at /shop/rods/bass now lives at /products/bass-rod and nothing points between them. Missing signals are quieter: the new page has a different title, no H1 and no schema. Crawl problems come last: a staging robots.txt left in place, a sitemap with old URLs.
Lamiglas moved 2,400 URLs from WooCommerce to Shopify and lost none. That took a sheet, not a trick.
- •Broken URLs: fixed by the redirect map.
- •Missing signals: fixed by per-page parity checks.
- •Crawl problems: fixed by the launch checklist.
The URL inventory
Crawl the live site and merge it with Search Console and backlink data. Every URL gets a row: template, clicks, referring domains and its fate on the new site. Anything with clicks or links is “must keep”.
This sheet is the migration. Design and development follow it; nothing is built that does not have a row.
Want us to run the CRO sprint on your store?
Book a call →Redirects and on-page parity
- 1.Import the 301 map from CSV; test every row on the preview theme.
- 2.Titles, descriptions and H1s carried over or improved, never blank.
- 3.Product and article schema on the new templates before launch.
- 4.Canonicals pointing at the new URLs, and the old sitemap retired.
Frequently asked
How long do rankings dip after a migration?
Should we keep the old domain live?
Can we change URLs on purpose during the move?
Sources(6)
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Written by
Haniel Singh
Founder, Creative Labs
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