The Shopify migration playbook: move platforms without losing a ranking
Haniel Singh
Founder, Creative Labs · Updated Oct 2026 · 2 min read
Summarize with AI
Every migration we have seen go wrong went wrong for the same reason: the team started with the design and found out about the URLs at the end. This playbook is the order we run, from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or a site builder to Shopify, and it has not lost a client a ranking yet.
It is written for the person who has to sign off on the move. Hand the technical parts to whoever is building; the order is what matters.
TL;DR
- •Inventory every URL, its clicks and its backlinks before anyone opens Figma.
- •Decide every URL’s fate (keep, 301, retire) in a sheet the whole team can see.
- •Move data through the Admin API in Shopify’s shape, not a flat CSV.
- •Launch early in the week and watch 404s, indexing and rankings daily for 30 days.
Inventory before you design
Crawl the live site, export Search Console pages for the last 12 months, and pull backlinks. Merge the three into one sheet with a row per URL. This sheet decides what must not move.
Add the catalog export beside it: products, variants, customers, orders and any custom fields. You now know what you are moving and what it is worth.
- •Crawl with Screaming Frog; include images and canonicals.
- •Search Console: clicks and impressions per page, 12 months.
- •Backlinks: every URL with a referring domain gets a “must keep” flag.
The redirect map
Every changed URL gets exactly one 301 to the closest equivalent page. Not the homepage, not a collection, the equivalent. Shopify’s URL redirects import from CSV, so the sheet becomes the config.
Keep paths where you can. BigCommerce and Squarespace let you set custom URLs; WooCommerce and Magento usually don’t match Shopify’s /products/ and /collections/ structure, so plan for a full map.
Want us to run the CRO sprint on your store?
Book a call →Data, in Shopify’s shape
- 1.Products and variants through the Admin API, with options and metafields mapped.
- 2.Customers with tags; customer groups become tags or B2B companies.
- 3.Orders with history, so support and lifecycle flows keep working.
- 4.Content as pages and blog posts, rebuilt as sections where it was page-builder markup.
Frequently asked
Will we lose rankings during a migration?
How long should the redirect map stay in place?
Can we redesign at the same time as migrating?
Sources(6)
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Written by
Haniel Singh
Founder, Creative Labs
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