Moving WooCommerce to Shopify without losing rankings
Replatforming is where organic traffic goes to die. Not because Shopify is worse than WooCommerce, but because a migration silently changes several hundred URLs and nobody notices until rankings have already gone.
The last one I ran dipped about 9% for eleven days and then recovered past the previous baseline. That is roughly the best realistic outcome. Anyone promising zero impact is guessing.
The URL structures do not line up
This is the root of the whole problem. WooCommerce gives you clean, arbitrary paths. Shopify enforces its own prefixes and will not let you remove them.
/shop/product-name/becomes/products/product-name/product-category/tiles/becomes/collections/tiles/blog/post-name/becomes/blogs/news/post-name
Every single one needs a 301. There is no configuration that avoids this.
Build the map before you build the store
The mistake I see repeatedly: the new store gets built, launch is scheduled, and redirects become a launch-day task. By then nobody remembers which of the 340 old category URLs mattered.
Export the old URLs first, from three sources, because none of them is complete on its own:
- The WooCommerce database — every published product, category and page.
- Search Console — every URL with impressions in the last 12 months. This catches pages that still rank but nobody links to internally.
- The server access log or analytics — anything with real traffic, including URLs long since unpublished that still pull in links.
The third list is the one people skip. On that build it turned up 40-odd discontinued product URLs still receiving traffic from old blog posts and forum links. Those got redirected to the closest live product rather than the homepage.
Redirecting everything to the homepage is treated as a soft 404. You keep almost none of the value. Point each URL at its closest genuine equivalent or let it 410.
Shopify’s redirect tooling is limited
Shopify does exact-match redirects only. No regex, no pattern rules. For 900 URLs that means a CSV import, and the file has to be exactly right — malformed rows fail silently in the middle of an import.
I generate the CSV from the URL map with a script and validate it before upload: every source path unique, every target returning 200 on the new store, no redirect chains. Chains are the sneaky one — old URL to interim URL to final URL bleeds value and Google gives up after a few hops.
What else moves
Structured data. Most Shopify themes ship Product schema, but the details vary. Check that price, availability and the review aggregate all still emit. Losing review stars in results costs more click-through than a ranking drop of two positions.
Canonicals. Shopify serves products at both /products/x and /collections/y/products/x. The theme should canonicalise to the former. Verify it — a broken canonical here splits every product across two URLs.
Image URLs. All of them change. Image search traffic takes longer to recover than page traffic; there is not much to do beyond keeping alt text and filenames intact.
Internal links. Migrated blog content will be full of absolute links to the old domain paths. They will redirect, which works, but a page whose internal links all pass through a 301 looks worse than one linking directly. Rewrite them in the content.
Launch day
Keep the old store reachable on a subdomain for a fortnight. Something will be missing and you will need to look at the original.
Then, in order: DNS cutover, spot-check 20 redirects by hand, submit the new sitemap, and resubmit the old sitemap. That last one is counterintuitive but it works — it invites Google to recrawl the old URLs promptly and discover the 301s rather than waiting for a natural recrawl.
Watch Search Console’s coverage report daily for a fortnight. The signal you care about is 404s appearing in the crawl stats. Each one is a URL you missed. I found nine that way on the last migration, all of them paginated category pages I had not thought about.