Preserving SEO When Migrating a Store to Shopify

An old WooCommerce store is slow, customers complain about sluggish pages, and you spend hours updating plugins. Migrating to Shopify means moving to a SaaS platform with managed infrastructure: built-in CDN, automatic scaling, Shopify Payments, and App Store. Over 7 years, we've migrated more than 50 stores—from 200 to 50,000 products. We guarantee preserved search positions and correct data transfer. But simply copying data isn't enough—it requires careful migration with SEO and business logic preservation.

Data Available for Migration

Also transferred: SEO fields, metadata, images, and content. Custom functions (discounts, shipping) require rework via Shopify Functions.

Migration Tools

Matrixify is cheaper for large volumes but requires manual setup. LitExtension is more expensive but automates order and password migration. For stores with customizations, we use a combination of Matrixify and REST API.

How We Migrated an Electronics Store: A Case Study

One of our clients, an electronics store, migrated from WooCommerce to Shopify—8,000 products, 15,000 customers, 3 years of order history. We used Matrixify and the Shopify REST API. First, we exported data from WooCommerce via CSV. Here's a script for basic product export:

import csv
import json
import mysql.connector

conn = mysql.connector.connect(host='localhost', user='root', password='pass', database='wordpress')
cursor = conn.cursor(dictionary=True)

cursor.execute("""
    SELECT p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_content, p.post_status,
           pm_price.meta_value as price,
           pm_sku.meta_value as sku
    FROM wp_posts p
    LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta pm_price ON pm_price.post_id = p.ID AND pm_price.meta_key = '_price'
    LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta pm_sku ON pm_sku.post_id = p.ID AND pm_sku.meta_key = '_sku'
    WHERE p.post_type = 'product' AND p.post_status = 'publish'
""")

products = cursor.fetchall()

with open('shopify_import.csv', 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=[
        'Handle', 'Title', 'Body (HTML)', 'Vendor', 'Published',
        'Variant SKU', 'Variant Price', 'Variant Inventory Qty'
    ])
    writer.writeheader()

    for product in products:
        handle = product['post_title'].lower().replace(' ', '-')
        writer.writerow({
            'Handle': handle,
            'Title': product['post_title'],
            'Body (HTML)': product['post_content'],
            'Vendor': 'Default',
            'Published': 'TRUE' if product['post_status'] == 'publish' else 'FALSE',
            'Variant SKU': product['sku'] or '',
            'Variant Price': product['price'] or '0',
            'Variant Inventory Qty': '100',
        })

Then we used Matrixify to import collections and customers. For orders, we used the Shopify API since Matrixify cannot restore orders as completed. After migration, page load speed was 2.5 times faster (from 4 to 1.5 seconds), and traffic was maintained at 98%. According to analysis, 301 redirects pass up to 90% of link equity. The total cost of migration was $1,200, saving the client an estimated $500/month in hosting and plugin fees.

Want a similar result? Contact us for a consultation to assess your store.

API Migration (Shopify Admin API)

For custom data (discounts, tags), we use the REST API:

import shopify
import requests

shopify.ShopifyResource.set_site(f"https://{API_KEY}:{API_SECRET}@{SHOP_NAME}.myshopify.com/admin/api/latest")

for product_data in source_products:
    product = shopify.Product()
    product.title = product_data['title']
    product.body_html = product_data['description']
    product.vendor = product_data['brand']
    product.variants = [{
        'sku': product_data['sku'],
        'price': str(product_data['price']),
        'inventory_quantity': product_data['stock'],
        'inventory_management': 'shopify',
    }]
    product.save()

    # Upload image
    if product_data.get('image_url'):
        image = shopify.Image({'product_id': product.id})
        image.src = product_data['image_url']
        image.save()

Why 301 Redirects Matter

After migration, the URL structure changes: from /catalog/category/product to /products/product. Without 301 redirects, Google loses traffic. A common mistake is forgetting redirects for category and filter pages. We configure a CSV for import:

Redirect: Path,Redirect: Target
/catalog/computers/laptop-model-x,/products/laptop-model-x
/catalog/phones/samsung-galaxy-s24,/products/products/samsung-galaxy-s24

Import via Matrixify or manually in Admin → Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects. We guarantee that after migration, traffic will remain at the previous level.

How to Prepare a CSV for Import: Step-by-Step Guide

1. Export data from your old CMS into a CSV file.
2. Check field mapping: Handle, Title, Body HTML, Variant SKU, Variant Price, Variant Inventory Qty.
3. Remove extra characters and duplicate rows.
4. Import via Matrixify or the built-in Shopify importer.
5. Check errors in the import log and fix them.

What to Do with Custom Functions?

Custom discount, shipping, and tax logic are not transferred automatically. For these, we use Shopify Functions or configure apps. For example, complex discount rules need to be rewritten in Shopify Flow. Integrations with 1C and CRM are connected via the Shopify API.

How Long Does Migration Take?

For a store with up to 5,000 products including customers and theme setup—5–10 days. Large stores with functionality rework—3 to 6 weeks. The price is calculated individually after an audit, typically starting from $500.

What's Included in Our Work

• Full data extraction from the old CMS
• Cleaning and converting to Shopify format
• Importing products, customers, orders
• Setting up collections and metafields
• Creating 301 redirects according to the URL map
• Testing orders and verifying all scenarios
• Training your team on Shopify

Contact us for a preliminary audit of your store—we'll assess the workload and select the optimal tool. Get a consultation to avoid losing traffic and time.

Website Redesign and Migration: CMS Change, SEO Preservation

A client came to us 6 weeks after a self-attempted redesign: 'We moved from WordPress to Tilda, traffic dropped by 70%.' I opened Google Search Console — 847 pages returned 404, the URL structure had completely changed, not a single 301 redirect was in place. Yandex hadn't reindexed the new site yet, positions collapsed. Recovery took 4 months and resulted in significant revenue loss for the quarter. Our experience — over 7 years and 80+ successful migrations, we guarantee position retention with the right approach.

Why Do Migrations Break SEO?

Search engines have indexed specific URLs. If /catalog/shoes/nike-air-max-270 turned into /products/nike-air-max-270 without a 301 redirect — all the link equity, traffic, and rankings go nowhere. Google says 301 passes ~99% of PageRank, but in practice positions recover over 2–8 weeks, not instantly.

Commonly, SEO gets broken not out of malice, but because a developer doesn't view the URL structure as a public API. Here are typical breakages:

How to Recover Traffic After a Failed Migration?

If traffic dropped, act immediately:

1. Crawl the new site for 404s and compare with the pre-migration URL list.
2. Create redirects for all lost pages with traffic >0.
3. Check structured data and meta tags on a test sample.
4. Daily monitor Coverage in Search Console and positions for top 50 queries.
5. If after 2 weeks traffic does not recover — deep audit of redirects (transitivity, chains, loops).

In our practice, a large e-commerce site lost 50% of traffic when moving from Bitrix to React + Strapi. We restored 95% of redirects in three days, and within 3 weeks traffic returned to 90% of original.

What Does a Pre-Migration Audit Include?

Before starting development on the new site:

1. Full crawl of current site via Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Get list of all indexable URLs with traffic from Google Search Console.
2. Export all pages with organic traffic >0 over the last 6 months — these are priority for redirects.
3. Record all external backlinks to specific pages — Ahrefs, Semrush.
4. Snapshot current positions for key queries — baseline for post-migration comparison.
5. Save Core Web Vitals from Search Console for the previous 90 days.

Table for recording:

Contact us for a detailed pre-migration audit — we will help identify all risks and create an action plan.

URL Mapping and Redirects

For projects with 200+ pages, we create a mapping table: old URL → new URL → status (301, merged with another page, deleted). Each row is verified: does the content actually migrate here?

In Laravel, redirects are handled via configuration file and middleware, not .htaccess — faster and more manageable. For WordPress → Next.js: redirects are set in next.config.js (static) and at the Nginx/CDN level for dynamic ones. Old .htaccess on shared hosting with 500+ lines of redirects is a special hell. Each redirect is checked sequentially, performance suffers. We move to Nginx map directive or Redis cache for dynamic lookup. More at Wikipedia: HTTP 301.

How to Migrate Content from Different CMSs?

WordPress → Headless CMS (Contentful, Strapi, Sanity): WordPress REST API or WP All Export to export posts, meta fields, media files. Migration script in Node.js: parse export, transform structure, upload via CMS API. Media files are reuploaded to new storage, links updated in content. Typical problem — shortcodes in WordPress content ([gallery id="123"]): need parser and transformation to new format.

1C-Bitrix → modern stack: Bitrix stores content in non-standard tables with IBLOCK_ELEMENT_PROPERTY. Direct SQL export via phpMyAdmin or Bitrix API. Transformation is the longest part due to specific Bitrix data structure.

Heavy WYSIWYG → structured content: Years of editing in FCKEditor/TinyMCE leave inline styles, non-standard tags, broken attributes. HTML sanitize + transformation to Markdown or Portable Text (Sanity) with manual check of problematic pages.

How to Preserve Technical SEO Elements During Migration?

Structured data (Schema.org) — if the old site had Product, Article, BreadcrumbList markup, they must be on the new site too. Google Search Console → Enhancement reports will show loss of rich snippets.

Sitemap XML: generated automatically, submitted to GSC a day after launch. Old sitemap remains until full reindexing.

hreflang for multilingual sites: if tags are lost during migration, conflicts between language versions in search results will start within weeks.

Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags — often forgotten when changing template, pages stop displaying correctly when shared on social networks.

Launch and First Weeks Monitoring

DNS propagation: DNS switching takes up to 48 hours, plan launch with buffer. Cloudflare as DNS provider — propagation takes minutes, not hours.

After launch, monitor daily: Search Console → Coverage (indexing errors), Analytics → organic traffic, year-over-year comparison, crawl site for 404 errors.

First 2 weeks are critical. If traffic drops more than 30% — immediate audit of redirects and comparison with pre-migration crawl.

What the Service Includes

Results you receive:

1. Migration plan with URL mapping and redirects in Excel/Google Sheets format.
2. Configured 301 redirects at server level (Nginx/Cloudflare/Vercel).
3. Migrated content with integrity check: images, meta fields, links.
4. Structured data (Schema.org) on the new site, identical to old or improved.
5. SEO report: position trend at 1, 3, and 6 weeks after launch.
6. Coverage monitoring in Search Console with error notifications.
7. Guaranteed position retention: if traffic drops more than 15% within the first month — free audit and correction.

Timelines and Estimates

• Redesign with migration for a small site (up to 100 pages): 4–8 weeks.
• E-commerce migration with 500+ product pages: 8–16 weeks.
• Only technical migration part (redirects, metadata) without redesign: 1–3 weeks.

Cost is calculated individually based on scope.

Get a consultation for your project — we will respond within a day. Order a pre-migration audit of your site and receive a detailed proposal with a redirect plan. Contact us to discuss details.