You keep your rankings in a WooCommerce to Shopify migration by doing three things well: redirecting every old URL that has traffic or links to its exact new equivalent, carrying over titles, descriptions, content and image alt text unchanged, and checking Search Console daily for the first month. Shopify’s URL structure is fixed, so every product and category URL will change. The redirects are the migration.
Why URLs always change
WooCommerce lets you shape URLs: products often live at /product/name/ or /shop/category/name/, categories at /product-category/name/, posts at /name/ or /blog/name/. Shopify uses fixed paths: /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/news/. Shopify’s help centre also notes that redirects cannot be created from paths it reserves, such as /products and /collections themselves. Plan the new structure on paper before importing anything.
Step 1: inventory what ranks
Before you touch Shopify, export the evidence:
- Search Console: pages with clicks or impressions in the last 12 months.
- Analytics: landing pages with organic sessions.
- A backlink export: pages other sites link to.
- A full crawl of the WooCommerce site: every URL, title, description, H1, canonical and status code.
Merge these into one sheet. Every URL with traffic, impressions or links needs a one-to-one redirect. Everything else should still redirect to the closest relevant page, never to the homepage by default.
Step 2: move the data
| Data | Route | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Products and variants | Shopify product CSV import or a migration app | Variant options, weights, SEO title and description fields, image alt text |
| Categories | Recreated as collections | Category descriptions must be moved by hand or by app |
| Customers | Customer CSV import | Passwords do not transfer; customers activate or reset their accounts |
| Order history | Migration app such as Matrixify | Shopify’s built-in CSV import does not cover historical orders |
| Reviews | Export and import through your review app | Keep review dates and ratings so schema stays truthful |
| Blog posts and pages | App or manual | Internal links inside the content still point at old URLs |
Keep product handles as close to the old slugs as you can. /product/silk-saree-red/ becoming /products/silk-saree-red is easy to map and easy to check.
Step 3: build and import the redirects
Shopify’s URL redirects live under Content, then Menus, then URL redirects. You can create them one by one or import them as a CSV with two columns, the old path and the new path. Shopify provides a sample file. Rules we follow:
- One hop only. Old URL straight to final URL, never through an intermediate.
- Exact matches for every page with traffic or links.
- Category pages to the matching collection; paginated and filtered category URLs to the collection’s first page.
- Deleted products to the most relevant collection, not the homepage.
- Old blog posts to their new
/blogs/news/address with the same slug. - Test a sample of 50 redirects on the Shopify preview before the domain moves.
Shopify’s migration guide recommends setting up redirects before you transfer the domain, so that bookmarked and linked pages never return an error.
Step 4: carry the SEO over, unchanged
Launch day is not the day to rewrite content. Copy across exactly:
- Page titles and meta descriptions into Shopify’s search engine listing fields.
- Product and category descriptions, including their headings.
- Image alt text.
- Structured data: check that the Shopify theme outputs Product schema with price, availability and reviews where WooCommerce did.
- Internal links inside product descriptions and blog posts, updated to the new URLs so they do not bounce through redirects.
Improve the content after rankings have settled, not during the move. Changing URLs and content at the same time makes any drop impossible to diagnose.
Step 5: launch and watch
- Point the domain to Shopify at a quiet hour.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console the same day.
- Crawl the old URL list against the live site: every one should return a single 301 to a 200 page.
- Check Search Console daily for 30 days for crawl errors, “not found” spikes and pages dropping out of the index.
- Compare clicks for your top 50 landing pages week by week against the pre-migration baseline.
Most migration ranking losses are not caused by Shopify. They are caused by redirects that were never made.
Things that will be different on Shopify
- Duplicate product URLs through collections. Fix the theme so product cards link to the canonical
/products/URL; we cover it in the Shopify SEO checklist. - Tag pages that Shopify creates and that should usually be kept out of the index.
- Apps instead of plugins. Each adds scripts; install fewer than you had on WooCommerce.
- Payments. In India you will still use a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, because Shopify Payments is not available there.
Moving to Shopify?
We migrate products, customers, orders and content, build every redirect from your Search Console data, and watch the rankings for a month after launch.
Get a migration quoteFrequently asked questions
Will I lose rankings moving from WooCommerce to Shopify?
A short wobble while Google recrawls is normal. Lasting losses usually come from missing redirects, changed content or lost internal links. Done properly, a migration keeps what you have, though nobody can guarantee rankings.
Can I keep my WooCommerce URLs on Shopify?
No. Shopify uses fixed paths for products, collections, pages and blogs. You keep the slugs where possible and redirect the old paths.
Do customer passwords transfer to Shopify?
No. Customer records import, but passwords do not. Customers set a new password through an account invitation or a reset.
How long does a migration take?
A catalogue of a few hundred products with content and redirects typically takes two to four weeks including testing. Larger catalogues and order history add time.
Related: Shopify development, Shopify for UK and US brands, Shopify SEO checklist.