Swerve the SEO slump: How to protect your rankings during a Shopify migration

Migrating to a new platform doesn’t have to mean a nosedive in search engine performance. With the right approach, you can preserve your rankings, maintain your visibility, and even enhance your SEO in the process.

To help you get it right, we’ve outlined five key actions to ensure your migration goes smoothly. From setting up redirects to optimising site speed, these steps will help you protect your hard-earned rankings and keep your store performing at its best.

Get on top of your redirects 

One of the most critical steps in any eCommerce migration is setting up proper redirects. When you move to Shopify, your URLs are likely to change, and if you don’t redirect your old URLs to the new ones, you risk breaking links and losing all-important traffic.

Search engines such as Google rely on these redirects to understand that your content has moved permanently. Without them, shoppers and search bots will hit dead ends when trying to explore your store, leading to frustration and a drop in rankings.

To avoid this, map out all your existing URLs and their corresponding new URLs before the migration, and use industry-accredited tools to identify high-traffic pages and ensure they’re properly redirected. This simple step makes a major difference, and is worth your time and attention to get it right first time.

Carry over your hard-working content

Your store’s content is a key driver of your SEO success, so it’s essential to ensure it’s migrated accurately and completely. This includes product descriptions, blog posts, landing pages, and any other content that ranks well or drives traffic.

During the migration, double-check that all your content has been transferred correctly and that formatting, images, and internal links remain intact. Although you should check all pages, pay special attention to those with high traffic or conversions, as these are critical to your SEO success.

If you’re planning to refresh or optimise your content during the migration, make sure to preserve the core elements that contribute to its SEO value - such as keywords, headings, and meta descriptions - and get advice from an SEO specialist if you’re worried about negative impact.

Make sure to sort your metadata

Metadata - including title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text for images - can play a crucial role in how search engines understand and rank your pages, however during a migration it’s easy for this information to get lost or overlooked.

Before launching your new Shopify store, audit your metadata to ensure it’s been carried over correctly, and avoid using placeholders that you could forget to update before it’s too late. If you’re planning on making changes, keep them concise, relevant, and keyword-rich, and only make slight refinements to old meta descriptions that are already performing pretty well.

Triple check your links and indexing

Broken links are a common problem during migrations, and they can harm user experience and brand perception as well as your store’s SEO. Internal links, in particular, are essential for guiding users and search engines through your site.

After migrating, use widely available tools to crawl your site and identify any broken links, and fix them promptly to ensure a seamless experience for both users and search bots. Additionally, it’s important to submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console and request reindexing, as this helps search engines discover and rank your new pages faster (your Shopify partner may do this on your behalf).

Don’t sacrifice site speed for aesthetics

When launching your online store on a new platform, particularly one with thousands of available apps, it can be tempting to add bells and whistles across all your pages. However, excessive design elements, large images, or complex scripts can slow down your site, which signals to Google that you’re not prioritising user experience.

Site speed is a key ranking factor, so it’s crucial to strike the right balance between aesthetic, content, and usability. Optimise images accordingly, leverage browser caching, and minimise the use of heavy scripts or apps. Shopify’s built-in performance tools can help, but it’s up to you to ensure your site remains fast and functional.

Want to learn more about making a smooth transition to Shopify?  Download our free guide, Switching to Shopify: The retailer’s guide to a stress-free migration, for a step-by-step roadmap.