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Migrating to Shopify can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to preserving your website's SEO and traffic.
However, with the right strategy and checklist, you can ensure a smooth transition without losing your hard-earned traffic.
In this article, we'll provide a comprehensive checklist to guide you through the Shopify SEO migration process.
Why trust us?
- We're the creators of Bloggle, a dynamic Shopify blog builder available on the Shopify App Store that fills the gaps in native Shopify blogging capabilities.
- We're a global force: 3000+ merchants across 60 countries have trusted us to amplify their voices.
- We've already empowered 55,000+ blogs written using our versatile app.
Potential risks of migrating to Shopify
Migrating to Shopify comes with certain risks that can affect your website's performance and traffic. Understanding these risks is crucial to mitigating them effectively.
There are many bad things that can happen. For example, it can affect your organic traffic, or you can lose your money.
That’s why it is very important to take this process seriously and complete every step of your migration thoroughly.
1. It can affect your organic traffic
Migrating your website can disrupt your organic traffic. Changes in URLs, website structure, and content can confuse search engines, leading to a temporary, or even permanent drop in rankings and traffic.
If you don’t do it right, the drop can be very significant, as we can see below:
To avoid these issues, you need to tell Google how and where your internal links moved and copy your whole site architecture with redirects in order for Google and other search engines to follow it.
2. You can lose money
When your organic traffic drops, it directly impacts your revenue. A significant loss in traffic can lead to decreased sales and profits, affecting your business from the core.
The drop in organic traffic is not the only reason why you could lose money during Shopify SEO migration.
Migration to Shopify means you will change your business model, even slightly, your website will look different, and even though the migration will provide benefits for you (why would you migrate to Shopify otherwise?), the risks are definitely there, and this process can affect your loyal customer base.
3. You cannot control everything on Shopify because this is a SaaS
Shopify is a SaaS company. The platform provides you with tools to create your own e-commerce store and helps merchants reach customers in a much more straightforward fashion compared to building their own, customized e-commerce platform.
Although Shopify can be pricey, they will give you so much value for the price you paid and definitely make your life as a merchant easier.
However, there are things you have to give away in the process. For instance, you won't have access to server logs, making certain SEO optimizations more challenging.
That’s another reason why migrating the website to Shopify might have an SEO impact.
Team members needed for a painless Shopify migration
A successful Shopify migration will most likely require a skilled team to handle different aspects of the process.
Maybe you are used to doing everything alone, and this process doesn’t sound complicated to you.
However, we can assure you that there are many things that can go wrong during this process, and hiring a person, or a team to handle this for you will actually save you money in the long run.
SEO specialist/consultant
An experienced SEO specialist is essential for overseeing the entire migration process. They will conduct pre-migration and post-migration audits, track keyword traffic and positions, and set up redirects from the old site to the new site.
It's crucial to involve the SEO specialist early, especially when working with UX/UI designers, to ensure all designs are SEO-friendly before implementation.
This is definitely the most important person in the team, and sometimes, an SEO specialist can handle all the essential tasks alone.
However, there is more technical stuff to solve during migration, and that’s why you should have a web developer as well.
Web developer
The web developer will set up the Shopify store, implement designs, and handle technical aspects of the migration.
Unless you have both a developer and an SEO specialist, your web developer must have SEO knowledge as well.
It is pretty much the same as with SEO specialists — if they don’t have the technical skills required to handle the whole process of migration, you also need a web developer and vice versa.
If you hire two people to complete this task for you, it would be good to have them in direct communication in order to avoid problems during the process.
Project manager
While optional, a project manager can be very helpful. They should keep the migration process on track and remind the team of the goal: to migrate the site while maintaining or improving SEO traffic.
The project manager must stay in constant communication with everyone involved, keep track of the progress, and inform the manager about it.
You would probably be the person to complete these tasks yourself, but if you don’t have time, or you feel that a more skillful person would complete the job better and faster, you should consider hiring a project manager as well.
Shopify SEO migration checklist
We finally come to the part of the article where we will present you our bulletproof SEO migration checklist. If you follow this list, you will avoid the most common problems that can occur during this process.
1. Create your SEO migration strategy
In a nutshell, set clear objectives, familiarize yourself with the migration process, gather data from analytics tools and Google Search Console, form your team, and create a timeline. Remember, a well-executed migration can improve your SEO.
You must prepare your team well for this process. They shouldn’t be afraid, but they also must realize the importance of this process.
Take your time. Do not rush things and push the team over the edge, because you will increase the possibility of an error occurring somewhere down the line.
Gathering data and mapping everything from your old site will allow you to do the migration smoothly.
2. Prepare for your migration type
There is one thing we all know that we should do, but sometimes we don’t — making a backup of our website.
It doesn’t matter if you are changing your domain, hosting provider, or platform, always backup your current website first. This precaution ensures you can recover your site if something goes wrong.
Making a backup will take some time, you need some technical knowledge to do it properly, it is boring and seems unneeded, because everything will be just fine, like the last time, right?
Well, you might go through several migration processes smoothly, and then that one time you will be unlucky, and problems will occur.
You better have a backup at that moment, or else you might lose much more than just organic traffic!
3. Choose your Shopify theme carefully
Select a theme from the official Shopify theme store. These themes are reviewed for performance, code quality, and SEO best practices, and they will give a solid foundation for your new store.
We used and reviewed every single theme linked here, and you won’t make a mistake if you go for any of them.
However, some themes are industry-specific, while some of them are universal. If you are indecisive, the free Dawn theme provided by Shopify is a solid universal theme that can cover everything you need at the start.
When you figure out any specific needs you potentially have, go for an upgrade, and buy some of the premium themes.
4. Prepare your new Shopify store
Set up your new Shopify store and ensure it's not indexed to avoid duplicate content issues. You can add a password to your Shopify website during the migration process.
We already mentioned that you should back up everything, to avoid losing content if errors occur during the migration process.
If you are not feeling safe, hire a specialist to complete this process for you, since it is very technical in nature.
Maybe you noticed that Shopify's default blog option is not giving you enough room or options to make your articles shine and promote your products in the best way.
You are also maybe wondering how you can overcome this obstacle. Bloggle is here to help you! We made a drag-and-drop blog builder specially for Shopify, which will allow you to design beautiful and high-converting blog posts.
5. Take care of your Shopify canonical tags
As with any other regular website, you need to take care about duplicate content when doing migration. Duplicate content can hurt your SEO, ratings, and ultimately the number of visitors and customers.
Canonical tags are used in SEO to help search engines index the correct URL and avoid duplicate content.
6. Configure Robots.txt
Configuring your robots.txt file on Shopify is essential to guide search engines on which pages to index. That’s also a very important step for avoiding duplicate content.
There are several commands you can use to configure Robots.txt through your Shopify admin, and we wrote everything you need to know about it in this Robots.txt Shopify guide.
7. Map your old URLs to your new URLs
Conduct a website audit with a tool such as ScreamingFrog and export all URLs from your current website.
Map each old URL to the most relevant page on the new site using a spreadsheet, or a different tool that will help you with this issue.
For example, you can use the Matrixify Shopify application to create redirects in bulk. Alternatively, you can set redirects up via Shopify admin.
You need some technical knowledge to do it, but everything is explained in detail, and the interface is user-friendly.
If you still need some help with it, our Shopify redirects guide got your back.
8. Don’t forget to update on-page elements
On-page elements are often overlooked during the migration process. It is not unusual to forget to update them, since paying attention to technical parts of migration is more important.
If you make some errors during the technical phase, you might lose way more than just forgetting about putting the right tags and meta descriptions on your website.
However, that doesn’t mean you should disregard these. Actually, you can use the migration process as an opportunity to update and improve H1s, title tags, and meta descriptions on your most important pages.
We already made a complete guide on Shopify titles and meta descriptions in which you can read everything you need to know about it.
9. Get an intermediate crawl
After customizing the theme and migrating the content, perform an intermediate crawl to identify potential issues before launching the website.
This is not a mandatory step, but it will help you identify potential problems you might have missed before.
10. Set up Google Search Console
Setting up the Google Search Console is crucial for tracking your website's organic performance.
This comes after finishing the migration process successfully. The most important thing in the process of setting up GSC is making sure that your sitemap is correctly submitted.
11. Set up Google Analytics on your new site
Set up Google Analytics to track user interactions and ensure data is collected properly once the site goes live.
Knowing how many visitors there are on your site, where do they come from, and how long they are staying on it are very important for your content management and content marketing efforts.
You can learn so much about your business and how others perceive it from analytics, which will help you with improving your Shopify store and maybe even come up with new products and redesign the old ones.
Of course, we have a guide on how to integrate GA4 to your Shopify store already covered everything you need in this department.
12. D-DAY: Launch the website
In a nutshell, you need to perform several essential tasks on the day you need to launch the website: remove the password, perform a crawl using Screaming Frog, submit the change to Google Search Console, and monitor 404 errors, creating 301 redirects as necessary.
If everything goes according to plan, your Shopify store will be ready to attract visitors and convert them to customers!
13. Monitor your performance
After successful launch, the main part of your work is over.
However, continue to regularly crawl your website and check Google Search Console and analytics to monitor traffic and performance.
By continuously monitoring your performance, you will be able to react if some problems or issues arise.
FAQs
What are the main risks of migrating to Shopify?
The main risks include a potential drop in organic traffic, loss of revenue, and limited control over certain technical aspects of your site due to the nature of the Shopify platform.
Who should be on the migration team?
Key team members include an SEO specialist, a web developer, and optionally, a project manager to oversee the process.
How can I ensure my traffic is not affected during migration?
Follow a comprehensive migration checklist, back up your site, carefully plan and execute each step, and continuously monitor performance after the migration.
Summing all up
Migrating to Shopify can be a smooth and beneficial process if done correctly.
By following this checklist and involving the right team members, you will be able to maintain your organic traffic and avoid losing money in the process.
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