If you’ve spent years building up your search rankings, the idea of moving platforms probably makes you nervous. That’s fair. Your rankings took real work to earn, and a messy migration can put them at risk.

Here’s the reassuring part: the risk isn’t mysterious, and it isn’t really about Shopify itself. It comes down to a few specific things that break when nobody catches them in time, mostly around URLs and redirects. Catch those, and your migration doesn’t have to cost you your rankings.

Google backs this up directly. Its guidance on site moves states plainly that “301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.” The risk isn’t moving your store. It’s moving it without mapping your old URLs to your new ones.

What puts your rankings at risk

Every platform structures its URLs a little differently. Shopify uses fixed conventions: /products/ for product pages, /collections/ for category pages, /pages/ for static content, and /blogs/ for blog posts. Your old platform almost certainly used something different, and Shopify won’t let you keep that structure.

When your URLs change and nothing points the old ones to the new ones, two things happen. Anyone who bookmarked or linked to an old URL hits a dead page. And search engines that had indexed your old URLs eventually treat them as gone, along with whatever ranking signal they’d built up, unless a redirect tells them where that content moved.

The fix for both problems is the same: a 301 redirect from every meaningful old URL to its new Shopify equivalent. The tricky part isn’t knowing that redirects matter. It’s knowing which URLs need one, because a few categories don’t have an obvious place to point.

The URLs that don’t map automatically

Products, collections, and content pages each have a clear Shopify equivalent, so their redirects are straightforward to set up. Our 301 Redirects add-on creates them automatically for products, categories, and CMS pages once the migration finishes. Brand or vendor pages are a different story, and they’re worth understanding before you migrate, not after.

A BigCommerce case: 149 broken links, three causes

Here’s a real example. A BigCommerce store moving to Shopify ran a crawl of their new site after migration and found 149 broken links. This store didn’t use a redirect add-on. Working through the list by category turned up three distinct causes, each with a different fix.

Some were expected. A handful of products were disabled or in draft status on both the old and new store, so a 404 there was correct behavior, not a bug. No redirect was needed.

Some were brand pages, and this is the one that catches people off guard. BigCommerce (like several platforms) gives every brand its own dedicated page with a stable URL. Shopify doesn’t work the same way. By default, Shopify’s vendor field only generates a filtered results page (/collections/vendors?q=Brand) rather than a fixed, indexable page the way a BigCommerce brand page is. If your old brand URLs need to redirect somewhere real, you (or your migration team) need to build a Shopify collection for that brand first. It won’t happen on its own.

Some were the source platform’s internal redirects. These were URLs that already pointed somewhere else on the old platform. A standard product-and-content migration doesn’t carry that redirect list forward, so it needs its own step.

The fix in all three cases was the same: go through the list, sort real issues from expected ones, and add the missing redirects in Shopify’s admin, which accepts a CSV import on its URL redirects page when there are too many to add one at a time. None of this is exotic. It has to happen, and it’s a lot easier to do calmly before launch than to scramble after your rankings start slipping.

If you do use the redirect add-on, plan for brand pages and your old platform’s existing redirects either way. They sit outside what a product, category, and CMS redirect covers.

What doing this well looks like before you migrate

We’ve also seen the other end of this, where a merchant handles it well from the start. One Shopware store moving to Shopify came to their migration with a detailed pre-launch checklist of their own: an exact old-to-new URL mapping for every page, and a specific requirement that meta titles match the originals precisely, including characters like ä, ö, ü, and ß that show up often in German-language product names.

That’s the level of care that protects a store’s rankings through a migration. It’s not complicated. It takes doing the work of mapping things out before launch, instead of finding out what broke after. If you’re also moving custom fields or product attributes, our Shopify data migration guide covers the same idea for your data.

Your SEO migration checklist

Before you migrate

List every live URL. Crawl your current site and get a full list of your live URLs. You can’t map what you haven’t listed.
Map old URLs to new ones. Build an old-to-new URL mapping for every product, collection, and content page, and don’t skip brand or vendor pages if your current platform gives them their own URLs.
Find your existing redirects. Check whether your current platform has internal redirects already in place. Those need to be carried over too, not only your primary URLs.
Check your meta data. Confirm your meta titles and descriptions will transfer as-is, including any special characters or non-English text.

Right after you go live

Recrawl the new site. Use a tool like Screaming Frog or Semrush and compare the results against your pre-migration list. This is how the BigCommerce store above caught its 149 broken links, and it’s the most useful step in this whole checklist.
Submit your sitemap. Shopify generates one automatically at /sitemap.xml. Submit it in Google Search Console so Google can find and reindex your new URLs faster.
Keep your redirects live. Google recommends keeping them in place for at least a year, since that’s how long it can take for ranking signals to fully transfer.
Watch your rankings for the first few weeks. A small dip during reindexing is normal. A steep drop usually means a redirect is missing somewhere, and it’s worth tracking down quickly rather than waiting to see if it resolves by itself.

Common questions about SEO and Shopify migrations

Will I lose my Google rankings by moving to Shopify?

Not automatically. Google’s guidance says a proper redirect doesn’t cost you PageRank. Rankings usually dip briefly while Google reindexes your new URLs, then recover, as long as every important old URL redirects somewhere real.

How long should I keep my redirects active?

At least a year, per Google’s recommendation. That’s roughly how long it can take for all your ranking signals to fully transfer to your new URLs.

Do I need to redirect every old URL?

Every URL that search engines have indexed or that people might still link to. That includes your product pages, collection pages, blog posts, and any brand or vendor pages your old platform generated automatically.

What’s the fastest way to catch a missed redirect?

Recrawl your live site right after launch with a tool like Screaming Frog or Semrush, and compare the results against your pre-migration URL list. That’s how the broken links in the BigCommerce example got caught, and it’s the best early-warning check you have.

Not sure what your current URL structure will need once it’s on Shopify? Talk to our migration team and we’ll map it out with you before you commit to anything.

SEO-Safe Migration to Shopify: Protecting Your Rankings