Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO
A field-tested checklist for preserving rankings, redirects, and reviews when you move a store off WordPress.
Replatforming scares people for one reason: the fear of waking up to a traffic cliff. Done carefully, a WooCommerce to Shopify move keeps your rankings intact and often improves them, because the new store is faster and cleaner. The trick is to treat SEO as a migration deliverable, not an afterthought.
Map every URL before you touch anything
Export a full crawl of the live WooCommerce site first. You want every product, collection, blog post, and CMS page with its current URL and its target Shopify URL sitting side by side in one sheet. This map is the single source of truth for the entire project.
- Products: /product/slug becomes /products/slug
- Categories: /product-category/slug becomes /collections/slug
- Blog posts: /2025/05/slug becomes /blogs/news/slug
- Flag any URL with traffic or backlinks as high priority
Ship 301 redirects on day one
Shopify lets you bulk import redirects under Online Store, Navigation, URL Redirects. Load your map as a CSV the moment the store goes live so no old link ever returns a 404. A 301 passes the large majority of link equity, which is exactly what you want.
Carry the trust signals over
Reviews are ranking and conversion gold, so migrate them with a tool that preserves star ratings and review schema. Rebuild title tags and meta descriptions from your export rather than letting the theme auto generate them, and recreate your structured data for products so rich results keep showing.
Verify, then watch
After launch, resubmit your sitemap in Search Console, confirm the redirects resolve in one hop, and keep the old analytics property open for comparison. Expect a small wobble in week one, then a return to baseline. If something slips, your URL map tells you exactly where to look.
