To move a WooCommerce store to Shopify without losing rankings, map every old URL to its new home, carry the metadata over, and upload the redirects before DNS changes. Most migrations lose traffic because that SEO work starts after launch, when the old URLs already return 404s and Google has started dropping them. Here is the order I work in.
What should you do before building the Shopify store?
Crawl, map and save everything that ranks.
Crawl the old site. Export every URL that gets organic traffic or has backlinks. Search Console, the analytics tool, and a crawl of the live site together give you the list. Include images and PDFs that rank.
Map every URL. WordPress URLs rarely match Shopify’s /products/, /collections/ and /pages/ structure. Build a spreadsheet with the old URL and its new home. Category pages become collections, product pages become products, blog posts move to the Shopify blog with the same slug where possible.
Save the metadata. Titles, meta descriptions, alt text and any structured data plugins are adding. Shopify will not import them from WooCommerce on its own.
What matters most when building the Shopify store?
Collections, clean product data and speed.
Collections first. Collection pages carry most of an e-commerce site’s rankings. Set them up with the same keyword targeting as the old category pages, and write the collection description with that keyword in mind. This is the core of e-commerce SEO.
Product data. Import with variants, SKUs, weights and inventory intact. Check a sample of products for options that WooCommerce handled as separate products but Shopify should handle as variants, or the reverse.
Theme and speed. Choose a theme for the catalogue, not the demo. Keep apps to the ones that earn their place. Test Core Web Vitals before launch, not after.
What happens on launch day?
Redirects, Search Console and tracking, in that order.
Redirects. Upload the redirect map to Shopify’s URL redirects before DNS changes. Test the top 50 URLs by traffic manually.
Search Console. Add the new property, submit the new sitemap, and use the change of address tool if the domain is changing.
Tracking. Verify GA4, the Meta pixel and any Conversions API setup fire on the new store with the right values. A migration is the most common place for tracking to silently break.
What should you check after launch?
Watch Search Console for 404s and crawl errors daily for the first two weeks. Fix redirects as they appear. Compare organic landing pages against the pre-migration list and investigate any page that lost more than its share.
The Caprice migration, a Hebrew and Russian jewelry brand, followed this order. If you want a second pair of eyes on a migration plan, send me the store and I will tell you what I would check first, or see how I handle Shopify migrations.