The single highest-leverage SEO discipline in a Magento → Shopify migration. This is the checklist I run for every migration; deviate at your peril.
Why 1:1 redirects matter
Without proper redirects, organic traffic drops 30-60% in the first two weeks and never fully recovers. With them, the drop is 5-15% temporary and recovers fully by week 8. The work is straightforward; the discipline is what wins.
Pre-migration audit
- Export Magento’s URL list (every category, subcategory, product, CMS page, blog post).
- Pull the top 500 organic-traffic URLs from Google Search Console (last 12 months).
- Pull the top 500 referrer URLs from Ahrefs / Semrush.
- Cross-reference: which Magento URLs drive 80% of the traffic? These get manual-review redirect attention.
- Document any URL patterns that won’t translate cleanly (e.g., session-ID URLs, category-subcategory-product paths that flatten in Shopify).
Build the redirect map
- One CSV row per Magento URL → Shopify URL.
- Format matches Shopify’s URL Redirects admin import (see the template).
- Strip session IDs and query strings from Magento side; preserve only the canonical path.
- For category URLs that don’t have a 1:1 Shopify collection, redirect to the closest parent.
- For products that deduplicate on Shopify (configurable + variants), redirect every Magento variant URL to the parent Shopify product.
- For deleted products, redirect to the closest collection — never to home page (Google penalizes mass-redirect-to-home as soft 404 signal).
- Audit the top 100 traffic URLs by hand. Auto-generation handles 95% correctly; the top-100 review catches the misses that matter.
Test before launch
- Stand up the redirect map in a staging Shopify store.
- Run a sample of 100 URLs through it — verify each returns 301 to the correct destination.
- Run Screaming Frog against the staging site — flag any redirect chains (A → B → C) or loops.
- Verify no redirect points to a 404 on the Shopify side.
Cutover day
- Deploy the redirect map in Shopify before DNS swap. Verify rules are active.
- Swap DNS during the low-traffic window.
- Verify top-50 URLs by hand within the first hour — 301 → correct Shopify destination → 200 OK.
- Submit new sitemap to Google Search Console.
- Submit new sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Set up Search Console URL inspection for top 20 URLs to confirm Google sees the redirects.
First 30 days
- Daily: Search Console crawl-error sweep. Address any new 404s flagged as previously-indexed.
- Weekly: organic-traffic delta vs. pre-launch baseline.
- Weekly: ranking check on top 50 keywords — flag any that dropped more than 3 positions.
- Daily for the first week: error-log sweep on the redirect map. If a redirect throws, fix immediately.
Days 30 to 90
- Recovery monitoring — by day 60, organic should be at 90%+ of pre-launch.
- By day 90, full recovery on all but a handful of long-tail terms.
- Written report at day 30, day 60, day 90 — share with stakeholders.
Common mistakes (avoid)
- Mass-redirect to home page. Google treats this as soft-404 signal. Always redirect to the nearest meaningful page.
- Skipping the audit step. Without the Search Console + Ahrefs cross-reference, you miss redirects for traffic-driving URLs.
- 302 instead of 301. Use 301 (permanent). 302 doesn’t pass link equity.
- Redirect chains. A → B → C dilutes signal and slows crawl. Always direct A → C.
- Not testing before launch. “Test on cutover day” is too late.
For the full migration (catalog, customers, redirects, SEO, B2B, payments), see /magento-to-shopify-migration/. For the CSV template that matches Shopify’s admin import format, see /templates/shopify-redirect-map-template/.
