The pattern is depressingly consistent. A store replatforms to Shopify, the new site looks far better, and organic traffic falls off a cliff within two weeks. The design wasn't the problem. The URLs were.

Why rankings actually live at the URL

Search engines assign authority to specific addresses, not to your brand in the abstract. A product page that has ranked for three years has accumulated links, engagement history, and trust at that URL. Change the address without telling anyone and you've thrown that away and started from zero.

Shopify also enforces its own URL structure — /products/, /collections/, /pages/. If you're coming from WooCommerce or BigCommerce, essentially every URL on your site is about to change. That's not optional, which is exactly why the redirect map isn't optional either.

Build the map before you build the store

Crawl the existing site and export every indexed URL. Pull your top pages by organic traffic and by revenue. Then map each old URL to its closest new equivalent — one at a time, by hand, for anything that matters.

Resist the temptation to point everything at the homepage. A blanket redirect to / tells search engines the old page is gone rather than moved, and the authority evaporates. A redirect is only credited when the destination is genuinely equivalent.

What people forget

  • Category and collection pages. Often the strongest ranking pages on the site, and routinely overlooked in favor of products.
  • Blog posts. Frequently where the backlinks actually point.
  • Paginated and filtered URLs that picked up links over the years.
  • Image URLs, if you get meaningful traffic from image search.
  • Discontinued products. Redirect to the closest live alternative or the parent collection — not to a 404, and not to the homepage.

Launch week

Before flipping DNS: confirm the new site is crawlable and that you haven't shipped the staging noindex to production. That single leftover tag has cost more stores more traffic than any other launch mistake.

After: submit the new sitemap, watch Search Console coverage daily for two weeks, and crawl your own redirect list to verify each one returns a 301 to a live page. Chains and loops are common and quietly leak authority.

What normal looks like

Expect some turbulence — a 10–20% dip for a few weeks is typical while everything is recrawled. What isn't normal is a sustained 60% drop that never recovers. That's a redirect problem, and it's fixable if you catch it early.