Moving from WooCommerce or Wix to Shopify without losing your search rankings.

Moving to Shopify is usually a good decision. The risk is not the platform. The risk is that every page on your old shop has an address that Google knows, and those addresses change in the move. If nobody tells Google where each page went, the rankings those pages earned are lost.

The good news is that this is a planning problem, not a technical mystery. Follow the steps below in order and most shops keep their traffic through the move.

Why rankings drop after a move

Google ranks pages, not whole websites. Each product, category and blog post has its own place in the results, built up over time from visits and links.

When you move to Shopify, three things tend to go wrong:

• Addresses change and nothing points to the new ones. The old address returns a "page not found" error, and Google drops it.
• Content gets lost. Product descriptions are shortened, page titles are left on the default, and image descriptions are not copied across.
• Links break. Other websites, old emails and social posts still point to the old addresses.

Each of these can be fixed before launch. The fix for the first one is a redirect: a rule that sends anyone asking for the old address, including Google, to the new one.

Before you move: take an inventory

You cannot redirect pages you do not know about. Before anything else, make a full list of the addresses on your current site.

Collect them from more than one place, because each source misses something:

1. Your sitemap. WooCommerce sites with an SEO plugin usually have one at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. Wix creates one at /sitemap.xml.
2. Google Search Console. The Pages report lists the addresses Google has indexed. The Performance report shows which pages bring in clicks. Export both.
3. Your analytics. Export the landing pages that brought in visits over the last year.
4. A crawl. A crawler such as Screaming Frog follows every link on the site and finds pages the sitemap missed.
5. Links from other sites. The Links report in Search Console shows which of your pages other sites link to. These pages matter most.

Put every address in one spreadsheet. Mark the pages that bring in the most clicks and links. Those are the ones to check by hand later.

How Shopify addresses differ

Shopify uses fixed prefixes for its page types. You can change the last part of an address, called the handle, but not the prefix.

• Products. WooCommerce uses /product/blue-mug/ by default and Wix uses /product-page/blue-mug. On Shopify it becomes /products/blue-mug.
• Categories. WooCommerce uses /product-category/mugs/ by default. On Shopify a category is a collection, at /collections/mugs.
• Pages. An about page at /about becomes /pages/about.
• Blog posts. A WooCommerce post often sits at /my-post/ and a Wix post at /post/my-post. On Shopify it becomes /blogs/news/my-post.

So almost every address will change, even when the product names stay the same. That is normal. It is why the redirect map below is the most important part of the move.

Keep the handles the same as your old slugs where you can. If your old product lived at /product/blue-mug/, give the Shopify product the handle blue-mug. It keeps the redirect map simple and the new address familiar.

Build the redirect map

A redirect map is a two-column list: the old address on the left, the new address on the right. Work through your inventory row by row.

• Map one to one. Each old product goes to the same product on Shopify. Each old category goes to the matching collection.
• Pick the closest match when a page is gone. A discontinued product can point to its collection. Do not send everything to the home page. Google treats a pile of redirects to the home page much like errors.
• Include the odd ones. Tag pages, paginated category pages, old campaign pages and image attachment pages often have links pointing at them.
• Use paths, not full addresses, on the left. Shopify expects the old path, such as /product/blue-mug/.

Shopify lets you add redirects one at a time or import them from a spreadsheet. At the time of writing, you find them in the Shopify admin under Content, then Menus, then View URL redirects. Choose Import and upload a CSV file with a "Redirect from" column and a "Redirect to" column. Shopify's help centre has a sample file. See Shopify's guide to URL redirects for the current steps.

Two details from that guide are worth knowing. First, a Shopify redirect only works when the old address no longer loads a page on Shopify. Second, there is a limit on how many redirects a store can hold. At the time of writing (October 2026) it is 100,000, or 20,000,000 on Shopify Plus, which is far more than most shops need.

Keep what Google already reads

Redirects carry the address across. The page itself still has to be as good as it was. Copy these across for every product, collection and page:

• Page titles and meta descriptions. If your old SEO plugin had custom ones, export them. Shopify has a search engine listing section on every product, collection and page.
• Full product descriptions. Do not trim them to fit a new theme.
• Image alt text. The short description of each image helps search and screen readers.
• Headings. Keep one main heading per page, and keep the wording that matched what people search for.
• Blog posts and their dates. Old posts often bring in steady traffic.

Then update the links inside your content. A blog post that links to /product/blue-mug/ still works through the redirect, but a direct link to the new address is faster and cleaner.

Launch day

Plan the switch for a quiet time of the week. Then work through this list:

1. Keep the same domain. Moving platform and domain at the same time doubles the risk. If your domain was bought through Wix, connect it to Shopify or transfer it, but keep it.
2. Point the domain to Shopify and confirm the secure padlock works on the new shop.
3. Test the redirects. Run your crawler in list mode on every old address from your inventory. Each one should return a 301 redirect that lands on a working page. Fix anything that ends in an error.
4. Submit the new sitemap. Shopify creates one at /sitemap.xml. Add it in Google Search Console.
5. Check your top pages by hand. Open the twenty pages that bring in the most clicks and check that each lands where it should.

When the domain stays the same, you do not need Google's Change of Address tool. That tool is for moving to a new domain.

After launch: the first weeks

Some movement in rankings is normal while Google recrawls the site. It usually settles once Google has followed the redirects. What is not normal is a steady drop on pages that used to do well.

For the first month, check Search Console every few days:

• Pages report. New "not found" errors mean an old address was missed. Add a redirect for each.
• Performance report. Compare clicks for your top pages with the weeks before the move.
• Sitemaps report. Make sure Google read the new sitemap without errors.

Keep the redirects in place for good. Google's own advice on moving a site with URL changes is to keep them for at least a year, and links from other sites can keep sending people to old addresses for much longer.

A short checklist

• Every old address listed, with the top pages marked.
• A redirect map with one row per old address, and no mass redirects to the home page.
• Handles kept the same as the old slugs where possible.
• Titles, descriptions, alt text and full product copy copied across.
• Same domain, with the padlock working.
• Every old address tested and landing on a working page.
• New sitemap submitted, and Search Console checked weekly for a month.

A move done this way is mostly careful list work. If you would rather hand it over, we do the inventory, the map and the testing, and we stay on after launch to fix anything Google reports.