PLAYBOOK

The Shopify migration checklist

Five phases from the inventory to the weeks after launch, built around the steps that get missed.

THE SHORT ANSWER

List what you have, decide what moves, map every URL, rehearse on staging, then watch both sites after launch. Most migration problems come from something nobody wrote down.

IN SHORT

A migration goes wrong in the parts nobody listed: URLs that change, data nobody decided about, and integrations that were never written down. The checklist is built around finding those first.
Work on a staging store until the cutover, and have a way back before you switch. A migration you cannot reverse is a bigger risk than a slow one.
For search, the points that matter most are one-to-one URL redirects, no chains, no mass redirect to the home page, and watching the old and new sites in Search Console.
This page has no timeline or success rate of ours. How long a migration takes depends on your data, your integrations and your design, and the checklist helps you size those.

Phase 1: inventory what you have

You cannot decide what to move until you know what exists.

Crawl the current site and export every URL: products, collections, pages, posts and any that earn links or traffic.
List the data types: products, variants, collections, customers, orders, reviews, gift cards, discount codes, subscriptions.
List every connected system: ERP or inventory, warehouse, tax, shipping, email and SMS, reviews, loyalty, analytics and tags.
List what the current store does that a plain Shopify store does not: custom checkout rules, account features, wholesale pricing, integrations.
Note who owns each system and who can give you access, because waiting for credentials is the commonest delay.
Record today’s numbers you will compare against later: orders, revenue, organic traffic, top landing pages and speed.

Phase 2: decide and prepare the data

Moving everything is not always the right call.

Decide what moves and what does not, in writing: old order history, inactive customers, retired products, reviews.
Clean the data before it moves: duplicates, missing fields, inconsistent variant names and broken image links.
Plan how customers get into their accounts on the new store, and how you will tell them.
Plan subscriptions and stored payment details separately, with your payment provider and subscription app, because they are the hardest data to move.
Build the new store on a staging store, not the live one, and import a test set first.
Check the import line by line against the source for a sample of products and customers, not only by count.

Phase 3: map the URLs and protect search

Summarized from Google’s site-move guidance, checked on October 10, 2026. Nobody can promise a ranking result.

Build a map of every old URL to its closest new one. Google: site moves with URL changes
Use permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308), and send each old URL straight to its final destination, with no chains.
Do not send many unrelated old URLs to the home page: Google can treat that as a soft 404. Let retired pages return 404 or 410.
Import the redirects into Shopify with its URL redirect feature, and test a sample of every type: product, collection, page, post and any with links.
Carry over titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonical tags, structured data and image alt text for the pages that matter.
Verify both the old and the new site in Search Console, including every variant, before you switch.
Keep the redirects live for at least a year.

Phase 4: rehearse, then cut over

The cutover should be a boring event because you have already done it once.

Run a full rehearsal on staging: place orders in every market and with every payment method, then refund them.
Check tax and shipping totals in each market, including whether prices include tax.
Test every integration end to end: an order reaches the warehouse, inventory updates, emails send, analytics fires.
Lower the DNS time-to-live ahead of the switch, so a change takes effect quickly and can be reversed quickly.
Freeze content and settings on the old store, then plan a final sync of new orders and customers.
Write the way back before you switch: what you revert, who decides and by when.
Pick a quiet window, with the people who can fix each system on hand.

Phase 5: watch the weeks after launch

Problems show up after launch, not during it.

Check redirects and 404 errors every day at first, and fix any URL that people or crawlers still request.
Compare orders, revenue and conversion against the numbers you recorded in phase one.
Watch organic traffic and indexed pages for the old and new sites in Search Console.
Expect a crawl surge on the new site, and check the server copes with it.
Reconcile orders between the store and your other systems for the first weeks.
Re-test speed on the pages that take the traffic, and the checkout on a phone.

Migrate in one go, or in phases?

The honest answer is the less ambitious one, when you can.

	One cutover	Phased moveUSUALLY THIS
Right when	A small catalog, few integrations, one market	Many markets, many integrations or a large catalog
Main risk	Everything that is wrong shows up on the same day	Two systems to keep in step for longer
Reversibility	One decision to roll back	Each phase can be rolled back on its own
Start with	A complete rehearsal on staging	The lowest-risk market or range first

Questions about migrating to Shopify

What should be on a Shopify migration checklist?

An inventory of your URLs, data and integrations; decisions on what moves; a clean, tested data import; a one-to-one URL redirect map; a rehearsal on staging; a cutover plan with a way back; and monitoring of errors, orders and search traffic afterwards. The five phases above put them in order.

Will migrating to Shopify hurt my search rankings?

It can, if URLs change without redirects or content is lost. Google’s site-move guidance says to map each old URL to a new one, use permanent server-side redirects and monitor both sites. Done carefully, the risk is mostly in the redirects, so test them before you switch. Nobody can promise a result.

How long does a Shopify migration take?

It depends on the number of products and customers, how much custom functionality you need to rebuild, how many systems connect to the store and how much of the design changes. There is no honest universal figure, so ask each agency what in your store drives theirs. The inventory in phase one is what lets them answer.

Which data should I migrate, and what can I leave behind?

Products, collections, customers and recent orders are the usual core. Decide deliberately about old order history, reviews, gift cards, discount codes and subscriptions, because each can be harder to move than it looks. Anything you leave behind, keep a record of.

Do I need to keep the old redirects forever?

Google’s guidance suggests keeping them for at least a year, and longer where old URLs still get links or traffic. The cost of leaving them is small, and the cost of removing them early is lost traffic.

What about a store that sells in the US, UK and Australia?

Settle the market setup before the data import: currencies, whether prices include tax, which domain or path each market uses, and which products sell where. Test checkout totals in each market during the rehearsal, because tax-inclusive and tax-added prices behave differently.

Where we help

The migration pages for each platform, and the tools to size the project.

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