Will I lose my Google rankings when I move to Shopify?

Why do rankings drop after moving to Shopify?

Google ranks pages, and it knows each page by its web address. When a store moves platform, most of those addresses change. On Shopify, products, collections and pages always sit under /products/, /collections/ and /pages/, and Shopify says those names can’t be edited. Its own example: a shipping policy at /policies/shipping-policy on the old platform becomes /pages/shipping-policy on Shopify.

If an old address now shows “Page not found”, Google drops it in time, and every link pointing at it from other sites leads nowhere. A redirect sends visitors and Google from the old address to the new one. Google’s guidance on site moves lists the mistakes that most often stop a new site being indexed properly:

• Missing redirects, or redirects to the wrong address. Google says it often sees sites redirecting to new addresses that don’t exist.
• Many old pages redirected to the home page. Google says this can confuse visitors and may be treated as a “soft 404”, an error.
• A block left over from building the site, such as a noindex rule or a robots.txt rule. On Shopify, the store’s private mode, behind its password page, hides every page from search engines.
• Sitemaps that still list the old addresses.
• Chains of redirects, one after another. Google can follow up to 10, but advises sending each address straight to its final page.

Google also suggests changing one thing at a time: if you want a new domain, a new platform and a new design, make the changes one after the other.

How long do rankings take to settle after a move?

Google says rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls and reindexes a site after any significant change. For a medium-sized site, it can take a few weeks or more before Google shows the new addresses instead of the old ones, and longer for a larger site. How fast depends mostly on how many addresses there are and how fast the server is.

The move happens one address at a time: Google has to visit every old and new address at least once, and there’s no fixed schedule for that. Submitting a sitemap of the new addresses helps Google find them sooner, and Search Console’s Sitemaps report shows how many of them are indexed.

How do I keep my rankings when I move to Shopify?

1. 01List every old address that matters. Google suggests starting with the pages in your sitemap, the ones with the most visits in your analytics, and the ones other sites link to (Search Console’s Links report). Include images and PDFs that get visits.
2. 02Map each old address to its new Shopify address, one to one: a product to the same product, a category to its collection. Don’t send old pages to the home page.
3. 03Plan for addresses Shopify can’t redirect: it won’t redirect addresses that begin /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services or /shop, and it only redirects addresses that no longer load a page.
4. 04Load the redirects into Shopify. In the Shopify admin, go to Content > Menus > View URL Redirects; they can be imported from a CSV file, and they work as soon as they’re saved. A store can have up to 100,000 URL redirects, or 20,000,000 on Shopify Plus.
5. 05Update the links inside the new store, so they point straight to the new addresses rather than through a redirect.
6. 06Switch over: connect your domain and make it the primary domain, take the store out of private mode, and check that no page you want found is set to noindex.
7. 07Test the redirects: type in the old addresses, starting with the most visited, and check each one lands on its matching page.
8. 08Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console. Every Shopify store makes one at /sitemap.xml. If the domain has changed too, also use Search Console’s Change of Address tool for the old domain.
9. 09Keep the redirects for at least a year, and update the links you control: your social profiles, email signature and ads.

If you keep the same domain, Google says you don’t need the Change of Address tool: it’s only for moves from one domain or subdomain to another.

My rankings dropped after moving to Shopify. What should I check?

Work through these in order. The first three are the most common, and the quickest to fix.

• The old addresses. Open your 20 most visited old addresses from your analytics. Each should land on its matching new page in one step, not on “Page not found” and not on the home page.
• Private mode. If the store is still behind its password page, Google can’t see any of it. In the Shopify admin, Online Store shows whether access is Private or Public.
• Pages set to noindex. Shopify can hide a page with a seo.hidden metafield or with code in the theme, and an Unlisted product is hidden from search too. Search Console’s URL Inspection tool shows what Google saw on any page of your store.
• robots.txt. Shopify’s default file suits most stores. Shopify warns that a customised robots.txt.liquid file, used wrongly, can lose a store all its traffic.
• The sitemap. Check the one submitted in Search Console is the new store’s, on the domain you use now.
• Errors in Search Console. A jump in “Not found (404)” addresses in the Page indexing report points to redirects that are missing.

Once all six are right, give it time. Google says rankings settle down as it recrawls, and that crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks. A missing redirect added late still helps: Shopify’s redirects work as soon as they’re saved.

What does a move to Shopify cost, with the redirects done?

We move a store to Shopify for US$1,250, fixed, in US dollars, at the same price in the US, the UK and Canada. Up to 300 products, 3 to 4 weeks. The full redirect map is part of the price, not an extra.

What the US$1,250 move includes, and what it doesn’t:

Payment is in two stages: half to start, half at launch. See moving a store to Shopify, or the page for your platform: WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, Etsy, Magento or BigCommerce.

Questions