Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing your SEO

Most migration guides stop at "your products are in Shopify". That's the half that's easy to see. The half that decides your next quarter is whether the URLs people already link to still work.

Why URLs break

WooCommerce and Shopify structure URLs differently. A product at /shop/blue-linen-shirt/ becomes /products/blue-linen-shirt, and a category at /product-category/shirts/ becomes /collections/shirts. Every old link — Google's index, other people's blog posts, your own newsletters — points at a page that no longer exists.

What a redirect does

A 301 redirect tells search engines the page moved permanently and passes on most of its ranking. Without it you keep the product but lose its position; with it, visitors land where they expect and your rankings carry across.

Doing it in bulk

Writing redirects by hand is fine for ten products and impossible for a thousand. When SyncifyPro migrates a WooCommerce store it generates a Redirects sheet alongside the catalog: the old path in one column, the new handle in the other, one row per product and category. It imports with everything else.

A sensible order

1. Migrate into Shopify while the old store is still live.
2. Check a sample of products, collections and customers.
3. Import the redirects.
4. Switch DNS.
5. Watch Search Console for 404s over the next fortnight and add any stragglers by hand.

Keep the old store reachable for a few weeks if you can. It's the quickest way to check a product's original data when something looks off.