Shopify migration checklist: what to move, redirect and check.

Before you start

Write down why you are moving. Lower running costs, fewer plugins, a better checkout, easier editing. The reason decides what you can leave behind.

Take a baseline. Export the last 12 months of organic traffic by page, your top search queries from Search Console, revenue by channel and conversion rate. Without it, nobody can tell afterwards whether the migration helped or hurt.

Crawl the old site and list every URL that returns a page, plus every URL with backlinks or traffic. That list becomes your redirect map. Then list every integration: ERP, stock, shipping, reviews, email, loyalty, accounting and marketplace feeds. Each one needs a Shopify equivalent or a reason to drop it.

Choose a launch window away from your peak trading weeks, with at least two weeks of buffer before any big sale, and agree one person in the business who signs off launch.

Move the data

Products and variants come first: titles, descriptions, SKUs, barcodes, prices, compare at prices, weights and options, with images and their alt text in the right order. Rebuild collections deliberately rather than copying a messy structure.

Customers move with names, emails, addresses and marketing consent status. Passwords do not transfer, so plan an account activation email and its timing. Bring across order history for customer accounts and reporting, gift card and store credit balances exactly, and any active discount codes with matching rules.

Blog posts and pages need their authors, dates, images and internal links. Reviews usually move through the review app's own import, and page titles, meta descriptions and structured data need moving too.

After import, spot check at least 20 products across categories for price, variants, images, stock and description. Then check the totals. Product count, customer count, order count and gift card balance should all match the old system.

Protect your search traffic

This is where migrations lose money. Shopify uses fixed URL patterns for products, collections, pages and blogs, so almost every old URL changes.

Map every old URL to its closest new URL: product to product, category to collection, article to article. Do not send everything to the home page. Google treats mass redirects to the home page as soft 404s, and the old page's value is lost.

Prioritise by value. Pages with traffic, revenue or backlinks come first, and each one is checked by hand. Import the redirects into Shopify before DNS switches, and test a sample on the staging store.

Keep page titles and headings on high traffic pages unless there is a reason to change them, and change one thing at a time. Rebuild internal links to point at new URLs directly. Check product, review and breadcrumb structured data carries over, set canonical tags for products that sit in several collections, prepare the XML sitemap, and make sure the staging block on search engines is removed at launch.

Rebuild tracking and check the numbers

A new store with broken tracking looks like a failed migration, even when sales are fine. Treat tracking as part of the build, not an afterthought.

Rebuild the GA4 ecommerce events for the new checkout, and use either Shopify's native GA4 connection or a hand built tag, not both. Reconnect ad platform tracking, including Meta's Conversions API and Google Ads conversions. Make sure the cookie banner on the new store blocks tags until the visitor chooses.

Test every payment method end to end, including those that redirect off the site, and check each purchase arrives in GA4 once. Match tax and shipping settings to how Finance reports revenue, so the new store can be compared fairly with the old one.

Then reconcile the first week. Compare Shopify orders, GA4 purchases and payment provider settlements for the same days, and explain every difference. When each gap has a name, marketing and Finance can stop arguing about which figure is right.

Launch day

Run the final product, customer and order sync from the old platform. Switch DNS and confirm HTTPS on every version of the domain. Remove the storefront password and the search engine block.

Test ten redirects from the priority list, including at least one product, one collection and one article. Place a real order with a real card and refund it. Submit the sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and watch GA4 realtime for page views and the test purchase.

Tell customer service what has changed, including the account activation email, so they are ready for the questions it brings.

The first 30 days

For the first week, check Search Console daily for 404s and crawl errors, and add redirects for any old URL still getting visits.

Each week, compare organic traffic and revenue with the baseline. Some movement is normal for a few weeks after a migration. A steady fall on key pages is not. Watch high value pages individually, because a healthy total can hide one important category losing most of its traffic.

At the end of the first full month, run the finance reconciliation again, and ask partners and directories that link to old URLs to update their links.

If you are planning a move, a Discover audit is a sensible first step. We crawl the site, build the redirect priority list and check tracking, so you know the real scope before anyone quotes for the build. Our Shopify builds start from £6,000, scoped after that audit.