A Step-by-Step Guide to Migrate from Shopify to Other Platforms

Migrating your e-commerce site from Shopify to another platform can seem like a daunting task, but with proper planning and execution, it can be a smooth and successful process. 

In this chapter, we’ll discuss a step-by-step migration process which includes the pre-migration, launch, and post-migration stages.

2.1 Pre-migration Stage

Here are some of the crucial pre-migration aspects you must consider for successful website migration. 

Planning

The first step in the pre-migration stage is to plan your migration. 

It starts with creating an end-to-end migration checklist. Also, you need to anticipate and procure the resources for the migration project. 

Consider these factors while creating your checklist and planning your migration resources:

• Goals: What are the objectives of the migration project? For example, do you want to improve your website's performance, gain more control over your data, or reduce costs?

• Scope: What parts of your website will you be migrating? Will you be moving your entire site or just certain sections?

• Team: Who will lead the migration process and who will be involved in planning & execution? 

You should also check whether you’re well-equipped to handle the process in-house or require assistance from an external SEO agency. 

• Concerns: What are the major concerns around the migration process? For instance, will the keyword rankings and traffic stay consistent or will they be impacted? 

• Risks: Assess the risks associated with the website migration process. For example, will you experience downtime, or will you be at risk of losing traffic or sales?

Crawl the Existing Shopify Site

Next, crawl your existing Shopify website to get an idea of the structure and content. This process will provide you with information such as title tags, headings, subheadings, canonical tags, meta-description, internal and external links, noindex/nofollow pages, server status, etc.

This way, you can take stock of your URLs and content inventory. And, you’d also come to know if there are any issues on your site that need to be fixed during the migration process. 

You can use tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. to crawl your site. 

Record Benchmarks

Your historical data is important for analysis purposes. But sometimes, you may lose analytics data during a website migration. So it’s advisable to keep a record of these benchmarks. 

This includes tracking important website metrics such as page views, bounce rate, and conversion rate. This will allow you to compare your site’s performance before and after migration and identify any areas for improvement.

Define SEO Requirements

When you migrate your site to a new CMS, you must outline your SEO requirements for web developers. This is even more important when you’ve hired an external agency to design and develop your new website. 

Some of the key SEO considerations for web developers include:

• Site structure and speed
• Meta data (titles and descriptions)
• URL structure
• Headings, subheadings, and body content
• XML sitemaps
• Structured data
• URL redirects
• Mobile optimisation, etc. 

Identify Priority Pages

You can measure the success of migration based on the quantity and quality of pages moved from your Shopify site to the new platform. 

Hence, you need to identify the priority pages on your site. These may include your homepage, product pages, and any pages that receive a lot of traffic or generate significant revenue. These pages should be given priority during the migration process to ensure that they are up and running as quickly as possible.

You can check your top-performing pages in Google Analytics by clicking on Behaviour>Site Content>All Pages tabs on the side panel. 

Export these URLs into a spreadsheet to check whether they’re migrated successfully on the new platform. 

Map your URLs

If you’re going to make changes in the URL structure of your webpages, you need to map your existing Shopify site's URLs to the URLs of your new site. This is important because changes to a website's URLs can affect its search engine ranking, and any broken links can negatively impact user experience. 

Here’s what you need to do: 

• Create a spreadsheet with two columns to record the old and new URLs.
• Map each old URL to its corresponding new URL in the spreadsheet.

This sheet will be helpful in the next step — planning URL redirects. 

Plan your Redirects 

Planning URL redirects is a critical part of site migration. Redirects help search engines and users navigate through your site's removed, renamed, and relocated pages. 

Search engines can establish the relationship between your old and new URLs with the help of redirects. Thus, you can retain the ranking of your old web pages and maintain consistent traffic. 

That’s why you should proactively create a redirection plan before launching the new site to ensure everything is in place before making the switch. Also, make sure you’ve tested and verified the redirects before the launch.

Here are some best practices to follow when implementing URL redirection during site migration:

• Use 301 redirects: 301 redirects are the most search engine-friendly way to redirect a URL permanently. They transfer the PageRank from the old URL to the new one and indicate to search engines that the old page has moved permanently to a new location.

• Redirect individual pages: Redirect each page on the old site to the corresponding page on the new site. 

• Update internal links: After implementing URL redirection, make sure to update all internal links on your new site to point to the new URLs. This will ensure that users can easily navigate your site, and search engines can crawl all your pages.

• Monitor redirects: Keep an eye on your site's traffic and rankings after migration. Check if any of your pages are still getting traffic from the old URLs and update the redirects accordingly.

2.2 Launch Stage

Now, it’s time to initiate the migration of your Shopify site. 

The launch day can be exciting and scary at the same time. As long as you’ve spent enough time in preparation and conducted pre-migration testing, you won’t have many surprises (or shocks) during the launch. 

Update DNS Settings

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform. So when you migrate your store from Shopify, you’d also move your site to a new server. 

In this case, you need to update your DNS records to point them to the site’s new location. To accomplish this, your web development or IT team needs to coordinate with your old and new hosting service providers. 

Make the New Site Accessible

Once your new site is ready and URLs redirects are set up, remove the limitations you may have set to restrict users and search engines on the new site. 

It can include limitations like HTTP authentication, noindex tags, Robot.txt disallows, etc. 

2.3 Post-migration Stage

Well done! You’ve just launched your new website. 

But before you start your team celebrations, it’s important to ensure that everything is working well on your new site. Take the following actions to make sure your new eCommerce site is functioning properly. 

Submit Sitemaps

Once you launch your new site, submit the XML sitemaps in Google Search Console (GSC) to inform Google to crawl your updated URLs. Sitemaps help search engines index your updated pages faster and more efficiently. 

At the same time, ensure that the XML sitemap that contains your old URLs remains accessible on your Shopify domain at least for a month after the migration. This will help search engines find your new pages quickly. 

Crawl New Website

Once your new website is live, perform a crawl to see if all the important pages are being crawled and indexed successfully. 

In addition, keep track of crawl stats in GSC to ensure Google is crawling the pages on your new site. Also, check whether indexing settings are correct in GSC and find out if there are any crawl errors reported. This will help you to take quick remedial action. 

Fix Post-migration Issues

Crawl report will highlight the anomalies and errors that the crawler encounters while crawling your new website. 

For instance, if you crawl your site with a tool like Ahrefs site audit tool, it’ll highlight if there are issues like redirect errors, redirect chains, broken links, crawling & indexing errors, etc. 

If you find such errors on your site, follow the recommendations given in the crawl report and fix the issues. 

However, if you don’t have access to the premium SEO tools, you can use our Free Site Audit Tool. We recommend you conduct an SEO audit for your website regularly to keep its SEO health in check. 

Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console

It’s a given that you must register your new property (website) with GSC and Google Analytics (preferably Google Analytics 4) immediately after migration. This will help you avoid any potential gaps in data and reporting. 

Monitor Performance

It’s common to experience a temporary drop in traffic after migration. But it’s advisable to closely monitor your site’s SEO performance initially to make sure that nothing major has been missed during the migration that affects traffic. 

Also, note that the number of pages that were indexed from the old site should go down. And the number of indexed URLs from the new website should increase.