Moving to Shopify: a migration checklist that protects your URLs

• Crawl the old store. Save every URL with its title and meta description, along with your top pages by traffic and by revenue. You can’t recreate this after the old site is gone.
• Decide what history you need. Do you need all the old orders, or only recent ones? Migrating everything takes time and rarely gets used.
• List every app and custom rule on the old store. Each one needs a Shopify equivalent, a replacement, or a decision to drop it.
• Choose your plan. Some features depend on it, and it sets your redirect allowance and API limits.

Shopify’s guide gives one firm rule for order: “Import your products first, then your customers, and then any historical orders”, so that orders connect properly to the records they refer to.

Shopify’s redirect rules are worth reading before you build the list, because some of them can catch you out:

• Standard stores can create up to 100,000 redirects, and Plus stores up to 20,000,000.
• Redirects only work from broken URLs. If a page loads at the old address, the redirect won’t fire.
• Some paths can’t be redirected, including /products, /collections and /collections/all, along with prefixes such as /apps, /cart and /services. Check the full list. Collection URLs filtered by tag can’t be redirected at all.
• You can bulk-import redirects from a CSV under Content > Menus > URL redirects, and export them again.
• 301s get cached by browsers and search engines, so a mistake can linger after you fix it.

Your old URLs almost certainly differ from Shopify’s, as Shopify’s own guide warns. Map each important old page to the single most relevant new one, not to the home page. Sort your crawl by traffic and do the top pages by hand, then handle long-tail products with a pattern. Filtered and paginated URLs often don’t deserve a redirect, so check whether they ever received traffic.

1. Place test orders using each payment provider and shipping rule. Check tax on them.
2. Lower the DNS TTL ahead of time, connect the domain, and remove the storefront password.
3. Turn staff order notifications back on after the import.
4. Crawl your list of old URLs and confirm that each one lands where it should. Fix any 404 or redirect chain.
5. Check that titles and descriptions moved across on your top pages, and that your analytics and tracking are firing.
6. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and review coverage and 404 reports weekly for a month.
7. Keep the old store’s data and admin access until you are sure nothing else is needed.

If an ERP or warehouse system has to connect, plan it alongside this work. See the Shopify ERP integration guide.