When a store moves platforms and its organic traffic drops, the usual suspect list starts with content. Owners assume the new product descriptions are weaker, or the new theme is slower, or Google simply distrusts change. Those factors can matter at the margins. The dominant cause is simpler: the old URLs stopped resolving, and nothing told Google where the pages went.

Search engines assign ranking signals to specific addresses. A product page that has earned links, reviews mentions, and years of click history holds that equity at its exact URL. Change the address without a forwarding instruction and the equity does not transfer. Google requests the old URL, receives a 404, and eventually drops the page from the index. The new page at the new address starts close to zero, because as far as the algorithm can tell, it is a new page.

The forwarding instruction is a 301 redirect: a server response that says this page has moved permanently, here is the new address. Google treats a 301 as a transfer order and passes the accumulated signals to the destination. A migration with complete redirects typically sees a temporary wobble while Google recrawls, then recovery. A migration without them sees a drop that no amount of new content marketing claws back quickly. Ecommerce SEO after a migration is largely the discipline of getting this transfer right for every URL that matters.

Shopify enforces a fixed URL structure. Products live at /products/product-name, collections at /collections/collection-name, and informational pages at /pages/page-name. Blog posts sit under /blogs/blog-name/post-title. Merchants cannot remove those prefixes; they are part of how the platform routes requests.

WordPress works differently. Permalinks are configurable, and WooCommerce stores commonly use cleaner patterns: /product/product-name or even /product-name at the root, category pages at /product-category/category-name, and posts wherever the permalink settings place them. A migrated store almost never reproduces Shopify’s paths exactly, and reproducing them is rarely worth the contortion.

The practical consequence: nearly every indexed URL on the store will change. A catalog of 200 products with 15 collections and a few dozen blog posts can carry several hundred indexed addresses, every one of which needs a mapped destination. This is not a reason to avoid migrating. It is the reason the redirect map is the central SEO artifact of the project.

A redirect map is a two-column list: every URL on the old site, and the URL on the new site that should answer for it. Teams that build this map before the WooCommerce build starts tend to make better structural decisions, because the map surfaces questions (what happens to this collection, where does this landing page go) while they are still cheap to answer.

The old-site column comes from three sources, combined and deduplicated. The Shopify sitemap lists what the platform considers live. Google Search Console’s performance and indexing reports show which URLs actually receive impressions, including old addresses that still rank. A crawl of the live store catches anything the first two miss. Pulling from all three matters because Search Console often reveals URLs earning traffic that nobody on the team remembers creating.

Each row then gets a destination. Products usually map one to one. Pages and posts usually map one to one. The map also earns its keep on priorities: the rows with real impressions and clicks in Search Console get verified by hand, while long-tail rows can be handled by pattern rules (for example, rewriting the /products/ prefix to the new product path) with spot checks.

Redirects go live at the moment DNS cuts over, not the following week. On a WordPress build, they can be implemented at the server level or through a redirection plugin; either works when the map behind it is complete.

Collections are where one-to-one mapping breaks down. Shopify merchants often accumulate overlapping collections (new arrivals, sale, gift guides, seasonal groupings) and the new WooCommerce category tree, usually cleaner and more deliberate, has no exact equivalent for each of them.

Deleting the concept and letting those URLs 404 is the expensive choice, because collection pages frequently rank for the category-level searches that bring in new customers rather than repeat ones. The workable options, in descending order of preservation:

• Map the collection to the closest WooCommerce product category, when one covers substantially the same products.
• Rebuild high-performing collections as curated WooCommerce pages or filtered category views, then redirect to those.
• Redirect the stragglers, the overlapping or abandoned collections with no meaningful search traffic, to the parent shop page.

Search Console decides which treatment each collection deserves. A collection with steady impressions for a commercial query justifies a rebuilt page. A collection nobody has clicked into for a year can safely roll up to its parent. Blanket-redirecting every collection to the homepage is the shortcut to avoid: Google treats mass redirects to an unrelated page as soft 404s, and the equity those pages held evaporates anyway.

URLs carry the equity, but the page-level SEO fields determine how the new pages present in results. Shopify stores title tags and meta descriptions per product, and merchants who have invested in seo on Shopify often have years of tuned titles in those fields. The product CSV export includes them, and a migration that imports name, description, and price while discarding the SEO columns quietly throws that work away. Carrying the fields into WooCommerce’s SEO plugin fields during import preserves the snippets Google already rewards.

Structured data deserves the same audit. Shopify themes emit product schema (price, availability, review ratings) that powers rich results in search listings. WooCommerce outputs its own product schema, and the house export pipeline this store runs on carries a full JSON-LD graph, but the point holds for any build: the new site’s product pages should present schema at least as complete as the old ones, verified with a rich-results test before launch rather than discovered missing after.

The same import pass covers image file names and alt text, which feed image search, and the XML sitemap, which should be submitted to Search Console the day the new site goes live.

Rankings do not settle on launch day. Google recrawls the old URLs, follows the redirects, reindexes the new pages, and reassigns signals over a period that commonly runs several weeks for a mid-size catalog. The first eight weeks of Search Console data show whether the migration is landing.

The coverage and indexing reports surface 404s Google encounters: each one is a missed row in the redirect map, and fixing them in the first days matters more than fixing them in the second month. The performance report shows impressions shifting from old URLs to new ones; the healthy pattern is a crossover, old addresses fading as new ones rise for the same queries. A temporary dip in average position is normal. What is not normal is a specific page that ranked before and has no rising successor, which usually means its redirect points somewhere Google considers a different topic.

Migrations run this way keep their rankings far more often than not. The failures are rarely mysterious; they are almost always a map that was incomplete, built late, or never verified against real Search Console data. Ask Boston Web Group for a redirect-map review before your migration goes live: it is the cheapest insurance in the project.