How It Works

Why Skipping Redirects During Migration Hurts SEO

Your URLs change when you move to Shopify

When you move from WooCommerce to Shopify, your product URLs and links to other store content almost never survive unchanged. WooCommerce URLs typically look like:

yourstore.com/product/blue-ceramic-mug/

Shopify structures URLs differently:

yourstore.com/products/blue-ceramic-mug

The slug might look almost identical, but “almost identical” is not “identical.” Search engines and inbound links don’t do fuzzy matching. A one-character difference in path structure (/product/ vs /products/) is enough to turn a working URL into a dead one.

What happens when a URL disappears without a redirect

  1. Search engines find a 404 error (page not found). Google recrawls your old URLs on schedule, whether or not you’ve migrated. If yourstore.com/product/blue-ceramic-mug/ returns a 404 error, that page’s ranking history doesn’t transfer to the new URL. It’s discarded.
  2. Backlinks stop counting. Every external site linking to your old product or blog URLs (press mentions, affiliate links, forum posts, social shares) now points at a dead page. That link equity often took years to build. It evaporates instead of carrying over.
  3. Returning visitors and bookmarks break. Anyone who bookmarked a product page, or is coming back via an old email or ad link, hits a 404 error instead of your product.
  4. You start from zero on rankings you already had. The new URL has no history as far as Google is concerned. Google has to crawl the page again and reassess it. That can take weeks, during which competitors keep the rankings you used to hold.

301 redirects connect your old URLs to the new ones

A 301 (“moved permanently”) redirect tells search engines and browsers that your content has moved to a new address. It sends visitors to the right page instead of a 404 error and helps carry ranking signals from the old URL, including the value of backlinks.

Each changed URL needs a redirect to its new address when your Shopify store goes live. For a store with hundreds or thousands of products, maintaining that map by hand is a large task. Your blog and other store content need redirects too. Any URL left out can still send visitors to a missing page.

How Store Importer handles this

With “Create URL redirects” enabled, WooCommerce Importer creates redirects from your old WooCommerce product URLs to their new Shopify URLs. It also creates redirects for category URLs. You can review the imported redirects in Shopify after migration.

WooCommerce Importer creates a Shopify URL redirect from the original WordPress permalink for every page and post it imports. Blog category pages get redirects too, so /category/recipes/ points to /blogs/recipes.

Links inside your imported pages and posts are also rewritten to the Shopify URLs created by the same migration. If a post links to an imported product at /product/blue-ceramic-mug/, that link becomes /products/blue-ceramic-mug in Shopify. You do not have to find and edit that link in each post yourself.

Want the direct migration checklist? Read how to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO.

Plan your WooCommerce to Shopify migration

Migrating more than 90 days from now? We'll set up a free Shopify client transfer store for you — a real Shopify environment where you can configure everything and run test migrations at your own pace. You only start paying for Shopify when you're ready to go live and we hand the store over to you. No obligation: if you change your mind, just let us know and we'll close the store.