The Ultimate Guide to Site Migrations

Migrating into Shopify from another CMS? Or migrating another domain into Shopify? Or migrating another Shopify Store into your Shopify? Then this is the guide for you. 

Having completed numerous CMS migrations into Shopify, I know it can be a complicated, unknown process. There is very little documentation anywhere about how to actually do it and what happens when you do. This article should shed the light you need to properly understand the process, what to expect, and how to navigate through it. 

Awareness & Initial Considerations

I will use a theoretical migration example throughout to help contextualise the process. This is a domain migration, luxurygoods.co.uk is becoming luxurygoods.com, as well as this, the paths are changing too - /collections/coats is to become /collections/mens-coats, so we’ll need to redirect map the current collections and products and any other changes from existing location > new location. 

The initial stages; 

1. Domain acquisition - if not already complete to acquire luxurygoods.com
2. Hosting - once acquired, has the new domain been propagated on the host? E.g. GoDaddy or Namescheap or similar? This process takes 5-7 days to make sure to factor it in. Typically, these two steps are done at the same time via GoDaddy or similar.
3. Domain propagation on Shopify store - you’ll need to add the new domain into your existing Shopify store
4. • Settings > Domains > connect secondary domain
   • • You’ll have to wait also for this to propagate. NOTE: make sure the new domain isn’t automatically set to redirect once it connects, as this can happen without checking e.g. once propagated, the new domain might immediately redirect to the existing domain luxurygoods.com 301 REDIRECTS to luxurygoods.co.uk

• NOTE: Should you want to retain www., but your existing store does not use www., you need to make sure not to have included www. In the new domain you’ve added when connected the new domain as that would cause a redirect to www. 

If this was added, and set to primary domain, it would result in the www. being applied

1. Ensure you have exported all the on-page content, and meta-data - this will be needed so you can import the same content onto the new site to not lose any SEO value. 
2. • If you don’t already have Matrixify installed, I highly recommend that you get it installed as this will massively expedite the process. 
   • Once downloaded, you’ll want to export with similar parameters to the below, adding the title_tag and description_tag metafield filters to ensure the SEO Title & Description is exported. 
   • In the basic columns section, ensure the Body HTML is selected as that will export any on page copy e.g. collection copy

The Redirect Process

This section is often the most time consuming as the landscape changes as decisions are being made. But for the sake of this post, let’s say all existing URL paths on luxurygoods.co.uk are changing to include ‘men’s’ in the URL e.g. luxurygoods.co.uk/collections/coats will change to be luxurygoods.com/collections/mens-coats, all the existing collections will need to be repointed to the new location factoring in men's. 

1. Extract all existing luxurygoods.co.uk collections, if you don’t have a bot like Screaming Frog, you can use this document, all you’ll need to do is; 
2. 1. Navigate to your robots.txt file e.g. domain.com/robots.txt
   2. Find the reference to the sitemap.xml file & paste that in the browser
   3. You’ll then likely get multiple files, but for this example, luxurygoods.co.uk would look something like this (Shopify site)
   4. Paste that into the linked document, and it’ll pull up all the linked collections. 
3. You’ll need to ensure that the new collections have been created utilising the /mens-xyz path so that when the domain switch happens, the new URL path resolves, rather than 404’s
4. Once created, given this is a simple find and replace for the URL path to add in /mens before the existing URL path, you can duplicate the existing collection paths, and add in a new column with the new collection path side by side
5. The Shopify CSV should be
6. 1. Old URLs column name = redirect from
   2. New URLs column name = redirect to
7. For the avoidance of doubt; 
8. 1. Column A Old URL example (redirect from) = luxurygoods.co.uk/collections/coats 
   2. Column B New URL example (redirect to) = luxurygood.com/collections/mens-coats

Bonus - this is a good opportunity to assess whether pages are still needed during the cutover so as not to spend time re-creating pages that don’t perform or you’re no longer going to have stock of in the future. If you decide to consolidate pages, ensure you have appropriate redirects setup for them too, either to a new version, or the closest equivalent page (often the parent collection).

Migration Considerations For Go-Live

On the day of your migration, there are some things to be aware of which might otherwise take you by surprise; 

1. Ensure the new collections with the new URLs are ready to be put live
2. You’ll need to ensure your redirects from the prior stage have been imported into the store where you expect to see the changes reflect;
3. 1. You can do this by an import from a CSV file
   2. 1. Go to Content
      2. Then Menus
      3. URL Redirects
      4. Import 
   3. You will already have your redirect from and redirect to URLs ready to import from the prior stage
   4. Load these in and the redirects will be ready to fire once pages are archived and step 3 happens
4. Go to domain settings and enable redirects from the luxurygoods.co.uk domain to the new domain luxurygoods.com. You can do this by swapping the old domain (.co.uk) to be the secondary, and the new domain (.com) to be the new primary domain
5. The old URLs will need to be disabled / archived before they can be redirected, as on Shopify you can’t redirect a live URL
6. With the above 4 steps complete, you should now be seeing the redirects firing, and your old .co.uk non-mens URLs redirecting to the .com mens inclusive URLs
7. 1. You can download this chrome extension to track the redirect from old URL to new URL 
8. Finally, the way that Shopify redirects work (annoyingly) is in stages; 
9. 1. Stage 1, the domain will redirect first, so your .co.uk will redirect to .com, but it’ll maintain the old URL path (which will be offline/archived)
   2. Stage 2, then uses the specified redirects you’ve imported which will result in the final destination resolving
   3. You’ll therefore see x2 redirects in the above tool

Bonus - this can be avoided should you have access to the htaccess file & cpanel to upload the redirects directly to the host, rather than using the native Shopify DNS. This will allow for a direct 1 to 1 redirect rather than the 2 that would natively happen if using the native Shopify functionality. 

Testing Success

1. The best way to test whether your redirects are working en-mass is to utilise a crawling simulator like Screaming Frog. This would allow you to upload the list of redirects from URLs into the tool, and it will crawl the list. At the end, you’ll have clarity that the end path (redirect to) URLs are resolving as expected, which you can then validate the migration of domain & path has been a success.
2. 1. Any major issues will be flagged, if you’re seeing redirect loops (can find these by going to Reports > Redirects > All redirects
   2. Any 404’s will be flagged (which could prove whether some destination URLs are yet to be put live) 
3. You’ll need to create a new Google Search Console property for your new domain now that it is live, if you are using GTM or similar it should automatically validate the property
4. 1. You can then head to settings (for the old domain) and to ‘Change of Address’
   2. You then choose the new property (.com) that is now live
5. Check that the site is still transactional by running test orders, though this shouldn’t have changed it might have
6. Ensure that your GA is still working as expected, you shouldn’t necessarily need to change anything as the old GA tracking code should have rolled onto the new domain, you will likely need to add your new domain into the existing GA property to ensure continuity of data tracking

How Long Will It Take to Swap Over to New Domain & URLs?

It’s an impossible prediction to make, but the cut over will happen over time. What you’ll see is that you might have an initial increase in the number of URLs ranking for your brand, due to the fact that you have 2 sites (in Google’s eyes) ranking for the same terms. 

However, as Google picks up on the 301 redirects, it’ll start to drop the old domain out and replace it with the new - the position might take some time to get back to, or it might be instantaneous, it is difficult to predict. 

Common Things That Are Flagged When Moving to Shopify

As you’re now reaching the end of the article, it might be that you have already signed with Shopify, so it might be too late if these things are an issue, however, if that’s not the case, there’s some things to consider when moving over; 

• Robots.txt - this never used to be editable, but now it is
• XML sitemaps - generated by default (but improvements are needed to keep them clean with HTTP 200 pages only)
• x2 Product URLs - Long product URL /collections/collection-name/products/product-name & Short product URL /products/product-name
• Breadcrumbs - by default use the long product URL to form the breadcrumb trail, to get a static breadcrumb, you need to build breadcrumbs using metafields, which will enable you to have a static breadcrumb for each product no matter where it was navigated to from
• Forced URL structure - you have no choice but to use /collections/ for categories, and /products/ for products
• Blog - not the best blog for UX or design, and functionality isn't as advanced or customisable - you can setup /tagged/ groups if you want to categorise the blog into themes

Common Issues When Migrating

Final gift from me to you, some common issues we find when clients start migrating or looking into it, or disasters we have seen from things as simple as a ‘re-design’ that turn out to be a nightmare for performance. 

• Design - alone this is normally ok, but if this results in significant amounts of JavaScript usage, or removal of text blocks this could negatively impact site performance 
• Content - try to mitigate against changing on site content as much as possible, as that alters the intent of the site, or what the site has been known for. Slowly introduce content changes over time rather than all at once 
• Consolidating URLs - don’t forget to redirect old URLs, or closed down pages to retain authority rather than losing it to 404’s - this can be seriously impactful  
• www. changing to non-www. - this will cause a migration before your migration so make sure to tread carefully there

If you’re planning a migration and this all scares you and sounds like a lot of work compared to your available resource, that’s why we’re here. We haven’t touched on selecting plug-ins which need to happen to ensure functionality on the new site, among many other quirks you’re likely to encounter. Most people will get SEO support to handle the process, and consult with you to ensure the new store is configured properly, and to be accountable for sustaining performance post-migration. Get in touch to hear more about the eCommerce brands we've helped and how we can do the same for you!