Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing your SEO: the protocol, step by step
The number one fear before a Shopify migration is losing your Google traffic. This guide covers the protocol that prevents the drop, what the store costs once it runs, and the cases where staying put makes more sense.
The short answer
Yes, you can migrate to Shopify without losing your search rankings, provided you follow a strict protocol: exhaustive 301 redirects (pages, blog posts, images), title and meta tags carried over unchanged, internal linking rebuilt, and Search Console monitoring for three months. Without that protocol, traffic drops while Google recrawls the new site. In some cases (highly complex B2B, large editorial archives, URL structures that cannot be reproduced), staying on your current platform is the better call.
Shopify or WooCommerce: what changes for a French brand?
Almost everything that ranks on this question has a horse in the race. Shopify promotes Shopify, WordPress blogs defend WooCommerce, and agencies that only build Shopify stores always conclude with "migrate". At Sonho, we build both Shopify stores and Next.js websites, so we have no stake in pushing you toward either one.
WooCommerce is open-source software installed on your own hosting: you are responsible for updates, security, backups and compatibility between plugins. Shopify is a hosted platform: you pay a subscription, and the entire technical side (servers, security, traffic spikes) is handled for you.
For a French brand doing between €200,000 and €3 million in revenue, the trade-off comes down to time. WooCommerce costs less on paper and more in hours spent maintaining, debugging and arbitrating between plugins. Shopify costs more in subscription and fees, and frees up time to sell.
From PrestaShop, the procedure differs on data export and customer accounts: it is covered in our PrestaShop to Shopify migration guide.
| Criterion | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting and security | Included, managed by Shopify | On you (hosting provider, updates, backups) |
| Entry cost | Subscription from €27/month billed yearly, plus the theme | Free software, but hosting and paid plugins to budget for |
| Maintenance | Almost none on the platform side | Regular and non-negotiable |
| URL freedom | Limited (/products/ and /collections/ are imposed) | Total |
| Blog and editorial content | Basic | Excellent (it is WordPress) |
Will I lose my Google traffic by migrating?
The risk is real, and you can measure and control it. A poorly prepared migration drops organic traffic for the time it takes Google to recrawl and make sense of the new site. The protocol below is there to keep that period as short as possible.
When a migration goes badly, traffic drops because your URLs change. Shopify imposes its own structure: every product page moves under /products/ and every category under /collections/. If your old addresses are not redirected one by one, Google hits 404 errors, loses track of the pages that ranked, and the authority built up over years scatters.
When traffic drops after a migration, the protocol was incomplete. On the Shopify redesigns we deliver, we treat your existing search rankings as an asset to carry over to the new site. After launch, the Shopify store's SEO is tracked in Search Console.
The anti-loss SEO protocol, step by step
The full protocol, in order. Traffic drops usually come from skipping a single step, most often the blog or the images.
- Exhaustive inventory of existing URLs: a full crawl of the current site, cross-checked with Search Console and your analytics. Including blog posts, indexed images, filter pages and the old forgotten pages that still receive traffic.
- Complete 301 redirect map: every old URL points to its exact equivalent on Shopify. A 301 redirect passes along almost all of the authority earned. No mass redirect to the homepage: Google treats that as a 404.
- Title tags and meta descriptions carried over: the tags of pages that rank are copied unchanged onto the new pages. You do not rewrite titles during a migration; you rewrite them after, once traffic has stabilized.
- Internal linking rebuilt: every internal link on the new site points directly to the new URLs, never through a redirect. Each redirect hop dilutes the signal.
- Sitemap submitted on launch day: the new sitemap goes into Search Console immediately, so Google discovers the new structure as fast as possible.
- Search Console monitoring for three months: 404 errors, index coverage, impressions tracked query by query. Anomalies get fixed within the week.
What Shopify costs after migration
The subscription is only part of a Shopify store's monthly cost. The table lists the line items, with the amounts from Shopify's pricing page checked in October 2026.
Then come the apps, each priced by its own developer. Add up their subscriptions before migrating: it is the line that grows with the store. In return, Shopify handles hosting, security and traffic spikes for you.
To place these amounts within a full build or redesign budget, we broke down the complete ranges in our guide how much a website costs, and the recurring costs in how much website maintenance costs.
| Line item | Range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify subscription | €27/month (Basic) or €79/month (Grow) billed yearly | €36 or €105 a month billed monthly |
| Apps | Price set by each developer | Reviews, email, search, subscriptions: each app adds a line |
| Payment fees with Shopify Payments | 1.5% + €0.25 per online card payment (Basic) | 1.3% + €0.25 on the Grow plan |
| Another payment provider | 2% per transaction (Basic) | On top of your provider's fees |
| Theme | Free, one-off purchase or custom-coded | See the next section |
When you should NOT migrate to Shopify
In some cases Shopify is the wrong answer, even though a Shopify-only agency will still tell you to migrate. We also build Next.js websites, so we gain nothing by pushing you toward one or the other.
First case: highly complex B2B. Multi-tier price lists, order approval flows, quotes, hierarchical accounts: Shopify is making progress on B2B, but some setups require so many apps and workarounds that the platform loses its main advantage, simplicity.
Second case: large editorial archives. If most of your traffic comes from hundreds of blog posts, Shopify's blog module will be a clear step down from WordPress. Third case: structural URLs that cannot be reproduced. Shopify imposes /products/ and /collections/ with no exceptions. If your search rankings rest on a URL tree that this structure cannot reproduce, even perfect redirects will not make up for the lost semantic logic. In these three cases, we recommend staying put, or looking at another solution.
The first three months after migration: what to watch in Search Console
The migration does not end on launch day. The first three months determine whether traffic stabilizes or erodes, and it all shows up in Search Console.
Week after week: the Coverage report to spot 404s (each error is a forgotten redirect, to be fixed within days) and the Performance report, comparing query by query against the equivalent period before migration. A page losing positions without any technical error usually signals a modified title or weakened internal linking. Also check that the number of indexed pages converges toward the number of pages on the new site, neither far more (duplicates) nor far fewer (forgotten pages).
If you are preparing a migration and want an opinion before committing, write to us. If migrating is the wrong move for you, we will say so.
Frequently asked questions
- Will my old URLs still work after the migration?
- Not as they are: Shopify imposes its own structure (/products/ for product pages, /collections/ for categories), so your old addresses will inevitably change. That is what 301 redirects are for: each old URL automatically sends the visitor, and Google, to the new equivalent page. Done properly, these redirects pass along almost all of the search authority you earned. Links placed elsewhere (press, directories, social) therefore keep working.
- How long does a migration to Shopify take?
- At Sonho, allow 4 to 6 weeks from project kickoff to going live. That window covers theme design, content import, the redirect map and testing. An import app moves the data, but it covers neither the design nor the search protocol.
- Are my customers and their accounts transferred?
- The catalog and customer records are imported by CSV file; order history goes through a migration app or the API, according to Shopify's migration guide. Passwords, however, are never transferable: they are encrypted on the old platform and unreadable by the new one. Your customers therefore receive an invitation to reactivate their account on first login, so plan for it in your launch communication.
- How much does a Shopify migration by an agency cost?
- The price depends on catalog size, the volume of order history to bring over, the design and the features to rebuild. At Sonho, a migration costs from €3,000 excl. VAT, with a fixed-price quote set after a discovery call: the amount does not move afterwards. We also take over existing Shopify stores without starting from scratch, and we migrate from Wix, WordPress, Squarespace or Webflow while preserving content and search rankings.
- Is Shopify good for SEO?
- Overall yes: pages load fast, the generated code is clean, basic structured data is in place and the HTTPS certificate is included. The limits are real: an imposed URL structure, a basic blog module, and some fine-grained settings out of reach. For the vast majority of brands, these limits weigh far less in rankings than the quality of the content and of the links pointing to the site.
