Recovering the rankings a WooCommerce to Shopify move threw away
A camera retailer moved from WooCommerce to Shopify with no redirect map. The dead URLs still held most of its clicks. How 654 of 656 were redirected safely.
Where the store started
- Store
- Camera and imaging retailer
- Scope
- 2,686 active products on Shopify, moved from WooCommerce
The store had moved from WooCommerce to Shopify some months earlier. Nobody built a redirect map, and the URL patterns did not match by accident: WooCommerce served /product/<slug>-india/ while Shopify serves /products/<handle>.
Search engines kept showing the old WooCommerce URLs because they still held the rankings. Every one of those clicks landed on a 404 page. The dead URLs had earned about two thirds of every click the site had ever recorded, at nearly double the click-through rate of the Shopify pages that replaced them.
The work, step by step
- 1
Pulled the real URL list
Search Console was not connected, so the list of old URLs with traffic came from Bing Webmaster Tools page statistics instead of a guess.
- 2
Exact matches first
After stripping the -india suffix, 292 old slugs matched a Shopify handle exactly. The untrimmed slug was tried too, because some migrated handles had kept it.
- 3
Model matching, never fuzzy matching
A similarity score at 0.82 paired a Nikon Z6 III with a Z7 II and a 35mm lens with an 85mm. So 170 more URLs were matched only when every model number and variant word (Mini, Pro, Max) agreed on both sides.
- 4
Brand, category and keyword fallbacks
Products that no longer existed went to their brand collection (111), the largest matching category (66), or a keyword page (15), so the shopper still landed somewhere useful.
- 5
Left two as 404
Two URLs had no safe target. A redirect to the wrong product is worse than a 404, so they were not guessed.
What changed
The redirect map is the part of a WooCommerce to Shopify migration that decides whether you keep your traffic. Build it before the domain moves, not months later.
Read before you switch to Shopify.
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WooCommerce to Shopify migration cost in India
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Keep your Google rankings when you switch to Shopify
URL patterns, 301 redirect maps, and the SEO fields migration tools leave empty.
The Woo to Shopify migration checklist
30 checks before, during and after the move. Tick them off as you go.
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Read the case studyReady to switch WooCommerce to Shopify?
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