Migrating from WooCommerce / WordPress
Moving to Shopify from WooCommerce or WordPress changes your URL structure. The single biggest risk to your traffic is broken links — old URLs that used to rank now returning 404. This playbook keeps that traffic by mapping every old URL to its new Shopify home with 301 redirects.
Do this before or immediately after you point your domain at Shopify. Every day an old URL 404s is lost traffic and lost ranking.
Why URLs change
Shopify uses fixed path prefixes you can’t remove:
| Content | WooCommerce / WordPress | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Product | /product/blue-mug | /products/blue-mug |
| Category | /product-category/mugs | /collections/mugs |
| Blog post | /2024/05/my-post | /blogs/news/my-post |
| Page | /about-us | /pages/about-us |
The playbook
Export your old URLs
From WordPress, export the full list of live URLs (an SEO plugin like Yoast/Rank Math, a sitemap, or a crawl with Screaming Frog). You want every URL that has traffic or backlinks.
Map each old URL to its new one
Build a two-column sheet: old path → new path. Products to /products/…,
categories to /collections/…, posts to /blogs/<blog>/…, pages to
/pages/….
Create the redirects in Shopify
In Shopify admin → Content → Menus → URL Redirects (or Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects on older layouts). Add each from → to pair. For a large list, use a bulk-redirect app or the CSV import.
Verify
Visit a sample of old URLs — each should 301 straight to the new page, no 404, no chain of hops.
Don’t forget
- Homepage — if your old home had a path (rare), redirect it to
/. - Feeds and attachments —
/feed,/wp-content/...image URLs with backlinks. - Trailing slashes and category bases — map both variants if both were live.
- Internal links in content — update links inside pages and posts to point at the new URLs directly (redirects are a safety net, not a replacement).
Citera emits clean canonical URLs and full structured data out of the box, so once the redirects are in place search engines re-map your pages quickly.