SEO impact after migrating an eCommerce store from Shopify to Magento

Question

My team will be migrating an eCommerce store from Shopify to Magento for a client. Over the past six months, the client has invested quite a bit in SEO improvements on the Shopify website. This effort included the creation of three SEO-optimized product landing pages and various technical SEO enhancements, which have successfully increased organic traffic, user engagement, and online sales.

As we proceed with the overall website redesign and migration, I'm concerned about the potential loss of SEO traction. Could anyone with experience in migrating from Shopify to Magento offer any advice to ensure that we maintain, or even enhance, our SEO performance post-migration? Specific insights on handling URL redirects, maintaining meta tags and descriptions, or any adjustments needed in Magento to align with Shopify's SEO setups would be helpful.

The new Magento site will use a customized version of the Porto template: https://www.portotheme.com/magento/porto_landing/

Answer 1

I’ve migrated sites to Magento and felt that it can be unstable - certain feeds break, functionality can be rigid, and PageSpeed performance can get bogged down.

That said, you’ll want to make sure the SEO fundamentals for a migration are covered.

Crawl your site

Make a backup of your current Shopify site by performing a crawl of all the URLs on your site.

This crawl will be used to redirect map and asses meta data optimizations.

Plus it’s good to have in case things go awry, you can reference a previous crawl to see what had changed in between the migration.

Redirects

• How many pages are migrating? How big is your product catalog? I would look at tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog, or Google Search Console to pull top performing URLs. You’ll want to account for the URLs that are performing and redirect
• How are you redirecting? I know Magento has URL rewriting functionality that acts as a redirect tool but there are extensions (e.g. Mageworx) that handle redirect building (in bulk)
• Who’s uploading and QAing redirects? I feel like this step is always left in the air. You’ll want to make sure that you have someone on your team that builds, QAs, and finalizes a redirect map and strategy.

I’ve always felt that when performance dips after a migration, 4 out of 5 times it’s redirects.

Meta data

You’ll want to make sure that the meta data you’ve built out in the Shopify store is either carried over or optimized further in Magento.

Meta data can be uploaded in Magento’s native functionality but you’ll want to understand how you want to position your optimizations going to launch.

XML Sitemap + Robots.txt

Having a sitemap in place will tell search engines what pages are available to crawl.

A robots can prohibit search engines from creating specific areas, saving on craw budget.

I believe you can toggle an XML sitemap natively in Magento, if not, with an SEO extension like Mageworx.

The robots.txt can be toggled natively.

Header / template optimizations

You’ll want to make sure your new site template abides by UX best practices - it’s a good rule of thumb to lean on UX.

But you’ll want to make sure you account for a header architecture - H1 > H2 > H3, etc.

Additionally, you want to ensure the template you’re using isn’t full of unnecessary code that’ll bog down site performance.

Again, Magento can be rigid and like in any other migration, you want to build requirements for what successful SEO looks like.