The Shopify Exit Plan

Audit & baseline - before you change anything

You can't protect what you haven't measured. Capture the current state of your store and its SEO first, so you have a map to migrate against and a benchmark to recover to.

• ✓Take a full backup/export of the current store: products, customers, orders, content, and theme files.
• ✓Crawl your live site (e.g. Screaming Frog) and export every URL with its status code, meta title, meta description, H1 and canonical.
• ✓Save your current XML sitemap(s) and robots.txt.
• ✓In Google Search Console, export your top pages and queries (12 months) - these are the rankings you must protect.
• ✓Record a 3-month analytics baseline: organic sessions, top landing pages, conversion rate, revenue.
• ✓Document your URL structure and naming patterns (products, collections, pages, blog).
• ✓List every app and exactly what it does - you'll rebuild each one.
• ✓List every integration: payments, shipping, email/SMS, reviews, analytics, ad pixels.
• ✓Record current Core Web Vitals / PageSpeed (mobile + desktop) as a benchmark.
• ✓Note all structured data in use (Product, Review, Breadcrumb, Organization).
• ✓Identify your top 20 pages by traffic AND by backlinks - protect these above all else.

Protect your SEO ★

This is where migrations quietly fail. Most data-migration tools move your catalog but do not handle redirects or canonicals - so your URLs change, your rankings vanish, and nobody notices until traffic craters. Do not skip a single box here.

• ✓Build a complete URL map: every old URL → its new URL (products, collections/categories, CMS pages, blog posts, images).
• ✓Keep your URL structure as close to identical as possible to minimize the redirects you need.
• ✓Create a 301 (permanent) redirect for every URL that changes - never a 302/temporary.
• ✓Redirect collection/category URLs, not just products.
• ✓Redirect blog post and CMS page URLs.
• ✓Redirect image URLs (or preserve image paths) so image search and external hotlinks survive.
• ✓Migrate every page's meta title and meta description exactly.
• ✓Preserve H1s and on-page copy on your money pages.
• ✓Migrate/regenerate canonical tags; confirm each page self-canonicalises correctly.
• ✓Rebuild structured data: Product (price, availability, GTIN), Review/AggregateRating, Breadcrumb, Organization.
• ✓Keep image ALT text on every product image.
• ✓Preserve internal linking (menus, related products, in-content links).
• ✓Pick a canonical host (www vs non-www), force it, and force HTTPS everywhere.
• ✓Enforce trailing-slash consistency to avoid duplicate URLs.
• ✓Set up hreflang if you serve multiple languages/regions.
• ✓Generate a fresh XML sitemap on the new platform.
• ✓★ Keep your staging/dev site un-indexable (password or noindex) - and remember to remove that block at launch.
• ✓Confirm the new robots.txt doesn't block important pages or your sitemap.

Keep every link alive

Backlinks are earned authority you can't buy back. A broken link is wasted authority and a lost customer. Make sure nothing that points at you lands on a 404.

• ✓Test the full redirect map (spot-check + bulk-crawl) both before and after launch.
• ✓Prioritize redirects for the URLs that have backlinks (from your GSC Links report) - they pass the most authority.
• ✓Update links in your email flows, automations and newsletter templates.
• ✓Update social profiles and link-in-bio.
• ✓Update your Google Business Profile and directory listings.
• ✓Redirect old sitemap and RSS/feed URLs.
• ✓Fix internal links that still point to old URLs.
• ✓Redirect any vanity / QR / print-campaign URLs.

Move every piece of data - lose nothing

If it lived in Shopify, it needs a home on the new platform. Walk this list field by field.

Products

• ✓Titles, descriptions, SKUs, barcodes/GTINs.
• ✓Variants/options (size, nicotine strength, flavor) each with their own price, image and inventory.
• ✓Prices, compare-at/sale prices, cost.
• ✓All product images + alt text, in order.
• ✓Inventory levels and locations.
• ✓Weights & dimensions (for shipping).
• ✓Tags, vendor/brand, product type, and custom fields/metafields.

Catalog & navigation

• ✓Categories/collections - both manual and automated/smart rules.
• ✓Category descriptions and SEO fields.
• ✓Navigation menus.

Customers

• ✓Accounts, contact details, and tags/groups.
• ✓Billing & shipping addresses.
• ✓Passwords: migrate hashes if possible; if not, plan a forced password-reset email at launch.
• ✓Marketing consent status (don't email people who never opted in).
• ✓Store credit / gift-card balances.

Orders & money

• ✓Full order history with line items, statuses and totals.
• ✓Transactions, refunds, fulfillments, tracking.
• ✓★ Subscriptions / recurring orders - re-authorize payment tokens and test thoroughly (easy to break).
• ✓Discount/coupon codes and gift cards.

Content & social proof

• ✓Reviews & ratings, mapped to the correct products (don't lose your star ratings).
• ✓Blog posts, images, authors, dates.
• ✓CMS / landing pages and the media library.

Configuration

• ✓Tax settings and rules.
• ✓Shipping zones, rates and carriers.
• ✓Multi-currency / multi-language setup.

Rebuild apps & integrations

Your store is held together by a dozen apps. Switching platforms means re-creating that functionality - map each one to a proven equivalent so nothing silently stops working.

• ✓Map each Shopify app to an equivalent on the new platform.
• ✓Reviews/UGC (Judge.me, Loox, Yotpo) - migrate the reviews, not just the app.
• ✓Subscriptions (Recharge, Bold) - re-link payment tokens and verify renewals.
• ✓Email & SMS (Klaviyo, Postscript) - reconnect, rebuild flows, re-sync lists & consent.
• ✓Loyalty & rewards - migrate point balances too.
• ✓Upsell/bundles, and on-site search & filters.
• ✓Re-install analytics & pixels (GA4, Google Ads, Meta, TikTok) and verify events fire (add-to-cart, purchase).
• ✓Reconnect Google Merchant Center / product feeds.

Vape / ENDS compliance ★

The reason you're leaving Shopify is the reason this chapter exists. Get compliance right on the new platform or you'll be migrating again.

• ✓Connect a high-risk, vape-friendly payment processor - don't assume mainstream gateways will keep you.
• ✓Install hard age verification (age gate on entry + age check at checkout).
• ✓Configure adult-signature delivery and restricted-state blocking (US: PACT Act).
• ✓Add required nicotine warnings and compliance disclaimers.
• ✓Confirm the destination platform's policies actually allow ENDS sales - favor self-hosted/open platforms that can't delist you.
• ✓Set up tax/excise handling for tobacco/vapor and any PACT Act reporting.

Build, design & tech

• ✓Rebuild a pixel-perfect theme; match your branding.
• ✓Mobile-first responsiveness on every template.
• ✓SSL/HTTPS provisioned; force HTTPS + a single host.
• ✓Page speed: optimize images, lazy-load, caching/CDN - protect your Core Web Vitals (a ranking factor).
• ✓Test on-site search, filters and forms.
• ✓Accessibility basics (contrast, alt text, labels).

Pre-launch QA

Everything below happens on a private staging site that search engines can't see - then you test like a paranoid customer.

• ✓Run the whole store on staging (not indexable).
• ✓Place real test orders end-to-end through the live gateway, then refund.
• ✓Test the age gate and restricted-state blocking.
• ✓Verify order confirmation, shipping and password-reset emails send and look right.
• ✓Spot-check redirects from your map, and confirm 404 behavior.
• ✓Verify analytics & pixels fire (GA4 DebugView, Meta Pixel Helper).
• ✓Cross-browser + cross-device testing.
• ✓Confirm tax & shipping calculate correctly at checkout.
• ✓Proofread content; check images and alt text; confirm inventory counts.

Launch / cutover

• ✓Lower your DNS TTL a day or two ahead for a fast cutover.
• ✓Choose a low-traffic window.
• ✓Point the domain / DNS to the new store.
• ✓★ Remove the staging noindex / password so Google can crawl the new store.
• ✓Confirm the live robots.txt and that your sitemap is reachable.
• ✓Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools.
• ✓Verify the property in GSC. Same domain? No Change of Address needed - only use it if the domain itself changes.
• ✓Watch server logs / error rates during cutover.
• ✓Keep the old platform's data accessible (read-only) for a while as a safety net.

Post-launch - the first 90 days

A clean migration usually sees a small, temporary ranking dip that recovers within weeks. The difference between "recovers" and "never recovers" is the monitoring you do now.

First 48 hours

• ✓Confirm Google is crawling the new site (GSC Crawl Stats / URL Inspection).
• ✓Watch the Pages/Coverage report for spikes in errors or 404s.
• ✓Fix missed redirects the moment 404s appear.

Weeks 1–4

• ✓Monitor rankings & organic traffic - expect a short dip; clean redirects bring it back.
• ✓Validate structured data (Rich Results Test) and fix warnings.
• ✓Re-check Core Web Vitals on the new platform.
• ✓Reconcile submitted vs indexed pages; resubmit the sitemap if needed.

Weeks 4–12

• ✓Compare conversion rate & revenue to your pre-migration baseline.
• ✓Reclaim/redirect any high-value backlinks still pointing to dead URLs.
• ✓Keep a 404 → 301 cleanup loop running until errors flatline.