301 Moving Day - make sure you redirect your Shopify urls when migrating

Surrounded by boxes.

As part of the move I had to change our address.

Luckily the US Postal Service has a service called mail forwarding where for $1 they will automatically forward all mail from your old address to your new address. It's an easy way to keep getting the mail and to remind yourself where else you need to update your address.

Shopify has a similar feature and it's vital for every store.

It's especially vital if you had a prior shopping cart or used your domain for something else before Shopify.

These are called URL redirects.

When you add one it will tell Shopify to forward any users from an old url to a new url.

Once you set them up for old pages, Google and other search engines will understand that the page has moved and will transfer all of the authority and SEO "scores" from the old url to the new url.

If you don't do this for a migration or after changing product or collection urls, you risk losing a lot of traffic.

A friend of mine who has a lot of experience with this say that sites and pages can lose half their traffic if they don't setup redirects properly. Once they are fixed it still might take several months before traffic recovers.

So whenever you're changing urls, make sure to remember to check to see if you need to setup redirects for the old url.

Otherwise you could be losing traffic and any Rich Snippets that the old url was getting.

Eric Davis

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Topics: Migration Url redirects

Would you like a daily tip about Shopify?

Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, customer acquisition, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.