Migrate from Magento to Shopify While Maintaining Your SEO Ranking
Magento and Shopify are both powerful ecommerce platforms that are capable of meeting a wide range of business needs. It’s vital for your store’s future success that you’re using the one that best fits your requirements.
The following article will help you to assess whether Shopify could be the better choice for you. An overview of the platform’s key advantages puts you in a strong position to make an informed decision about migrating from Magento to Shopify. You will also gain insight on how Magento to Shopify migration can be enacted while retaining your store’s SEO ranking.
Benefits of Migrating to Shopify
Hosting
Shopify provides fully managed cloud-based hosting as part of its core service. This saves merchants the trouble of having to find a hosting solution. Since hosting is managed on your behalf, you also won’t need to worry about resolving technical issues. Merchants using Magento, however, need to source a separate hosting service prior to building their website.
Security
Websites built on Shopify enjoy superlative security features. Firstly, Shopify is level 1 PCI DSS compliant – the highest level of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Secondly, all Shopify stores are provided with SSL certificates, ensuring encrypted connections for all visitors. This is one of the reasons why Magento to Shopify migration is such a popular move.
Customisation
Both Magento and Shopify offer merchants the opportunity for extensive customisation of their stores. However, achieving this through Magento is significantly more difficult, requiring advanced web development knowledge. Shopify’s user interface, however, is extremely user-friendly and enables merchants to edit almost every element of their site without any coding skills.
Efficient and Effective Automations
Merchants using Shopify are given access to a range of powerful automations. Tools such as Flow, Scripts, and Launchpad can significantly streamline your operations. By utilising these automatic systems, you will save yourself considerable amounts of time and energy.
Extensive App Ecosystem
The features offered by Shopify are more than sufficient to support a growing ecommerce business. However, Shopify merchants can also make use of the platform’s extensive app ecosystem. The Shopify app store has over 4,000 plug-ins available, providing everything from SEO tools to shipping apps.
24/7 Support
Running an online store can be a stressful task. However, Shopify make this much easier by providing a dedicated support team that is available 24/7. Whenever you run into difficulties, just send an email, pick up the phone, or use the live chat feature for professional assistance.
Migrating from Magento to Shopify While Retaining SEO: The Key Steps
Now that you know some key benefits of migrating Magento to Shopify migration, the next natural step is to understand the migration process itself. The basic Magento to Shopify migration checklist below breaks down how to transfer a website to Shopify while maintaining your SEO ranking.
1. Learn What Risks Migration Might Pose
The main risk in migrating your store from Magento to Shopify is that you lose your hard-earned SEO performance. A poorly handled migration could cause this, which can lead to a reduction in sales and traffic. This is why utilising the services of professionals like Vsourz is highly advisable.
2. Establish A Development Store
The first substantive part of the Shopify migration process involves establishing a development store to begin transferring content. This can be facilitated by use of the Shopify apps, which simplify the transference of data between Shopify and Magento.
3. Begin Migrating Products And Collections
The next step is migrating all products, categories, and collections. Magento to Shopify product migration is accomplished by exporting the relevant data in CSV files from the Magento admin panel. These can then be uploaded into the relevant Shopify app to begin the transfer process.
4. Establish 301 Redirects For All Products And Collections
Fortunately, some Shopify apps automatically create redirects for all products and collections, so that your old URLs will direct visitors to your new ones. However, it’s vitally important for your SEO performance that all of these are double-checked.
5. Begin Migrating Site Pages
Some apps don’t support page migration, so this step must often be done manually. Each page from the Magento site needs to be set up on Shopify and populated with the corresponding content. This must include elements such as meta titles and descriptions, as well as establishing 301 redirects. Failure to do so will negatively impact your SEO rankings.
6. Migrate Your Blog Content
Migrating blog content involves downloading the relevant CSV dataset and running it through the respective Shopify app you’re using. Once more, it’s vitally important that the 301 redirects are set up to avoid harming your SEO performance.
7. Check Pages Using Google Search Console
The next step involves using Google Search Console to run a diagnostic check on the new site. Accomplishing this entails checking that all the redirects and URLS work, and that the XML sitemap is set up properly.
8. Establish the Store’s Look and Feel
Once the technical aspects of migration have been achieved, it’s time to focus on the aesthetic side of your store. Similarly, the feel and responsiveness of the site needs to be checked. This step ensures that everything works optimally in both the front and back ends. It can be a highly complex process, which is best handled by professional web developers.
9. Migrate Customers
At this stage, your new Shopify store should be essentially ready to go live. But before you launch your Shopify store, you may want to migrate customers to your new site. Whether or not you decide to will depend on whether you have a lot of regular customers. If you do, this can make things much easier for you in the long run. The good news? This is another area where a Shopify app can do most of the heavy lifting for you.
10. Launching Your Store and Keeping the Old Site on a Subdomain
As your new site goes live, your old site should still be available on a subdomain. Doing this may help resolve any issues that arise around orders placed prior to migration. This will require communicating with your Magento site’s hosting service provider.
It’s very important that your old site has the no-index tag, so that you avoid SEO penalisation for duplicate content. On the day you launch your new site, your domain name system (DNS) needs to be changed so that it points to Shopify. Then your new store is ready to go live.
11. Post-Migration Monitoring
Once your store has been launched, it’s important to keep a close eye on its performance. This process should involve monitoring Google positions for a month or so and re-submitting sitemaps to Google and Bing. Additionally, Google Analytics should be checked to ensure no redirects were missed.
Magento to Shopify Migration is a Complex Process that can Easily Go Badly Wrong
Trying to complete Magento to Shopify migration on your own can have severe consequences if not handled correctly. More often than not redirects are missed, which negatively impact hard-earned SEO rankings.
The best approach is to have seasoned Shopify migration experts to manage the whole process for you. Speak to a Vsourz specialist today to discuss your requirements. Our professional Magento to Shopify migration service is seamless and guaranteed to meet your specific needs.
