Migrating from Wix to Shopify without losing rankings.

This is the playbook we run when migrating an ecommerce store from Wix (or Squarespace, or BigCommerce) to Shopify without losing Google rankings. We've done it most recently with VMEP, who came off Wix and are now doing £29k/month, up from £14k pre-migration over fourteen months.

The biggest fear founders have when migrating: 'will I lose my rankings?' The honest answer is that you might lose some short-term traffic for a few weeks, but a properly executed migration almost always recovers within four to six weeks and often improves long-term because the new site is faster, more crawlable, and better structured.

Here's what 'properly executed' actually means.

1. Content audit before anything else

Before touching Shopify, we audit the existing site. Every page that gets traffic, every page that gets backlinks, every page that ranks. The output is a spreadsheet of URLs sorted by SEO value, these are the URLs that must be preserved or redirected.

Most stores have hundreds of URLs and only twenty to thirty actually matter. The rest are paginated collection URLs, faceted filter URLs, and one-off pages that ranked for nothing. Treat them accordingly.

2. URL structure mapping

For each preserved URL, we map old → new. Two approaches: mirror the old structure to minimise the redirect map, or redesign the URL structure properly and redirect everything old to new. The first is less work; the second leaves you with a clean structure for the next five years instead of carrying Wix's choices forever. We almost always recommend the second.

3. The redirect map

301 redirects, every old URL to its new equivalent. Built in a spreadsheet, loaded into Shopify via the bulk redirect importer or a custom Liquid template.

Common mistakes: 302 instead of 301 (signals temporary, doesn't pass link equity), chained redirects (A→B→C wastes crawl budget, go A→C direct), redirecting to homepage as a fallback (Google interprets this as a soft 404). Every old URL goes to the most specific new URL that makes sense. If there's no equivalent, redirect to the most relevant category, not the homepage.

4. Cutover rehearsal

We rehearse the cutover on a staging environment. DNS swap is the moment of risk, we want it as boring as possible. Pre-cutover checklist: redirect map loaded and tested on staging, sitemap.xml generated and validated, robots.txt confirmed (no `Disallow: /` left over from staging), Google Search Console verification set up on the new domain.

5. Launch day

DNS swap. Sitemap submitted to Google Search Console immediately. We monitor for 404s in the first twenty-four hours, anything missed in the redirect map shows up here and gets fixed within hours.

6. The first six weeks

Expect a 10-20% traffic dip in the first one to two weeks while Google re-crawls. Don't panic, don't change anything reactively. Most rankings recover by week four to six. If they don't, that's diagnostic, something in the migration wasn't right. Common culprits: redirect chain depth, missing redirects on long-tail URLs that nobody was tracking, Core Web Vitals regression on the new site.

Timeline

Realistic timeline for a full Wix → Shopify migration: week one for content audit + URL mapping; weeks two and three for Shopify build + theme customisation; weeks four and five for redirect map build + cutover rehearsal; week six for DNS swap, launch, and monitoring; weeks seven to twelve for ranking recovery + ongoing tuning.

The biggest mistake founders make is rushing the audit phase and discovering URLs that should have been preserved three weeks after launch. Spend the time on the spreadsheet.