With more than one million businesses currently using Shopifyas their preferred eCommerce platform, it’s normal for other online businesses to consider Shopify migrations. Still, replatforming can be costly (see how much it costs to perform an eCommerce platform migration) and a lot of things can go south if your team is not prepared. Let’s see what mistakes to avoid when migrating to Shopify! 

Top 6 Shopify Migration Mistakes:

Not making a Shopify migration checklist.

Migrating to Shopify requires a lot of work and organization, meaning the process calls for a detailed checklist if you want to stay out of trouble. Your in-house team in charge of the migration should create a pre and post-migration checklist and share it with your development agency or at least with whoever gets involved in the process later on. These documents should guide the migration team on all the critical steps that ensure the replatforming process was conducted properly and no Shopify migration mistakes will arise down the road. 

Forget to manage all administrative content. 

Backing up your current business information should be among the top priorities of your Shopify migration. This includes past transactions, staff information, product details, branding data and contact information. Though managing your administrative intent involves more than just ensuring your current company data remains intact during the replatforming process. 

One of the most common Shopify migration mistakes is to overlook the complexity of Shopify’s tax format and not rearrange your store’s shipping methods. If you get familiar with the new tax format and arrange all shipping details, you’re ready to move on with the design of your new store. 

Not checking (and double-checking) URLs. 

 Before you complete your Shopify migration, you should always double-check your store’s URLs to ensure they’re properly structured and displayed both on the web and mobile browsers. This will help not only your overall site structure but also your SEO efforts. eCommerce SEO is closely related to URLs, and checking these are in perfect health before moving forward with the re-platforming efforts will help your store continue to rank on search engines despite the changes. 

Not monitoring for 404 errors. 

On the topic of URLs, you should always set up 301 permanent redirects and monitor for 404 errors with Google Search Console. Once you setup your new Google Search Console account when migrating to Shopify, the system will automatically send you updates on how your site is indexing, readability or mobile formatting issues, intent penalties, security breaches, or any broken links. You should take advantage of this tool to monitor for 404 Page Not Found issues and avoid other Shopify migration mistakes when it comes to migrating content and old links. 

Allowing duplicate content to be generated. 

Duplicate content not only clutters and slows down your eCommerce store, but it can also hurt your search engine optimization strategy, as google penalizes duplicate posts, no matter if they’re product pages or blog post articles. This happens because Google assumes all copied content is an act of plagiarism, even if it’s coming from the same site. 

Shopify migration mistakes happen, and cloned content is among the most common things that can go wrong during the re-platforming process. You can avoid this by ensuring all the automation settings of the migrations are correct and looking for copies right away, to catch them early if they were to exist. This will save you valuable hours of manually removing copied content in the future and save your are-earned rankings from getting penalized by Google. 

Picking the wrong kind of Shopify theme. 

One of the first decisions you and your team will have to make when migrating to Shopify is whether you prefer a custom or template Shopify theme. If you go the custom route, then your custom eCommerce development team should be able to take care of all the details. If not, keep in mind that, while Shopify templates are mostly user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing, they might not be 100% compatible with your previous site. That’s why you need to plan what kind of theme you’ll use before performing the migration or else you’ll be making one of the most common Shopify migration mistakes. 

Looking for professional assistance when migrating to Shopify?

At Resolve Digital, we understand the ins and outs of re-platforming and migrating to Shopify. We have a team of experienced software developers who work with all sorts of migration budgets and can accommodate any special requests. Contact us today to learn more about our services!