How to leave Shopify without throwing away URLs

9 October 2026. Crost.

The risk in a replatform is not the theme. It is the addresses customers, ads, and search engines already use. Crost keeps the Shopify store live while the new store is built, maps the old URLs onto the new ones, and re-syncs orders and inventory before DNS changes. This note covers the URL part.

What Shopify's URLs look like

Every Shopify store uses the same fixed patterns, and you cannot rename the prefixes. A migration has to account for each of them:

/products/handle for products, and /collections/name/products/handle for the same product reached through a collection.
/collections/name for collections, including filtered and paginated variants.
/pages/name for static pages, and /blogs/news/post-name for articles.
/cart, /account, /policies/... and the checkout, which are platform features rather than content.

The collection-scoped product path is the one most often forgotten. Links, ads, and search results point at it, even though the canonical page is /products/handle.

Build the redirect map before the build is finished

Inventory everything that has an address. Export products, collections, pages, and blog posts from the old store, and crawl the live site to catch URLs the export misses.
Decide which URLs the new store keeps. If the new platform can serve the same path, keep it and no redirect is needed. If not, point the old path at the closest equivalent page.
Map one to one. A product goes to its own product, a collection to its own collection. Sending retired products to the home page tells search engines nothing useful. Send them to the nearest category, or let them return a clear 404 or 410 if nothing replaces them.
Use permanent (301) redirects, one hop. Chains of redirects slow crawling and lose clarity.
Test the map on staging against the full URL list, and sample high-traffic URLs by hand.

Keep these steady through the cutover

Titles, descriptions, headings, and structured data on pages that already rank. Changing the platform and the content at once makes any ranking change impossible to diagnose.
Canonical tags that point to the new URL, and an XML sitemap that lists only live URLs.
Image URLs and alt text. Image search and product listings often depend on them.

Launch order

DNS is the last step, and only after the new store has been tested. Shopify stays as a fallback until that cutover is proven. That is the same sequence as on the migration page.

What to check after launch

Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch the Pages report for new "Not found" and "Redirect error" entries.
Compare crawl and impressions data for your top landing pages against the weeks before the move.
Re-crawl the live site against the redirect map and fix anything that lands on the wrong page.
Keep the redirects in place for at least a year, longer if old URLs still receive links.

Mapping every URL gives existing rankings somewhere to land. It cannot guarantee that every keyword keeps its position. To scope a move for your store, start with the migration audit.