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My SEO plummeted after a website migration
Posted by on October 16, 2025 at 6:42 pmHi! I left my soul-crushing corporate role to help grow my dad's small business, and now my soul is crushed in a far more personal way.
He migrated his website from Magento to Shopify about a year ago, and since then our organic traffic has absolutely plummeted (I'm talking down 80%) since this switch. While Shopify is far more versatile, low-cost, and user-friendly, I seriously want to walk off a cliff every time I look at our traffic trends. I have a pit in my stomach every time I open Google Analytics and I just feel like I have lost all hope.
If you were in my shoes, how would you build this back up? Is it truly just strategic keywords, blog posts, and going for slow and steady growth or is there something more technical I should be doing here? I'm new to this world but eager to learn, just want to make sure I'm learning the right things and focusing my energy on what will have the highest impact.
Some context: We sell a direct to consumer men's health item, so organic search makes a lot of sense for our business. Think of how you google search your weird health issues or discomforts to find a solution to a problem very private and embarrassing.
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!
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1 Reply
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Probably because you changed your slugs and didn’t redirect them properly?
> Is it truly just strategic keywords, blog posts, and going for slow and steady growth or is there something more technical I should be doing here
Google is a page level system. Your page has 1 URL = its canon. If you “change it” – you are creating a new page.
All that ranking, CTR history and authority is stored in that URL, not variations of it.
Secondly – what you publish = relevance, where you rank = authority.
Authority is external – as it is with almost everything in life.
you dont get to say you’re the best – you get voted the best – either by CTR or by backlinks.
If I were you – I would try to recreate teh links you had or at least 301 them.
>While Shopify is f~~ar more versatile, low-cost, and user-friendly,~~ easier to use, it’s not SEO friendly
FTFY.
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Did it plummet all at once or gradually over time?
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Seen this many times as a magento dev.
as weblinkr mentions the urls, the structure would have very likely changed as shopify’s is quite different. This is super important. Additionally, magento by default will auto redirect url edits and changes and keeps these stored, you would have lost these also.
What you’ll need to do is 301 redirect all those pages from the old store to their new pages, get the list of all the internal redirects and flatten, and 301 them to.
Check in ‘Search Console’ for issues. 404s, canonicals etc, noindex..
Then on the technical side, magento is just more search friendly, you’ll probably need to do some work there with shopify… and match your meta titles etc as needed with the old site, check sku etc… check for schema differences if you had or have any. configurable and simple products a lot of people get caught on if that rings a bell.
basically all the stuff you should have done, before moving adhock.
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Use ai to create redirects. You can redirect 100s or more pages very accurately and be done with that part (at least) very quickly.
Just code structure and content changes can change your rank. There are a great many factors though and you should be looking at them all and going down the list fixing and/or mitigating the damage. Ensure all meta and on page seo is good. Make sure your keywords are mapped correctly. Duplicate content…etc etc. If I were you I’d pay for an seo tool like sem rush and audit the site. Start plugging holes and climbing out. Or…hire an seo nerd.
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As others mentioned, you should have had a migrating plan in which you listed all your old urls who brought in organic traffic (Google Search Console) and then map them to the new URLs with 301 redirects the moment you switched from Magento to Shopify.
Furthermore if you could have a general rule for redirection it would be good to add that (i.e. all pdp slugs changed from /p/something.html to /product/something/).
Within your content, you might have had and still have (not dynamic) linking to old URLs, even if you have proper redirecting in place, it would be better to properly link internally to the new URLs.
It’s a year since you migrated, hard to say you can still salvage, but what you should do is monitor your 404s in Google Analytics to help you identity which internal links to improve and 301 redirects to add.
Setup proper reporting in Looker Studio where you can monitor your organic traffic at least monthly to prevent that you wait a year for doing something about your next drop.
You can check and change the backlinks to your site which are in your control (socials, GBP etc) and ask webmasters to update backlinks to your website.
..
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SEO Wingman here, one way link coming in hot.
I have a soft spot for fathers, and especially sons trying to help their fathers.
I will link to you. Let’s get your dad ranking again.
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Cloudflare is super easy with 301 plus nice security features
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Everyone else already said it. You likely broke some links. Fix it ASAP or else lose years of SEO juice.
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