Magento to Shopify Plus: The 40-Point Data and SEO QA Checklist

The Magento-to-Shopify-Plus migrations that go wrong almost never go wrong because the storefront was badly built. They go wrong because a redirect map was generated from a sitemap that was already stale, or because customer passwords could not be migrated and nobody planned the communications, or because a tax rule that existed as a Magento cart price rule has no obvious equivalent and got quietly dropped.

These are QA failures, not engineering failures, and they are entirely preventable with a list. This is ours — forty checks, grouped by what they protect. Work through it before cutover, not after.

Part 1: URLs, Redirects and Rankings (Checks 1–12)

This is where migrations lose money fastest, and where the damage is slowest to reverse. Shopify's URL structure differs from Magento's in ways that are not negotiable — /collections/, /products/, and the /collections/x/products/y duplication — so the mapping is genuine work, not a find-and-replace.

1. Crawl the live Magento store with a real crawler and export every indexable URL. Do not build the redirect map from the sitemap — sitemaps are routinely incomplete and out of date.
2. Pull the top 500 landing pages by organic sessions from analytics and confirm every one has an explicit, tested destination. These are the URLs that pay the bills.
3. Map category URLs to collections, including every layered-navigation URL that has earned rankings. Filtered URLs are frequently the ones ranking for long-tail terms.
4. Map product URLs, accounting for Magento's URL suffix (.html) which Shopify does not use.
5. Map CMS pages, including the ones nobody has opened in two years but which hold backlinks.
6. Decide the canonical form for products — Shopify serves products under both /products/x and /collections/y/products/x, and the canonical must be consistent sitewide.
7. Handle pagination. Magento's ?p=2 becomes Shopify's ?page=2; make sure paginated collection URLs resolve rather than 404.
8. Test the redirect chain depth. Every redirect should be a single hop. Chains of three or more leak authority and slow the crawl.
9. Confirm 301, not 302. Temporary redirects do not pass ranking signals and are startlingly common in hand-built maps.
10. Preserve or deliberately rewrite meta titles and descriptions for the top pages — do not let a theme's default template silently overwrite years of optimisation.
11. Recreate structured data. Product, Offer, AggregateRating, MerchantReturnPolicy and Breadcrumb markup all need to exist on the new templates and validate.
12. Set up a post-launch 404 monitor before you launch, not after. The first 72 hours of 404 logs are the most valuable diagnostic you will get.

Part 2: Customer and Order Data (Checks 13–22)

Customers notice this part immediately, and the support load from getting it wrong is what makes a launch feel like a disaster even when everything else worked.

1. Plan for passwords not migrating. Magento password hashes cannot be imported into Shopify. Every customer will need to reset. Decide the comms plan — email timing, wording, and support scripting — before launch, not in reaction to it.
2. Migrate customer accounts with their tags and segments intact, so lifecycle marketing does not restart from zero.
3. Migrate order history and confirm it is visible in the customer account. Customers checking a past order is one of the first things that happens after a relaunch.
4. Preserve order numbering or publish a clear mapping — finance, support and any connected ERP all depend on it.
5. Migrate saved addresses, and validate the country and region formats, which differ between the two platforms.
6. Check email subscription status transfers correctly. Re-mailing people who opted out is a compliance problem, not an inconvenience.
7. Migrate store credit, loyalty balances and gift-card values — these are liabilities, and losing them is a financial as well as a reputational event.
8. Verify B2B customer group assignments map onto Shopify's company and catalogue structures.
9. Reconcile record counts on both sides: customers, orders, addresses. A 2% shortfall is not rounding, it is a failed import.
10. Test the full account journey on the new store with a migrated account, not a freshly created one.

Part 3: Catalogue and Commercial Rules (Checks 23–33)

Magento's commercial logic is more expressive than Shopify's out of the box. Some of it maps directly, some needs Shopify Functions, and some needs a genuine rethink. Finding out which is which during UAT is expensive; finding out after launch is worse.

1. Inventory every cart price rule and catalogue price rule in Magento and decide, per rule, whether it maps natively, needs a Shopify Function, needs an app, or gets retired.
2. Map configurable products to variants, and check the 100-variant limit against your worst-case product. Products that exceed it need a different modelling approach.
3. Decide what happens to bundled and grouped products — Shopify has no direct equivalent, so each becomes a modelling decision.
4. Migrate customer-group pricing into Shopify's B2B catalogues, and test with a real B2B account.
5. Rebuild tax configuration and validate against real historical orders across every jurisdiction you sell into. Do not trust defaults.
6. Recreate shipping rules and rate logic, including any weight or dimension-based bands, and test at the boundaries rather than in the middle.
7. Verify multi-currency and market pricing if you are using Shopify Markets, including rounding rules.
8. Migrate product media at full resolution, and check alt text came with it — it is both an accessibility and an SEO asset.
9. Rebuild layered navigation as collection filters, and confirm the filterable attributes actually exist on the migrated products.
10. Re-point subscription contracts if you have them; this is specialist work and is frequently underestimated in the plan.
11. Migrate product reviews with their ratings and dates intact — losing review history visibly damages conversion.

Part 4: Integrations, Analytics and Launch (Checks 34–40)

1. Re-point every integration: ERP, PIM, WMS, CRM, marketplace feeds. Each is its own test, and each has an owner who needs to sign it off.
2. Rebuild analytics — GA4, server-side tagging, consent mode, ad platform conversion tracking — and validate purchase events with real test transactions before launch.
3. Verify Merchant Center feed continuity. A feed outage during a migration is a paid-traffic outage.
4. Load-test the theme, and run field-realistic performance checks on category and product templates before you launch, not after the first traffic spike.
5. Agree a rollback plan with a defined trigger, a named decision-maker and a tested procedure. Most migrations never use it; the ones that need it and do not have it become case studies of a different kind.
6. Freeze content and pricing changes for the cutover window, and tell everyone who might otherwise make one.
7. Book the launch away from peak. Nobody should replatform in November.

The First Two Weeks After Launch

The checklist does not end at cutover. Watch these daily:

• 404 logs — the fastest signal that a redirect group was missed
• Search Console coverage and crawl stats — expect movement, watch for cliffs
• Organic sessions by landing page, compared against the same page pre-launch rather than against a sitewide total
• Conversion rate by device, because mobile regressions hide inside healthy blended numbers
• Support ticket themes — your customers will find the migration gaps before your QA does

Expect a dip. A modest, recovering dip in organic traffic over three to six weeks is normal on any replatform. A cliff that does not recover is a redirect problem, and the sooner you find it the cheaper it is.

Should You Be Doing This At All?

Worth asking before you spend the money. Shopify Plus is a genuinely good answer when your team is small, your commercial rules are conventional, and the cost of running Magento infrastructure is buying you flexibility you never use. It is the wrong answer when your pricing logic is your competitive advantage, when your catalogue exceeds what the variant model handles gracefully, or when an ERP integration is the actual centre of your business.

We build on both, so we have no side to take. Our Maison Lipari Shopify Plus migration is what a good outcome looks like; our Magento front-end decision framework covers the case where the honest answer is to fix what you have rather than leave it.

If you want the migration run properly, our Shopify and Shopify Plus team do this work end to end, and our wider platform practice exists to make the choice before the project — including telling retail brands when the honest answer is to stay put.

Get the Migration Plan Reviewed

Send us your redirect map and your cart price rule inventory and we will tell you where the gaps are — that pair predicts most of what goes wrong. Talk to our team; we reply within a business day.