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By Joshua Uebergang

Six weeks after launch, organic traffic is down by a third and nobody can say why. The agency mentions that Google has been volatile. Someone raises a core update. The real answer is usually sitting in the redirect file, decided by whoever happened to pick up the migration ticket that week.

I have audited more than 1,300 Shopify stores, and replatforming damage has a signature. Nothing has been penalised. The damage is structural, and it happens because Shopify makes decisions about your site that your old platform left to you.

Brands move to Shopify for the roadmap, and releases like Winter '26 are a fair reason to. What arrives with it is a URL structure you do not control.

Products live under /products/. Collections live under /collections/. Static pages live under /pages/, and blog posts live under /blogs/, plus a blog handle plus the article handle. None of those prefixes is configurable.

Coming off Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or anything custom, that means every URL on the site changes. Not the important ones. All of them.

Most migration plans treat this as a redirect task. It is an information architecture task that happens to need redirects, and the distinction becomes obvious about two months after launch.

There is a second URL problem sitting underneath that one. Shopify will serve the same product at /products/handle and at /collections/some-collection/products/handle. Most themes canonicalise to the short version, which is correct, but plenty of themes still generate the long version inside collection grids and related-product blocks. Your internal links then point at URLs you never intended to rank. Crawl your own theme output before you blame anything external.

The standard approach is to export the top few hundred pages from analytics and map those. That list is wrong in a specific way. It contains only pages that got traffic inside the window you exported, which leaves out everything seasonal, everything that ranks but converts too poorly for anyone to look at, and every URL that earns links without earning sessions.

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