Crucial Considerations When Migrating your Store to Shopify

Things to prioritize out of every other factor for the successful migration of a previous storefront to Shopify.

With over 2 million active users, Shopify is a leading platform for modern eCommerce businesses. Scalability, security, easy product management, customization, and access to a robust ecosystem with minimal technical experience are some of its delightful benefits. For these reasons, an increasing number of eCommerce businesses are migrating their storefronts to Shopify.

Moving an existing eCommerce store to Shopify is a big step for a business. It would be best if a business owner put in the commensurate time and effort to successfully migrate their store's data to Shopify.

Store pages, product specifications, client information, and order history are examples of data that may need to be migrated. There are two approaches to data migration:

• Big Bang Migration: This enables businesses to migrate all of their store data within a predetermined timeframe. During the migration, the storefront will be unavailable to users.
• Trickle migration: This involves moving the storefront data over in small batches while maintaining sync between Shopify and the previous store without any downtime.

The Big Bang method of data migration, which enables companies to move all of their store data at once, will be the focus of this article. Below are the crucial considerations when using Big Bang migration.

Migration Plan

Preparing and following a migration plan is essential to successful data migration. A comprehensive migration plan will give a holistic overview of the migration process. It will also help determine the time and resources required to complete the process. In the case of unexpected events, the migration plan will help to handle the situation effectively.

A good migration plan should tick the following boxes:

• Understand The Data and Its Source: A comprehensive migration plan should provide insight into the type of data being migrated. The data can be images, texts, or slugs. Users should also identify the pages, files, or folders that house the data.
• Data Backup: Prior to the migration, backing up all data that users intend to move is paramount. This will guarantee that, in the event of an error, such as a failed transfer, a corrupted file, or a missing file, the files can easily be restored to their original states.
• Assess Resources and Tools: Once users have determined the type and size of data they want to transfer, they’ll need to determine how much storage space is needed on the new Shopify store, as well as the tools required to export and import the data to Shopify.
• Time: The migration time should provide an estimate of the time required to complete the data migration and test it on Shopify.
• Order of Migration: For data types like order history, there is need to import them in a particular order to maintain the relationship between the constituent data. To successfully link order history to the corresponding customers and products, Shopify advises that users import it in the following order:
  • Products
  • Customers
  • Historical orders

Protocol-Independent Assets

HTTPS, HTTP, and FTP are the common web protocols that websites load through. Migrating from an old store to Shopify may come with a change in the web protocol that a site loads through. For example, the old store website may be loading through HTTP, but the new store is loading through a secure protocol, HTTPS. In this case, store assets like JavaScript files, theme files, and stylesheets that are dependent on the old HTTP protocol may not respond properly, causing important components of the new Shopify storefront to not function properly. Therefore, it is good practice to update such assets to be protocol-independent before migrating them to Shopify.

Making an asset protocol-independent can be achieved with following these process:

1. Open the theme files in a text editor.
2. Search for the texts, http:// and https://
3. Everywhere the above protocol texts are found, replace them with //.

Below is an example:

Protocol Dependent

<img src="http://mystore.sample-product.jpeg" alt="My sample product"/>

Protocol Independent

<img src="//mystore.sample-product.jpeg" alt="My sample product"/>

By updating the store assets to use protocol-independent URLs, you'll make sure that the assets load through any protocol the site uses and they continue to work correctly after the migration.

URL Redirects

When a previous store's content is migrated to Shopify, users and search engines will no longer be able to access the store via the old URLs. In such a case, the eCommerce store might lose past clients who are unaware of the migration, and if the broken URLs are not fixed promptly, the store might lose its search engine credibility. It is imperative to set up URL redirects for crucial pages to prevent such awful scenarios.

1. To configure URL redirects, follow this process::
2. Log in to the old eCommerce platform from which you are migrating.
3. Find the URL redirects section in the account settings, or contact the platform's Help Center if you can’t locate the section.
4. Click on "Add new URL redirect" in the URL redirect section.
5. Enter the old URL you want to redirect users from in the From field. For example: https://www.myoldstore.com/products
6. Enter the new URL that you want to redirect users to in the To field. For example: https://www.newstore.shopify.com/products
7. Click on "Add redirect"

Manually finding and adding URL redirects on large websites will be time-consuming. Crawling tools such as Screaming Frog can crawl the old storefront, find broken links or the existing XML sitemap, and bulk export them as a CSV file. Following that, you can import the CSV file using the Shopify dashboard. On adding the redirect, customers who visit the page through the old URL will be automatically redirected to the new Shopify page.

Customer Accounts and Passwords

Customer records are another important consideration when migrating a store to Shopify to ensure the continuity of the eCommerce business. Customer data can be imported into Shopify by doing the following:

• Create a CSV file with the customer profiles and