The challenge
The store was moving from WordPress to Shopify. Years of rankings sat on old category, product and blog URLs.
The old site had working Product, Merchant listing, Breadcrumb and Review structured data. A separate development team was building the new store, so SEO had to be checked from the outside before and after launch.
What I did
- Mapped every old URL to its new home: 454 to collections, 241 to products and 2 to blog posts. Discontinued products went to the closest collection, not the homepage.
- Validated the redirect file before import: no empty rows, duplicates, self-redirects, chains or loops. Flagged double-encoded URLs and old image paths that Shopify may not redirect.
- Checked canonical tags and all four structured data types on the staging store before the domain moved.
- After launch, found that old URLs redirected to a trailing-slash version while the canonical pointed to the non-slash version. Documented it with proof and had the developers point redirects straight to the canonical URL.
- Rewrote titles and meta descriptions for the homepage and key blog posts, and replaced file-name alt text on product images.
The outcome
The store launched with a clean, validated redirect map and structured data verified before go-live.
The redirect and canonical mismatch was caught in the first post-launch review, before it could split ranking signals.
