How to transfer your blog when migrating to Shopify

Whenever you go through migrating from one platform to another, the main focus is always on the commercial pages which are where you ultimately make your money. 

However, as search engines develop the way they crawl the internet, informational content is becoming more and more important every day for your site, and if you lose any value from blog content you have currently when you migrate, no matter how perfectly you migrate your product & category pages you’ll see a drop off due to loss of long-tail terms, loss of internal linking & authoritative content onsite.

Due to rise in demand of Magento 1 migrations to Shopify in 2020, this is something we’ve dealt with a lot. See below our steps to migrating your blog content from any platform to Shopify:

• If you have a /blog/ subfolder (or similar ID slug) on your site before your titles, you can use Google Analytics data from the last 12 months to identify the blog posts that have been bringing you in traffic. Filter this by organic traffic channel, and then export the list

• Any blogs that have sessions that make up less than 1% of the total amount of sessions to your blog over the last 12 months, you should look to either cut completely, or decide to re-do & optimise with a brand new article on your new Shopify site

• If you don’t have a /blog/ subfolder (or similar ID slug) on your site before the titles, you’ll be best either a) crawling all your pages and then manually checking the blogs in GA, or view your entire site in GA, export into Excel/Google Sheets, and look at lowest-performing pages in terms of sessions over the last 12 months and follow the same above process

Once you’ve identified the content you want to keep due to the traffic & potential if optimised, this is where it gets manual. You’ll need to basically go to Online Store > Blog Posts > Create New Blog Post, and then copy/paste your existing article into this new Shopify one. Add all images as per the initial article too.

Then, optimise the metadata and create a unique title tag, meta description, slug (try to make identical to existing one) & add your featured image.

We recommend you do this with all articles BEFORE you go live on Shopify, so you can save it and then choose to “publish at a later date” if you know the date of your migration & Shopify launch.

The final crucial step is then mapping out the redirect from the previous blog URL to the new Shopify one, and implementing this redirect with the rest of the sites redirects on the day of migration.

You can read more about how to implement redirects on Shopify in our Ultimate Shopify SEO guide here.

Interested in finding out more about how we can help you migrate or with your Shopify site? Get in touch with us here.

Alternatively, read about how we’ve achieved 100% year on year non-brand SEO growth for letterbox flower delivery giant Bloom & Wild.