We recently showed you the steps to migrate your online store from Prestashop to Shopify and this time we want to focus on the prior considerations you must make to take this step, which can be crucial for the future of your business. If you are thinking about taking the step and need help, at Webmefy we will be happy to hear your questions to ensure that this transition is as comfortable as possible. You just have to contact us. For now, we explain what steps you have to take before migrating your online store to Shopify.

Removing specific protocols from your resources

This step is essential in the process, since it depends on whether you can have access to all the resources of your online store. To do this you must remove each and every one of the specific protocols such as http: or https: from the urls of these template file resources, style sheets or images.

Configuring redirects to migrate your online store to Shopify

If your online store already has a certain history, you must keep in mind that many customers will have saved some of your pages with their favorite products and it is very important that these pages continue to guide them correctly, since that is surely the way in which they access to buy them. In this sense, you can import and export URL redirects on the URL Redirects page , which is very useful if you have a large number of redirects to manage.

How is this process carried out?

To do this, you must log in to the platform from which you want to migrate your online store to Shopify. Subsequently, you must look for the URL Redirects section in your account settings, whose location varies depending on the platform you are working with. If you can't find it, we recommend that you search the platform's help center, as it is usually quite complete.

Once you have found it, you will need to enter the old url in the 'From' field and the new Shopify url in the 'To' field. You must repeat this process with all the urls you want to redirect.

Practical example of URL redirection to migrate your online store

Let's imagine that we want to migrate our online store to Shopify and that our best-selling product is a 100% synthetic gasoline car oil. A link to this oil was recently published on a motor blog and the truth is that it is generating a lot of traffic, but the original link goes to our old store. To ensure that we do not lose a single customer, it is vital to correctly configure the redirection of this URL and we will do it as follows:

1. We log in to our old ecommerce platform and head to the URL redirect section.
2. We click 'Add new URL redirect'.
3. In the 'Redirect from' field, we add the old address of our 100% synthetic oil for gasoline cars.
4. In the 'Redirect to' field we enter the new address of this product in our Shopify online store.
5. Finally, we click on 'Add Redirect'.

In this way, readers who come to the specialized blog and try to buy our oil will be able to do so safely from our new platform.