How to Verify Redirects After a Shopify Migration

You migrated to Shopify. The theme looks good. Products load. Checkout works. Everyone exhales.

Now comes the part most people skip: actually verifying the redirects.

If you migrated from WooCommerce, Magento, AmeriCommerce, or a custom platform, your old URLs don't just disappear. They're still in Google's index. They're in email campaigns from two years ago. Customers have shared them all over social media and in reviews. They're in backlinks you can't edit.

If those URLs don't redirect correctly, traffic leaks out slowly. Sometimes quietly.

Here's how to verify redirects properly — without guessing.

Step 1: Get a real list of old URLs (not just your favorites)

Start by building an inventory of every URL you used to have.

The easiest sources are:

• Your old sitemap.xml
• A crawl export (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, etc.)
• Product/collection exports from your previous platform

The goal is simple: collect every URL that previously returned 200 OK.

If you only test your top 20 pages, you're not validating a migration. You're spot-checking. Migrations break in the long tail.

Step 2: Validate the redirect behavior, not just the destination

For each old URL, you're answering a few questions:

Does it redirect cleanly?
Does it land somewhere sensible?
Does it take three hops to get there?
Did it get lazily dumped onto the homepage?

In practice, you want most old URLs to look like:

301 → 200 (one hop, correct destination)

Anything else deserves attention:

• 404s (missing pages)
• redirect chains (301 → 301 → 200)
• wrong content (returns 200 but it's not the right product/page)
• homepage dumping (everything redirects to /)

A handful of misses is normal. A pattern is a problem.

Step 3: Compare old vs new, because “it loads” isn't the same as “it didn't regress”

This is where migrations quietly lose money.

A redirect can be correct and the new page can still be worse.

You're looking for regressions like:

• slower server response time (TTFB)
• heavier pages (images/scripts/styles)
• slower total load
• visual differences you didn't expect

This is why I built Cutover.

You give it your old domain and your new domain, and it runs the boring checks you don't want to do manually:

• scans every old URL
• flags missing pages and redirect chains
• compares status codes
• measures performance deltas
• captures screenshots so you can spot changes fast

Instead of “I think it's fine,” you get a report you can actually trust.

If you're migrating to Shopify specifically, the Shopify migration checker walks through the full validation workflow.

Step 4: Run the audit more than once

If you can, validate redirects:

1. before switching DNS (staging)
2. immediately after launch
3. again a week later

Rules get tweaked. Apps get installed. Platforms throttle. Someone “quickly fixes” a redirect and accidentally breaks five others.

A migration isn't done just because it went live.

Final Thought

If you migrated a 300+ page site and didn't systematically verify redirects, you're flying blind.

At small scale, manual testing works.

At real scale, you need automation.

Run a full migration scan and know exactly what's working — and what isn't — before Google figures it out for you.