Why did my Google traffic drop after moving my store off Shopify?
Usually because old URLs stopped working. When a store leaves Shopify's theme, blog, product and collection links often change, and any page without a permanent redirect loses the search history it earned. At Mully, Google impressions fell 81% the month we moved. Our SEO agent found 3,050 dead links, and fixing the ones that used to earn traffic came first.
We moved Mully's storefront off Shopify's theme onto a custom site earlier this year. When we built an SEO agent and its first job was pulling 16 months of Search Console data, the problem was obvious: impressions fell 81% the month we moved, and monthly clicks went from about 1,900 to 616 (Drew's thread on X).
This guide walks through what the agent checked, what it found and what we fixed first. The steps work whether a person or an agent does them.
What actually breaks when a store leaves Shopify?
Shopify uses fixed URL patterns: /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/news/. A new site often changes those paths, drops old locale prefixes or simply never rebuilds the old blog. Every one of those old URLs had earned impressions, links and rankings. If it now returns a 404, that history stops counting.
Google's own guidance for any site move starts with the same step: list your old URLs and map each one to its new destination (Google Search Central). Most traffic drops after a replatform come from skipping or rushing that map.
How do you find which old URLs are broken?
Our agent did three things in order:
- Pulled the history. It exported page-level clicks and impressions from the Search Console Performance report, which counts how often your site appeared in results and how often people clicked through (Search Console Help). The months before the move tell you which URLs were worth something.
- Checked every old URL against the live site. It requested each one and recorded the status code. 3,050 old links were dead.
- Ranked the dead links by what they used to earn. The worst were 75 blog posts that drew 156,000 Google impressions in the two months before the move. They still existed inside Shopify but the new site never served them (Drew's thread on X).
Ranking matters more than the raw count. A dead link that never earned an impression costs nothing, so the ranked list is what tells you where to start.
What should you fix first?
| Priority | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Old pages that earned real impressions | This is where the lost traffic lives |
| 2 | Pages other sites link to | Links keep sending signals only if the URL resolves |
| 3 | Everything else with a close match | Cheap to redirect, small gains each |
| 4 | Pages with no good match | Let them 404 rather than force a bad redirect |
For Mully, the agent handed its ranked list to our website agent. It restored the top 12 blog posts at their exact old URLs and added 130 permanent redirects for the rest (Drew's thread on X).
Which redirects does Google want?
Google recommends server-side permanent redirects, 301 or 308, from each old URL straight to its final new URL. It suggests avoiding redirect chains and keeping redirects for at least a year (Google Search Central). A permanent redirect tells Google the new URL should be treated as the canonical one (Google's redirect documentation).
Two common mistakes:
- Redirecting everything to the homepage. It is fast, but someone who searched for a specific jacket lands on a page that does not answer the search. Map each URL to its closest live equivalent.
- Temporary redirects left in place. A 302 that was meant to be swapped later still sits there months on. Check the status codes, not just that the page loads.
How long until traffic comes back?
Google says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones, and larger sites take longer, with rankings fluctuating along the way (Google Search Central). That clock only starts once the redirects are live. In our case it started five months late.
The lesson from our own move: check Search Console the week after a replatform, not five months later.
What about AI search?
Search engines are no longer the only place shoppers ask questions. Our SEO agent also tracks AI answers. It runs 15 buyer questions each week and logs which sources the AI tools cite. In October, AI answers cited mymully.com in 3 of 15 buyer questions, and AI search sent 32 visits (Drew's thread on X). We count Google clicks plus AI visits as one organic number.
Research on generative engines found that pages with clear citations, quotes and statistics showed up in AI answers more often, while keyword stuffing did worse (Aggarwal et al.). Restoring old pages helps here too. A restored page with real numbers and sources gives both Google and AI tools something worth citing.
What runs every week now?
Once the recovery work shipped, the agent moved to a weekly loop:
- Pull weekly and month-to-date clicks and AI visits.
- Re-run the buyer questions and log citations.
- Flag any page that drops more than five positions or falls out of the index.
- Write up to three ranked fixes for the website agent.
The agent does not edit the site itself. It writes the fixes, and the website agent ships them after a preview check. That split keeps one agent focused on finding problems and the other on shipping safe changes.
Common questions
How long does Google take to recover after a site move?
Google says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs replace the old ones in results, and larger sites take longer. That timeline assumes the redirects are in place. Pages with no redirect do not recover on their own.
Should every old URL redirect to the homepage?
No. Send each old page to the closest live page that answers the same need, like an old product to its replacement or its collection. A blanket homepage redirect throws away the match between what someone searched and what they land on.
Which redirect status code should I use?
Use a permanent redirect, 301 or 308. Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the new URL should be the one it shows in search. Keep them in place for at least a year, and ideally for good.
Do I need an agent for this, or can I do it by hand?
A small store can do it by hand with a spreadsheet of old and new URLs. An agent helps when there are thousands of URLs, when you want every lost page ranked by the traffic it used to earn, and when you want the check to keep running every week after the fix.