Migrating from PrestaShop to Shopify Plus is not "moving a shop". It is replacing the foundation the company's revenue rests on — and that is exactly why it causes so much anxiety. The board's most common question is not "how much does it cost", but "will we lose traffic and sales along the way". The answer depends entirely on the discipline of the process. Below is the playbook we used for the Topeshop migration — a store that, after moving to Shopify Plus, recorded a 58% increase in conversion with an organic traffic drop of under 3%.
Why companies are leaving PrestaShop
PrestaShop works well at an early stage, but once turnover passes several or a dozen million złoty, its hidden cost grows exponentially. Core updates break modules. Every module from a different vendor means a different support cycle. Performance with a large catalogue demands ever more expensive infrastructure and a dedicated DevOps team. Shopify Plus shifts that burden onto the platform — hosting, scaling, PCI and security stop being your team's problem.
The seven-stage playbook
URL audit and address map. We export the full URL map from PrestaShop and cross-reference it with data from Google Search Console and Ahrefs. Every address gets a status: keep, redirect, remove. This is the foundation of the whole SEO migration.
Data model and catalogue mapping. The structure of products, variants, attributes and collections in PrestaShop differs from the Shopify model. We map field by field before moving anything — a mistake at this stage multiplies across thousands of SKUs.
Content and data migration. Products, customers, order history and blog content go to Shopify via the API in a staging environment, not in production. We validate completeness: the number of records on input must match the output.
Rebuilding the SEO structure. Meta tags, structured data, canonicals and the heading structure are recreated 1:1. Wherever a URL changes, we prepare 301 redirects — the complete set, not a sample.
The 301 redirect map. The most important technical element of an SEO migration. Every old URL with SEO value must point to the right new address. Redirect chains and loops are eliminated before launch.
Testing on staging. A full review: cart, checkout, payments, integrations (ERP, warehouse, couriers), performance. A Screaming Frog crawl of staging catches 404 errors and gaps in redirects before Google sees them.
Cutover and monitoring. DNS switch, immediate submission of the new sitemap in GSC, day-by-day monitoring of indexing and rankings for the first 4–6 weeks. We react to anomalies within hours, not weeks.
The result of the Topeshop case
After the migration conversion rose by 58% — mainly thanks to Shopify's faster, well-polished checkout and better mobile performance. The drop in organic traffic stayed below 3%, against an industry benchmark of 15–30%. The difference is made not by the tool, but by the completeness of the redirect map and by rebuilding the SEO structure before the cutover, not after it.
Conclusion: Migrating a platform without losing SEO is entirely achievable, but it requires treating SEO as the first item on the task list, not the last.