Most Squarespace-to-Shopify migrations we audit lost organic rankings on the cutover. Not all of them, and the loss isn't always permanent, but it's common enough that we plan for it explicitly on every migration we run.
The loss almost always traces back to one of three things: a missing or wrong redirect map, a mishandled hreflang setup on multilingual stores, or a DNS cutover scheduled at the wrong moment.
The redirect map is the foundation. Before the new site ships, we crawl the existing Squarespace store, export every URL with organic traffic in the last 12 months, and map each one to its Shopify equivalent. Product pages map to product pages, collection pages to collections, and content pages to whatever the closest equivalent is. Squarespace's URL conventions don't match Shopify's, so the map is non-trivial. There are usually 200 to 600 redirects on a mid-sized store.
“Assume nothing is preserved automatically. Map every URL, audit every hreflang, schedule every cutover.
We load that map into Shopify's URL Redirects panel before the cutover. Bulk import via CSV, then spot-check the high-traffic ones manually. Squarespace also runs a redirect on its own end if you keep the domain there briefly during cutover, but we don't rely on that. Shopify handles the redirects from the moment the domain points at it.
For multilingual stores, hreflang gets rewritten from scratch. Squarespace's multilingual handling is limited and non-standard. Shopify Markets handles it cleanly with a per-region URL structure, and we re-emit hreflang tags pointing at the new structure. Google reindexes the new structure within two to four weeks if the redirects are clean.
DNS cutover happens at low-traffic hours, typically a Tuesday between 02:00 and 04:00 local time. We pre-stage the Shopify store on a myshopify.com URL with the redirect map already loaded, run a final pre-launch QA, then flip the DNS. TTL on the existing DNS is dropped to 300 seconds the week before so propagation is fast.
The rule we follow: assume nothing is preserved automatically. Map every URL, audit every hreflang, schedule every cutover. The migrations we've run this way arrive on the other side with rankings intact.
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