Before you push the button and migrate your site to Shopify, it's best to conduct some reviews of all the work that's been done, to minimise any risks when you go live. Find out what we do prior to every single migration to make sure it goes as smoothly as possible.
We use the same checklist on every site we migrate. We've refined this over several years and dozens of migrations and it ensures we cover the key QA steps for every launch.
Quality-assuring redirects is one of the most important parts of the entire process.
It is essential to ensure that:
Shopify will block any IP that attempts to request lots of URLs too quickly. This is to prevent people spamming your site. This includes bots like Screaming Frog.
To get around this, in Screaming Frog go to:
When the crawl has finished, go to:
Reports > Redirects > All Redirects
This will export a CSV that details all the redirects discovered during the call.
Then go to:
Reports > Redirects > Redirect Chains
This will generate a report that details any redirects that chain across multiple redirects. For these ones you should update the redirect so that it points directly at the final destination.
This is the final check we do to review the SEO health of the site - any amendments are passed to our development team to implement.
Some of the things we check include:
A canonical tag ("rel canonical") is a way of letting search engines know that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. In real terms, the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in their search results.
Schema markup is a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines better understand the info on your website. These markups allow search engines to see the meaning and relationships behind entities mentioned on your site.
You use headers to provide structure to your pages. Typically an H1 is the main title, H2s might represent chapters and H3s, H4s and H5s etc can refer to sub-topics.
Hreflang is a HTML attribute which indicates to search engines when there are alternate versions of a page intended for a different region/language audience.
Hreflang can be implemented in different ways but the most common is a simple meta tag which goes on any page that has alternate versions.
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