Magento to Shopify migration: recover lost meta titles, descriptions and SEO data
Magento stores meta_title and meta_description as separate attributes on every product and category, but Shopify's native product CSV has no SEO columns and most migration tools skip those attributes — so products and images come across while the meta fields land blank. With them empty, Shopify falls back to auto-generating snippets from the product description, burying your hand-written titles and cratering CTR. Shopify keeps no version history of SEO fields, so there's no undo to roll back to — the only copy of your old Magento meta lives in your Magento database/export, while you still have it.
If you didn't already have a backup, those old values are gone — Shopify keeps no history.
The steps below recover what you can. To make the next time a 1-click undo instead of hours of CSV work: a daily snapshot of every SEO field. Free to monitor, no card — and SEO Vault only reads your store unless you click restore.
Don't decommission Magento yet, and pause any re-import that's still running. In Shopify, open a handful of products and click 'Edit website SEO' — then do the same on the collections that replaced your Magento categories. Most migrations leave both the meta title and description empty because the importer never read those attributes; confirm exactly what's missing before you touch anything.
Pull the real values out of Magento while you still have access — it's the only place they exist. Export meta_title and meta_description per product and per category (System > Data Transfer > Export, or query catalog_product_entity_varchar / catalog_product_entity_text directly), and keep that file safe. Don't forget categories: category SEO almost never survives a replatform.
Re-import into Shopify in bulk with Matrixify, mapping meta title to the global.title_tag metafield and meta description to global.description_tag, and applying collection meta the same way. For any product the Magento export didn't cover, recover the old snippet text from Google Search Console (Performance > Search results, filtered to the page) or from Wayback Machine captures of the old Magento URLs, then paste it back in.
Once it's restored, close the gap that let the migration wipe it: nothing was recording these fields, which is exactly why an import could blank them — and the next app, theme swap, or bulk edit can do it again, usually unnoticed until traffic slips. Keep a daily snapshot of every SEO field (product and collection meta titles/descriptions, alt-text, tags, handles) so you're alerted the moment a batch changes — with the likely app named — and can restore the last good version in one click.
Source: Shopify Help Center: editing SEO for products and collections; Shopify product CSV reference (SEO title and meta description stored as global.title_tag / global.description_tag metafields, not standard CSV columns); Matrixify docs on importing SEO metafields
SEO Vault keeps a daily snapshot of every SEO field on your store — meta titles, descriptions, alt-text, tags, handles (products AND collections) — and emails you the moment something changes in bulk, with the likely app responsible. One click restores yesterday's state, just the SEO fields. Free to monitor and get alerted; $14/mo for 1-click restore.