Squarespace to Shopify migration: old product URLs now 404 and rankings dropped
Squarespace and Shopify use completely different URL structures — Squarespace product pages live at paths like /shop/p/... while Shopify serves /products/handle — and Shopify auto-generates each handle from the product title during import, so it rarely matches your old Squarespace slug. Migration tools move the products but almost never create 301 redirects from the old URLs, so every page Google already indexed now returns 404, taking your rankings and accumulated link equity down with it. Shopify keeps no record of the old paths and no version history, so there's no undo — once Squarespace is offline, that list of URLs only survives in Google's index and the Wayback Machine.
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.
Keep your Squarespace site live, or fully exported, before you point the domain at Shopify — it's still the cleanest source of every old URL. If the DNS cutover already happened and pages are 404ing, don't panic-delete products or handles; the fix is adding redirects, not rebuilding the store.
Rebuild the complete list of old URLs: pull everything Google still knows about from Search Console (Indexing > Pages, plus Performance > Pages for the URLs that earned clicks), crawl the live or archived Squarespace site with a tool like Screaming Frog or the Wayback Machine, then export your new Shopify product and collection handles to map the two against each other.
Create the 301s in bulk: in Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects, import a CSV mapping each old Squarespace path to its new Shopify URL. Then re-crawl the old URLs to confirm each returns a single 301 (not a lingering 404 or a redirect chain), and resubmit your sitemap in Search Console so Google re-crawls and transfers the ranking signals.
Lock it down so the next change can't silently break URLs again: handles and redirects get rewritten every time you run a bulk import, rename products, or install an app — and you usually find out weeks later when traffic drops. A daily snapshot records your handles, redirects and SEO fields every day, alerts you the moment a batch changes (and flags the app that most likely caused it), and lets you restore the last good version in one click. This is what SEO Vault does.
Source: Shopify Help Center — 'URL redirects' (Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects, bulk CSV import); Google Search Central — 'Redirects and Google Search'
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.