Changing Shopify Theme and Organic SEO

[Maxwell_Chiu]

Hello,

We are planning to switch our Shopify theme from Turbo to Warehouse. We want to make sure that changing the theme will not affect our organic search in SEO, and lose ranking. If it does, what can be done to not let it happen?

On the new theme, it is best to keep everything the same to avoid the possibility of affecting our SEO, correct? For example, in the new theme, we should keep the same color code from the old theme?

If someone can please provide us information, or a checklist, that would be great!

Thank you.

Any help/input will be appreciated.

Thank you.

[KieranR]

Theme switches are generally pretty safe in Shopify.

In saying that, here's some areas I would pay attention to:

• internal links changing
• schema being removed
• page-speed getting worse
• on-page content changing (more important if you have heavily customized PDP or PLPs)
• title tag & meta descriptions changing (dependant on liquid logic)

You can make a change like this as complex or as simple as you want to. It's pretty easy to over-kill.

The size/scale of your site and how much organic traffic you are getting (right now) will ultimately decide how important managing a change like this will be.

Some more ideas on SEO migrations:

There are ways to dupe a site and test it on a staging or dev instance without it being live, to identify SEO issues. If you want to get really techy there are ways to run diffs on old vs new theme with something like Sitebulb or even just with a ScreamingFrog export and Excel. 

If you want to be really thorough you can create a migration checklist. Personally I like to divide it up into stages: pre-change, during-change, post-change (cleanup), post-change (monitoring). Making sure to project-manage it correctly can become important (depending on your business). So ensuring timings, stakeholders and ownership for different tasks might need to be considered.

There are crawl-monitoring tools like ContentKing/DeepCrawl/OnCrawl which can help to monitor the "during-change" phase if needed.

You can search for "seo migration checklist" or "seo migration guide" there are some good ones out there. I'd suggest using those guides as inspo and just build out a staged checklist, specific to your site, based on what's needed or relevant.

[jam_chan]

@Maxwell_Chiu 

Most importantly, you have to prevent deadlinks (404) in your store. For colors, they do not affect SEO at all. Rest assured that, you can switch to other colors you like. 

For more info, please refer to my article: Will SEO be affected if I change my theme?