Hey Jimmy, camera and imaging retailer
WooCommerce to Shopify: Recovering 675 Dead URLs and a Blank Catalogue
What a camera retailer's move from WooCommerce to Shopify quietly broke, from old product URLs that still earned most of the site's clicks to a catalogue with no SEO data, and how we rebuilt it.
Moved platforms and lost search traffic? Get a free migration check.The problem
Hey Jimmy sells cameras, lenses, lighting and audio gear from dozens of brands, and moved from WooCommerce to Shopify in early 2026. The new store looked fine and took orders. What nobody checked was what the move had done to search.
What we found
The old WooCommerce product URLs had never been redirected. All 675 of them returned a 404 page, and they were still the site's best performers: across Bing's history for the site, those dead URLs had earned 67% of every click it ever recorded, at nearly double the click-through rate of the live Shopify pages that replaced them.
The catalogue had come across empty. 2,377 products had no SEO title, 2,354 had no SEO description, and every single product was missing a product type. Shopify's own count said every product had a type; four samples proved the values were blank.
38 products carried promotional titles starting with “Buy”. Shopify's Google channel sends that field to Merchant Center as the product title, so each one was a disapproval waiting to happen. And the theme added “ - Hey Jimmy” to every product title, spending 13 characters of every search result on the store's own name.
What we changed
654 of the 675 dead URLs now 301 to the right product. Matching thousands of old slugs to new ones is where migrations go wrong: loose matching happily sends a Nikon Z6 III page to a Z7 II, so every uncertain match was checked by a person, and the ones with no honest equivalent were left alone rather than dumped on the homepage.
Product type written to 2,663 products across 57 types, with 23 genuine oddballs left empty rather than guessed. SEO titles and descriptions written to 2,415 products to a real 60-character budget, including the 38 promotional titles, while 74 descriptions a person had already written were kept as they were. Every write was verified by re-reading the catalogue and comparing it row by row.
36 brand collections built from the brand field, covering 73% of the catalogue, with a Brands menu to reach them. The store-name suffix now drops on product pages only, so collections and the blog keep the brand.
A follow-up audit in September corrected spec tables on 7 product pages that had been copied from other models, including an “Australian warranty” line on an Indian store, and put “Price in India” in 30 product titles while keeping the Google Shopping titles plain through a separate feed.
Where it stands
The redirects are live and checked: 25 of 25 randomly sampled old URLs return a 301 to the right product. At the September audit Merchant Center showed no account issues and no ineligible products. The catalogue rebuild went live in September, so it is too early to credit a change in search traffic to it. We will say what moved once there is a clean month to compare.
How we match thousands of old URLs to the right new product, and which matches we refuse, is the part we do not publish. It is also the part that decides whether a migration keeps its traffic.
The store is described rather than named. Every figure on this page is one we measured on it.