Hi all! I have a client who’s store I’m inheriting and the current stack is Hydrogen storefront + Oxygen + Sanity.io which is totally overkill for the size of the client’s business so I’m proposing they migrate back to a Liquid theme and host from the native online store.
Has anyone done this type of migration before and is it as “simple” as developing a new theme and pointing the domain back to the online store? Seems too easy lol (I’ve never worked on a store with this stack before)
Client’s store setup is very straightforwarod right now they only have 3 skus with a few variants and less than 10 pages across the store and only a few third-party apps like Klaviyo, Mux for video hosting, and Facebook pixel. I understand that we’d need to port over all of the content from Sanity (they’re not doing anything crazy in there) and for any routes created in Hydrogen would need to match those back up or redirect.
If anyone knows of any other gotchas or has experience with this I’d love your input! Thanks so much!
Yeah, from what you’ve described it sounds like this should be a fairly manageable migration. Since all of the merchant’s product data, customers, orders, etc. already live in the Shopify backend, you’re really just looking at a frontend swap.
The main things I’d keep in mind are porting any content managed in Sanity (page copy, media, custom content blocks, etc.) over to be hosted natively on Shopify, and figuring out how to embed the Mux videos in a Liquid theme vs how they’re being pulled in via Hydrogen currently. SEO is probably the area I’d be most careful with though. It might be worth doing a full crawl of the current site before migrating to map out all URLs, meta titles/descriptions, any structured data or schema markup, and canonical URLs. Good call on redirects, but you also may want to make sure any SEO metadata managed in Sanity gets ported over to Shopify’s native SEO fields or the theme. Then it’s really just pointing the domain away from Oxygen back to Shopify’s native hosting.
I can’t say for sure, since every migration is a bit different depending on how things were set up on the Hydrogen side, but generally speaking for a store this size the process should be pretty straightforward.
Hope this helps! Let me know if I can clarify anything on our end here
