You've spent countless hours choosing a Shopify theme, importing products, and ultimately creating your new Shopify store. But, your store still needs to be published so that potential customers can learn more about your brand and convert into buyers.
Here are some best practices to follow when making your new Shopify store visible under your domain.
ADD THE NEW DOMAIN TO SHOPIFY
Within the Shopify administration panel, go to Sales Channels > Domains > Connect the existing domain and paste here the domain you want to connect.
UPDATE THE DNS RECORDS
In the administration panel of your domain you need to make two changes:
- Replace the IP address
- Add or replace the CNAME record
REMOVE FRONT END PASSWORD
In Shopify, go to Sales Channels > Preferences > Password Protection and uncheck Enable Password.
If you don't remove the password, your customers won't be able to access your store even if you have it published.
ADD MORE DOMAINS IF NEEDED
You can repeat steps one and two for other domains you own. If you do this, you can define the main domain from all of them, as you will see in the next point.
The number of domains you associate with your Shopify store is irrelevant to SEO.
DEFINE A PRIMARY DOMAIN IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE
In Sales Channels > Domains you can define which will be your main domain. If you want the traffic of all your domains to be redirected to the main domain, make sure that the "redirect all traffic to this domain" option is checked. Doing this is important for the SEO of your Shopify online store.
WHAT 3 THINGS YOU SHOULD CHECK ON LAUNCH DAY
Check the following just before you publish your Shopify online store:
- Perform a final review to find and correct errors in texts and images.
- Check all links to make sure you don't have any broken links (error 404). The brokenlinkcheck.com tool can help you with this.
- If you had discount coupons activated in your previous store, make sure you also create them in your new Shopify store.
If you have any questions about how to optimize your Shopify store prior to launch, reach out to us so that we can provide personalized solutions for your business! Contact us and we'll talk about what we can do for your brand.
