Two small, easy-to-get-wrong things came up rebuilding our services pages this week: what actually happens to your Shopify store when you touch the theme, and which kind of redirect actually protects your Google rankings during a website redesign. Both have documented, sourced answers most agency blogs skip.
Shopify: your theme and your content are not the same thing
If you ask someone to restyle your Shopify store's theme, a common worry is "will this break my products or blog posts?" Shopify's own help documentation settles it directly — describing what a theme download contains, it says a theme "doesn't include your store's products, collections, menus, pages, blog posts, images, or other files." Commerce data (products, collections, orders, customers) is stored completely separately from the theme, which only controls layout and presentation.
Practically: restyling a theme — new colours, fonts, logo, rearranged sections — cannot delete or alter a single product, page or blog post. Even fully replacing the theme leaves that data untouched.
Shopify's own recommended workflow for anyone about to touch a theme is also worth following: duplicate the published theme into an unpublished draft first, work there, and only publish once approved. That's the exact process behind ZoopCoder's fixed-price ₹1,499 Shopify Theme Customization — up to 5 sections restyled in 3-4 working days, the live store untouched until the new look ships: https://zoopcoder.com/services/shopify-theme-customization.php
Website redesign: 301 vs 302 is the whole SEO ballgame
The other one is a bigger, more expensive mistake we still see: agencies quietly use a 302 (temporary) redirect during a redesign because the old URL "still needs to be there for a bit." Google's Search Central documentation is explicit that only permanent redirects — 301 or 308 — are treated as a signal that the new URL should replace the old one in search results; temporary redirects (302, 303, 307) are not used as that canonicalization signal, so the old page can keep sitting in search results instead of the new one indefinitely.
Google also states plainly that "301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank" — so there's no ranking cost to doing this correctly — and recommends keeping redirects live for at least a year, since it typically takes "a few weeks or more" for a medium-sized site's new URLs to fully replace the old ones in search results (longer for bigger sites).
Every website redesign we build uses exactly this: 301s (never 302s) for every changed URL, kept live for a minimum of a year, not pulled the moment the new site looks fine. Fixed-price ₹8,999 for up to 5 pages, 7-10 working days: https://zoopcoder.com/services/website-redesign.php
Sources, straight from the vendors, not our own claims:
- https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/managing-themes/duplicating-themes
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes
Disclosure: I'm with ZoopCoder, an Indian dev shop that builds and sells both of the fixed-price services linked above.
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