From PrestaShop to Shopify without losing your menu or breadcrumbs
When a store moves from PrestaShop to Shopify, everyone remembers the products, customers and orders. The menu and the breadcrumbs are usually left for last, and that is a mistake: they guide shoppers through the catalogue and tell Google how the store is organised. This guide explains what changes between the two platforms, how to keep both without rebuilding them by hand, and what to check before you switch the domain.
Why the menu and breadcrumbs matter in a migration
In PrestaShop the category tree is almost everything: it feeds the main menu, the category pages and the breadcrumbs of every product (Home › Category › Subcategory › Product). Your regular customers know where everything is, and Google has learned the hierarchy of your catalogue from those links and from the breadcrumb markup.
If the menu reaches Shopify incomplete or with a different structure, shoppers get lost and the internal links that supported your key categories disappear. And if the breadcrumbs stop showing, Google loses a hint about the store hierarchy, which it can also use to show the page path in search results. None of this breaks the store, but it shows in navigation and rankings exactly when they are most fragile: the weeks after the migration.
What changes from PrestaShop to Shopify
| PrestaShop | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Catalogue | Category tree with levels (category, subcategory…) | Flat collections, with no parents or children |
| Main category of a product | Every product has a default category | A product can be in many collections and none is “the main one” |
| Menu | Menu module (the theme’s “Main menu” or a mega menu) that reads the categories | Navigation menus created by hand, link by link |
| Breadcrumbs | Rendered by the theme from the category tree | Depends on the theme: many have none, and those that do don’t know your hierarchy |
| URLs | With an ID or custom (for example /12-t-shirts) | Fixed: /collections/… and /products/… |
The upshot is clear: Shopify has no category tree to build the menu and breadcrumbs from. That hierarchy has to be rebuilt somehow, and the fastest way is to bring it over from the store you already have.
Step by step: keeping the menu and breadcrumbs when migrating
- Take stock of your PrestaShop store. Note the category tree you actually use, the main menu as shoppers see it (including links to brands, CMS pages or promotions) and a sample of the breadcrumbs of several products.
- Import the products and create the collections. Each PrestaShop category you want to keep becomes a Shopify collection. Use the same name: that makes it easy to match each menu link to its collection.
- Bring the menu over. Instead of recreating it link by link, import it from the old store (see the next section) and review the result: order, labels and links that are not categories.
- Turn on breadcrumbs with their markup. They should show on product and collection pages, with the same hierarchy you had in PrestaShop and with Google’s structured data (BreadcrumbList).
- Prepare the redirects. Every old category and product URL must lead to its new Shopify URL with a 301 redirect. Shopify has its own URL redirect tool and lets you import redirects in bulk from a CSV.
- Test before switching the domain. Browse the new store from the menu on mobile and desktop, open products from different categories and check that the breadcrumbs tell the same story as before.
How to import the menu and breadcrumbs from PrestaShop
Our app LG Breadcrumbs SEO & Mega Menu is built for exactly this moment. Besides creating mega menus and breadcrumbs, it reads the structure of your old store and rebuilds it in Shopify:
- Import from your store’s address. You type the URL of your PrestaShop store (1.7, 8 or 9) and the app reads the main menu of the home page once. No password or back-office access is needed.
- Also from WooCommerce and Magento. In WooCommerce it reads the store’s public product categories; in Magento 2, its public category tree.
- Each category linked to its collection. The app looks for the Shopify collection with the same name, and you decide whether missing ones are created (empty, to fill later) or kept as plain links.
- Or by CSV, if you prefer. If your store is not public or you want to review the data first, an export module for PrestaShop generates the category CSV from the back office and the app imports it.
- Breadcrumbs with the same hierarchy. From the imported menu, the app builds the breadcrumb tree and saves it on your collections. Once you add its block to the theme, every product and collection page shows its path (Home › Collection › Product) with BreadcrumbList markup for Google.
Importing from PrestaShop, WooCommerce and Magento is included in every plan, the free one too. You will find all the details on the breadcrumbs and mega menu app page.
Common mistakes
- Rebuilding the menu from memory. Subcategories and special links get forgotten, and regular customers can’t find what they were looking for.
- Assuming the theme has breadcrumbs. Many Shopify themes, including some of the most popular free ones, don’t include them, and those that do only know the collection the shopper came from.
- Breadcrumbs without structured data. If they are rendered as plain text without BreadcrumbList markup, shoppers see them but Google can’t use them as well.
- Renaming categories at the same time. Migrating and reorganising the catalogue at once complicates redirects and tracking. Migrate as is first and reorganise later.
- Forgetting category redirects. Products usually get redirected, but old categories also have links and Google rankings.
Before and after the migration
If you are still deciding, our page from PrestaShop to Shopify: equivalent modules and apps shows the app that matches each of our modules, including the mega menu for PrestaShop. If you would rather we did it, our PrestaShop to Shopify migration service takes care of products and combinations, customers, orders, URLs and redirects. And once the new store is ready, you can check for free whether it complies with EU rules.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify have breadcrumbs out of the box?
It depends on the theme. Shopify has no category tree like PrestaShop, so even if the theme renders them, it doesn’t know your catalogue hierarchy. With an app like LG Breadcrumbs SEO & Mega Menu you define that hierarchy (or import it) and the breadcrumbs are consistent across the whole catalogue.
Do I need to give access to my PrestaShop store to import the menu?
No. The app reads the public part of the store, the same any visitor sees. If the store is not public, you can use the CSV import.
Can I import the menu before all the products are in Shopify?
Yes. You can let the app create the missing collections, empty, and fill them later with the imported products.
Does it work if I come from WooCommerce or Magento?
Yes. Import by address works with PrestaShop 1.7, 8 and 9, with WooCommerce and with Magento 2, and you can also import a CSV with the categories.
Do breadcrumbs help SEO?
They help Google understand the store structure, and Google can use them to show the page path in search results. They won’t work miracles on their own, but losing them in a migration is a step back you can avoid.