How can I move the eCommerce section to Shopify while preserving an image subfolder without breaking SEO?

Question

I have a pretty unique situation so I'm wondering how to properly get this handled.

Basically our old site consists of 2 things:

1. An eCommerce site hosted directly on the domain (ex: mysite.com).
2. A FTP Image server hosts on the /img subfolder (ex: example.com/img/)

We are using these images on various other marketplaces (for example eBay, Amazon, etc). So we must keep the FTP hosted images intact.

Now we are launching a new website hosted by Shopify. I was trying to figure out how I could get the new site added to the domain, but NOT break the image links hosted on the FTP.

So for now, I thought the best thing might be to simply host the new site at shop.example.com - as this will keep the main server intact, and then I could just redirect people from the main home page to this new site.

But I'm not sure exactly the best way to do that? I could add some js to redirect, but I'm not sure Google would like that.

I'm also not sure if hosting this on the subdomain might hurt us in the long run.

Any ideas for the best way to resolve this problem?

Answer 1

Use a Shopify App Proxy.

Your proxy setup will look something like this:

Sub Path Prefix: img
Sub Path: (blank)
Proxy URL: (direct HTTPS link to FTP server)

Answer 2

Another solution would be to move the URL of your images. You could put the images on a subdomain like img.example.com and have Shopify redirect that directory to them. Shopify has redirect instructions here.

If you redirect /img/ subdirectory to a subdomain, you can still host the images like you have been. All the images will still be available from the third party sites.