SEO for Site Migrations
Replatforming, redesigning or changing domains without losing the rankings you have built. Planned before launch, checked on launch day and monitored until traffic settles.
Plan Your MigrationReplatforming, redesigning or changing domains without losing the rankings you have built. Planned before launch, checked on launch day and monitored until traffic settles.
Plan Your MigrationA new site launches, it looks better than the old one, and for a few days everything seems fine. Then organic traffic starts sliding. By the time anyone connects the drop to the launch, weeks of revenue have gone.
The causes are rarely mysterious. They are details that slipped through because nobody owned search during the project.
Shopify fixes its URL formats. Products live under /products/, categories under /collections/, content pages under /pages/ and articles under /blogs/. Moving to Shopify from almost any other platform therefore changes nearly every URL on the site. That makes the redirect map the single most important document in the project. Shopify also handles some things differently, such as how product URLs appear inside collections and how robots.txt is edited, and the migration plan needs to account for both. More on the platform itself is on the Shopify SEO page.
The current site gets benchmarked: rankings, organic traffic by page, the pages that earn revenue and the pages that hold backlinks. Every URL is inventoried and mapped one to one to its new home. The new templates are reviewed on staging for content, headings, internal links, structured data and indexing settings, while they are still easy to change. Tracking is planned so it carries over on day one.
Redirects are tested against the map. The live site is crawled for errors, blocked pages, wrong canonicals and leftover staging settings. New sitemaps go into Search Console and tracking is confirmed as recording.
Indexing, rankings, 404s and organic traffic are monitored against the benchmark. Issues get fixed as they surface, not after a monthly review. Reporting continues until traffic has settled.
Some movement in rankings during the first weeks after a migration is normal while search engines recrawl and process the new site. A well-run migration keeps that dip small and short. A badly run one takes months to recover from, and some never fully do. The difference is almost entirely in the preparation.
I do not build the new site. Your developer or agency builds it, and I make sure the move keeps its search visibility: the redirect map, template reviews, launch checks and monitoring. Where I have access, redirects and fixes go in directly, especially on Shopify. Otherwise they are briefed clearly to the build team. Agencies running migrations for their own clients get the same work under their brand through white-label SEO.
The work I do every week has the same discipline a migration needs: launching new country sections on live sites and restructuring a multi-market store into a clean subfolder and hreflang setup. A German market built inside an existing European store went from zero organic presence to roughly 6,800 clicks within six months, on a structure that had to work alongside the markets already there. A web development background means the technical side of a launch is familiar ground.
If tracking needs rebuilding as part of the move, that is covered by analytics and tracking setup.
Some short-term movement is normal while search engines process the new site. Significant, lasting losses usually come from missing redirects, lost content or technical settings carried over from staging, all of which are preventable with proper preparation.
Before design and build decisions are final, ideally when the new URL structure and templates are being planned. Problems found on staging are quick to fix. Problems found after launch cost traffic while they are fixed.
The redirect map is part of the work. On Shopify the redirects are often added directly. On other platforms they are handed to the developer as a tested, one-to-one map.
Until indexing, rankings and organic traffic have settled against the pre-launch benchmark. For most sites that means several weeks of close monitoring, with larger sites taking longer.
Yes. A recovery audit compares the old and new sites, finds what was lost, and prioritises fixes by the traffic and revenue at stake. Earlier is better, because lost signals become harder to recover over time.
No. Your developer or agency builds and moves the site. The SEO work makes sure search visibility survives the move, from planning through to post-launch monitoring.
Bring SEO in before launch, while problems are still cheap to fix. Tell me what you are moving from, what you are moving to and when.
Plan Your Migration