E-Commerce
How to replatform to Shopify without losing your rankings
The fear that stops retailers moving to a better platform is losing the search traffic they have spent years earning. It is a reasonable fear, and an avoidable outcome.
Realm Digital
2 min read
Replatforming is one of the highest-stakes things an online store can do. Get it right and you inherit a faster, easier platform with your traffic intact. Get it wrong and you spend the following year clawing back rankings that used to be yours for free.
The stores that lose rankings in a migration rarely lose them to bad luck. They lose them to steps that were treated as details and left until the end. Protecting search performance is not a task you bolt on after launch. It is part of the plan from the first day.
Preserve URLs, and redirect the rest
Search engines have your existing URLs indexed. Every one that changes without a redirect is a page that returns nothing, taking its ranking with it. The single biggest cause of migration traffic loss is URLs that moved and were never pointed anywhere.
The work is methodical, not clever. Map every old URL to its new home. Preserve the structure where you can. Where a URL has to change, set a permanent redirect so both visitors and search engines are carried across. Do this before launch, not after the traffic has already dropped.
Carry your metadata with you
Titles, meta descriptions and structured data are part of why your pages rank. They do not migrate themselves. Treat them as content to be moved deliberately, product by product and category by category, rather than regenerated from a template and hoped for.
Migrate in stages you can check
A single overnight switch-over is the riskiest way to migrate, because everything that went wrong went wrong at once and you find out in the morning. Staged migration, with checks at each step, turns a cliff-edge into a series of small, reversible moves.
Once live, watch. Crawl the new site for broken links and missing redirects. Keep an eye on search performance for the pages that matter most. A migration is not finished at launch; it is finished when the traffic has held for long enough to trust.
