The Ecommerce Replatforming Checklist: Migrate Without Losing SEO

Why Replatforming Goes Wrong

A store migration touches everything Google cares about at once: URLs, page speed, internal links, structured data, and content. Do it carelessly and rankings built over years evaporate in a weekend. The good news: every failure mode is preventable with planning.

Before You Migrate: The Audit

• **Crawl your entire site**, every URL, title, and meta description exported and archived

• **Benchmark your rankings**, top pages, top keywords, current traffic by landing page

• **Map your redirects**, every old URL needs a destination. Every. Single. One.

• **Inventory integrations**, payment, shipping, email, reviews, analytics

During the Build

• **Match or improve page speed**, a faster site is your migration's upside; measure it per template

• **Preserve URL structure where possible**, fewer redirects means less risk

• **Rebuild structured data**, product schema, reviews, breadcrumbs

• **Set up 301s, not 302s**, permanent redirects pass link equity; temporary ones don't

Launch Day Protocol

Launch mid-week, in the morning, never before a sales event. Submit the new sitemap immediately, crawl the live site for 404s within the hour, and watch Search Console daily for two weeks. Keep the old platform accessible (not indexed) for 30 days as your safety net.

The First 90 Days

Some ranking wobble in weeks 1 to 3 is normal. What's not normal: 404 spikes, orphaned pages, or traffic down >15% after week four. Monitoring catches these while they're fixable.

Our Track Record

We've replatformed stores from Magento, WooCommerce, and custom builds to Shopify and headless stacks, with zero net SEO loss, and usually a traffic *gain* from the speed improvement. The checklist above is real; the discipline to follow all of it is what you're actually hiring.