Every store migration horror story has the same cause. The new store looks better, and organic traffic halves in a fortnight because ten thousand URLs changed and nobody mapped them.
What a migration involves
- product, variant, category and attribute mapping
- customer accounts and order history
- complete URL mapping with permanent redirects
- payment, shipping and tax reconfiguration
- structured data and feed reconnection
- verification after launch, not just before
The redirect map is the project
Every URL with traffic, rankings or inbound links needs a permanent redirect to its closest equivalent. Not to the home page — search engines treat mass redirects to the root as soft errors and drop the pages.
We inventory the old store from analytics, search console, the sitemap and a crawl, then map deliberately. Categories that split need a decision. Discontinued products need a destination.
The map is built before launch and tested immediately after, including edge cases: paginated category pages, filtered URLs that got indexed, old campaign links.
Product data rarely maps cleanly
Attribute structures differ between platforms. Variants are modelled differently. Custom fields may have no equivalent.
We map this explicitly rather than trusting an import tool, because import tools quietly drop what they cannot place — and you discover it when a customer asks why the sizing chart vanished.
Checkout parity
Payment methods, shipping rules and tax configuration must work on day one. For German trade that means invoice and direct debit expectations, correct VAT display, and withdrawal information present.
A migration that loses a payment method loses the customers who used it.
Launch timing
Migrate during a quiet trading period, never before peak season. Keep the old store accessible internally for reference. Have a rollback plan.
After launch
Indexing, redirects, canonicals, structured data and analytics all get checked in the following days and weeks. Some ranking fluctuation is normal for a few weeks. Sustained loss usually means a mapping gap, and speed of diagnosis decides how much is recoverable.
FAQ
How long does a migration take?
Four to twelve weeks depending on catalogue size and integrations.
Will we lose sales during the switch?
Downtime should be minutes, not hours. Some ranking fluctuation afterwards is normal.
Can you migrate order history?
Usually. It is worth confirming early, since it affects platform choice.