How to migrate an online shop without losing your rankings

Why rankings drop after a migration

Search engines rank URLs, not shops. When a product moves from /detail/index/sArticle/123 to /products/blue-shirt, Google sees one page disappear and another one appear. Unless you tell it the two are the same — with a permanent redirect — the new page starts from zero.

The other causes are quieter: titles and descriptions not carried over, category texts dropped, internal links pointing at old URLs, or a staging robots rule that made it to production.

Step 1: Build a complete URL inventory

Before anything else, collect every URL that matters. Combine several sources, because none of them is complete on its own:

• a full crawl of the live shop;
• the current XML sitemap;
• pages with impressions or clicks in Google Search Console over the last 12–16 months;
• landing pages from your analytics;
• URLs with external backlinks.

Mark the URLs that bring in traffic or revenue. Those get checked by hand; the long tail gets checked by rule.

Step 2: Map old URLs to new ones

Every old URL needs a destination on the new shop: its direct equivalent where one exists, otherwise the closest relevant page — for a discontinued product, usually its category. Redirecting everything to the home page is treated like a 404 by search engines and is frustrating for visitors.

Rules that save pain later:

• Use 301 (permanent) redirects, not 302.
• No chains. If a URL was already redirected in the past, point the oldest version straight to the final destination.
• Handle variants: trailing slashes, upper/lower case, old parameters, and language or store prefixes.
• Keep the redirect list in a spreadsheet you can test automatically before and after launch.

Step 3: Carry the content across, not just the data

Product data is only part of what ranks. Make sure these move too:

• meta titles and descriptions — migrated field by field, not regenerated;
• category and landing page texts;
• image alt texts;
• structured data (product, breadcrumb, organisation);
• hreflang for multi-language shops;
• canonical tags that point to the new URLs.

Step 4: Test on staging

Run the full redirect list against the staging shop and check that every rule returns a single 301 to a 200 page. Crawl staging for broken internal links and missing titles. Keep staging blocked from search engines — and write down that the block has to be removed at launch.

Step 5: Launch day

• Remove any staging noindex or robots block.
• Activate redirects at the same moment as the DNS switch.
• Test the top 100 URLs by hand.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
• Keep the old sitemap reachable for a few weeks, so Google recrawls the old URLs and discovers the redirects faster.

Step 6: Monitor for four to eight weeks

Watch 404s in your logs and in Search Console daily for the first two weeks, and add redirects for anything that was missed. Compare rankings and organic traffic for your most important pages week by week. Some movement right after launch is normal; a steady recovery within a few weeks is what a clean migration looks like.

One change at a time — if you can

A new platform, new URL structure, new design and rewritten content all at once makes it very hard to know what caused a drop. If the business allows it, keep content and information architecture stable during the move and improve them afterwards.

SEO is part of every migration we run. For the full list of what to check, use the migration checklist.