Replatforming is high-risk and high-reward. Done right, it's a clean slate to fix years of technical debt. Done wrong, it can erase six figures of monthly organic revenue in a week — and the recovery can take months.
This is the playbook our team runs whether you're moving Shopify → WooCommerce, Magento → Shopify Plus, or anything in between.
Stage 1 — Pre-migration audit
Before anything moves, you need a complete picture of what's actually ranking and indexed today.
- Full crawl of the current site (Screaming Frog / Sitebulb).
- Top organic-revenue pages from Search Console & analytics — last 12 months.
- Backlink inventory by URL (Ahrefs / Semrush) — these are pages you must redirect with care.
- Indexed-URL list from
site:and Search Console index coverage.
The output is a written priority list: which pages, in which order, must not break. We tie this back to Technical Ecommerce SEO fundamentals so the new build inherits clean foundations.
Stage 2 — URL mapping
For every URL that ranks, has traffic, or has external links, you map it to its destination on the new platform. Three rules:
- Same-or-better page (the redirect target must answer the same intent).
- One-hop only (no redirect chains).
- Brand and search intent preserved (avoid redirecting product pages to category catch-alls — Google may treat it as a soft 404).
Stage 3 — 301 redirect implementation
Redirects belong server-side (HTTP 301), not JavaScript. On Shopify, use the bulk URL redirects table; on WooCommerce, server config or a dedicated redirects plugin with no chains. We test every mapped redirect twice — once on staging, once on launch.
Stage 4 — Staging-environment QA
Before launch, the new site must be crawled and reviewed on staging — fully blocked from indexing, but otherwise final. Checks include:
- Crawlability and canonical tags on every template.
- Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) on mobile in the field, not just lab.
- Schema (Product, Offer, Breadcrumb, Organization) — validated.
- XML sitemap and robots.txt prepared but pointing at the new domain.
- Internal linking and pagination behaviour.
Stage 5 — Launch day
On launch we go live with: a clean robots.txt, validated sitemap submitted in Search Console, and the full redirect map active. Within minutes we re-crawl the top 500 URLs and the entire sitemap to catch any 4xx/5xx and redirect chains in production.
Stage 6 — Post-launch monitoring
The first 30 days post-migration are the highest-leverage window for fixes. We watch:
- Index coverage in Search Console — flag any spikes in excluded or "discovered, not indexed" pages.
- Top-10 ranking pages — query-by-query, compared to pre-migration baseline.
- 404 logs and broken-link reports — fix every one within 24 hours.
- Server logs to confirm Googlebot is crawling the new URLs (not stuck in redirects).
What "good" looks like
A well-run migration shows a 1–3 week dip in organic clicks of 5–15%, then a clean recovery. A botched one shows 40–70% loss, "stuck" recovery, and pages dropping out of the index. The difference is almost always in stages 1, 2 and 6.
If you're planning a replatform, talk to us before you start the design phase — that's when SEO planning is cheapest. Our Migrations & Platform SEO service is built around this exact workflow.
