Migration · 5 August 2026 · 11 min read

How to migrate an online store without losing SEO traffic

A practical migration guide: what actually gets lost, the redirect map, what to check before launch, and what to do in the first six weeks after.

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The most common fear before a migration is that organic traffic collapses. It's a justified fear — it happens often. But it doesn't happen because of the migration itself. It happens because of three or four concrete things that get missed, almost always the same ones.

This article is the list we use on every migration to Magento 2, whatever platform you're leaving. You can use it as a checklist for your current agency, even if we never work together.

What actually gets lost in a migration

Google doesn't penalise your site for being rebuilt. Rankings are lost because the signals it was tracking disappear or change. There are four categories, in order of impact:

The URLs. If a page's address changes and no redirect exists, Google treats the old page as gone and the new one as having no history. Everything it accumulated over years resets.
The content. If a category page's text drops from 400 words to 80 because the new design “looks cleaner”, the page becomes weaker for the queries it used to cover.
The structured data. Products without Product schema, articles without Article, missing breadcrumbs — all of them reduce how you appear in results.
Speed and stability. A new site that loads slower than the old one loses on Core Web Vitals, and that shows in both ranking and conversion.

Before launch: the inventory

You can't preserve what you haven't inventoried. The first step, always, is knowing exactly what you have now. Concretely:

Export every indexed URL from Google Search Console, not just the ones in your sitemap. The sitemap is what you think you have; Search Console is what Google knows.
Crawl the current site with Screaming Frog and export titles, meta descriptions, H1s and status codes.
Pull the pages that bring traffic from Search Console, over the last 12 months. Those are the ones you're not allowed to break.
Note every backlink pointing at internal pages, not just at the homepage. A four-year-old article with 20 links is worth more than you think.

That inventory produces your list of critical pages. Typically 10–15% of URLs bring 80% of the traffic. Those are the ones you protect first.

The redirect map

The basic rule: the URL structure doesn't change unless it absolutely has to. Every redirect is a small loss and one more point of failure. The best redirect is the one you didn't need.

When the change is unavoidable — for example in a migration from Shopify, where the platform forces the /products/ and /collections/ prefixes — the rules are:

301, not 302. A 302 says “this is temporary” and doesn't transfer equity.
One to one, page to page. Don't redirect 500 products to the homepage — Google treats that as a soft 404 and you lose everything.
No chains. A → B → C becomes A → C. Every extra hop dilutes.
Test the map before launch, on staging, against the complete URL list exported from Search Console.

What transfers, point by point

Element	What happens if you miss it
Title and meta description	You lose click-through from results even if the position holds. Immediate effect, visible in Search Console.
H1 and heading structure	The page becomes harder for Google to understand, particularly on categories with many products.
Structured data	You lose rich results: prices, stock, reviews, breadcrumbs. Visible in the SERP, so visible in clicks.
Category copy	The most frequently missed, because the new design “has no room for it”. Categories usually bring more traffic than products.
Images and their `alt` text	You lose Google Images traffic, which in some niches is 10–15% of the total.
`robots.txt` and the sitemap	A forgotten `Disallow: /` from staging removes your entire site from the index. It happens more often than you'd think.

Launch day

Switch in a low-traffic window, but not on a Friday evening — you need the team available for the next 48 hours.
Check robots.txt, meta robots and the accessibility of critical pages immediately.
Run a full crawl on the new site and compare it with the one from before: status codes, titles, descriptions, H1s.
Manually test 20–30 redirects from your critical-pages list.
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for the important pages.
Check that the structured data validates, using Google's rich results test.

The first six weeks

This is where a migration actually ends. Not at launch. What we watch daily:

Coverage errors in Search Console — new 404s mean missing redirects.
Indexed pages — if the number keeps dropping, something is blocking crawlers.
Impressions and clicks, compared against the same period last year, not against last month.
Core Web Vitals on field data, which updates on a 28-day lag.

If traffic hasn't recovered in six weeks, stop waiting. It doesn't fix itself.

Platform-specific cases

Every source platform has its own traps. We've written them up separately, in detail: from Shopify, from WooCommerce, from PrestaShop, from OpenCart and from Magento 1.

If you're staying on your current platform and only want to optimise it, the Shopify, WooCommerce and PrestaShop pages cover what can be done without migrating.

What we do differently

We treat the SEO side as the migration's main deliverable, not as a stage at the end. The redirect map is finished before development starts, and 30 days of monitoring is included in the project — if traffic drops because of us, fixing it is on us.

If you want to know where your store stands now, the free audit gives you indexing status and Core Web Vitals within 48 hours, with no conversation about a project. If you've already decided, request an estimate.