How Do You Migrate an Ecommerce Store Without Losing SEO?
Moving your store to a new platform, domain, or URL structure is the most common cause of sudden organic traffic loss. I manage migrations to protect your Google rankings, preserve your AI Visibility Score, and prevent citation gaps in AI tools.
Most migration traffic loss is preventable. It requires planning before launch, not recovery after.
What Causes SEO Loss During Migrations
| Cause | What Happens |
|---|---|
| Redirect failures | Old URLs return 404s or redirect chains, and years of link equity evaporate |
| Indexation gaps | New pages are never crawled or indexed, so they cannot replace old URLs in search results |
| Schema loss | Structured data is dropped from new templates, costing rich results and AI parseability |
| Broken internal links | Navigation and in-content links point at dead URLs, bleeding authority across the site |
| AI crawler disruption | AI crawlers lose access or context during the move, creating citation gaps in AI answers |
My Migration Process
Phase 1: Pre-migration (4–6 weeks)
Full crawl and inventory of every URL, a redirect map for all changing URLs, benchmarks for rankings, traffic, and AI Visibility Score, plus staging-site testing of templates, schema, and page speed.
Phase 2: Launch day
Redirects deployed and verified in real time, XML sitemaps submitted, indexation monitored as it happens, and critical pages checked for schema, canonicals, and AI crawler access.
Phase 3: Post-migration (30–90 days)
Weekly crawl and indexation audits, redirect log monitoring, ranking and AI citation tracking against pre-migration benchmarks, and rapid fixes for anything the launch missed.
Migration Types I Support
| Migration Type | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| Platform migrations | Moves between Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or custom platforms while protecting your rankings |
| Domain changes | Rebrands and domain moves with full redirect mapping and Search Console change-of-address handling |
| URL restructuring | Category and product URL changes, slug cleanups, and hierarchy rebuilds |
| HTTPS migrations | Full-site HTTP to HTTPS moves with canonical, sitemap, and internal link updates |
| Redesigns and replatforming | Template overhauls where layout, navigation, and schema change at the same time |
Signs Your Migration Caused Damage
- Sudden organic traffic drops in the days or weeks after launch.
- Spikes in 404 errors in Search Console or your crawl logs.
- Lost rich results: review stars, product info, or FAQs disappearing from search results.
- Deindexed pages: new URLs failing to appear in Google’s index.
- Falling AI citations: your brand mentioned less often in AI-generated answers.
If you are seeing any of these after a migration, I can run a recovery audit to find what broke and fix it. Recovery takes longer than prevention — but it is almost always possible. Contact me for a migration recovery assessment.