In short
- A new online shop is a house move: keep every old address if you can, and otherwise forward it with a 301 in one step.
- Also carry over titles, meta descriptions, product data, internal links and structured data.
- After launch, check with a crawl and Search Console, against a baseline from before the switch.
In this article (6)
Your new online shop is live. Prettier, faster, finally something you can manage yourself. And then a few weeks later you look in Search Console, and your best-selling category is nowhere to be found.
That’s not bad luck. That’s a migration in which rankings only came up at the end, as something the developer would “sort out quickly”.
I think that’s the wrong order. With every website and online shop we make, strategy, design and SEO safeguarding are part of the job. Not an extra, but a starting point. In this article you’ll read what to carry over when you migrate an online shop, with two shops we rebuilt together with our development partner Hoort: Stobe and Homie.
A new online shop is a house move
Google knows your old shop. Every product page, every category and every blog has an address. Attached to those addresses is everything you’ve built up over the years: rankings, links from other sites, clicks from the search results.
Build a new shop, and you’re moving house. And a move without a change of address means the post keeps landing on the old doormat. Google knocks at the old address, finds nobody home, and the customer buys from your competitor.
The good news: this can be prevented. Not with a trick, but with an inventory and a plan. Nobody can honestly guarantee you rankings. What you do control: that you don’t throw away anything that was already there.
The best redirect is one you don’t need
The first thing you carry over is your URLs. Make a list of every address in your old shop: products, categories, brand pages, blogs and landing pages. Pull them from your sitemap, from a crawl and from Search Console. That way you also catch the pages that haven’t been in the menu for ages, but still attract visitors.
Then a choice per address. Can the URL stay as it is? Do that.
At Homie we went from WordPress with WooCommerce to a completely new platform in Laravel and Vue. Entirely different technology. And yet an old WooCommerce address like /product-category/wassen/ still simply works on the new platform (checked on 2 October 2026). To Google, nothing changed at that address.
Can’t an address stay, for instance because your new platform has a fixed structure? Then you forward it with a permanent redirect, a 301, to the page that’s closest in content. Shopify, for example, puts products under /products/ and categories under /collections/. Coming from another platform, you can’t avoid that.
Factory bread
Sending all old URLs to the homepage.
The visitor has to start searching again, and Google often treats that kind of redirect as a page that no longer exists.
Fresh from the baker
Every old URL to the page that’s closest in content.
The visitor lands where they wanted to be, and what the old address had built up comes along.
Factory bread
Sorting out redirects after launch, once the 404s roll in.
By then visitors and Google have already walked into a closed door.
Fresh from the baker
The redirect list ready and tested on the staging environment, before the switch.
On launch day every door is open.
Factory bread
Chains: from old to intermediate to new.
Every extra step is a delay, and a chance that something breaks along the way.
Fresh from the baker
Every old URL in one step to its final destination.
Faster for the visitor, clearer for Google.
What else you carry over
Addresses are the start. But an address without the content that belonged to it is an empty building with the right house number.
URLs and redirects
The inventory of all old addresses, and per address the choice: stay, or forward in one step with a 301.
SEO titles and meta descriptions
The copy you see in the search results. Often polished over years, and the first thing forgotten in a migration. Carry them over per page, not as one default template for everything.
Product data
Names, descriptions, variants, images with their alt text, and reviews. That’s the content Google judges your products on. A product page without a description is an empty shop window.
Internal links
Links in your copy, menus and blogs that point to old addresses. They still work via a redirect, but change them to the new address. Tidier for visitors, clearer for Google.
Structured data
The code that tells Google what a product is, what it costs, whether it’s in stock and where it sits in your shop (Product and BreadcrumbList). A new theme or platform doesn’t always provide it by itself. Check it per page type.
The technical base
Canonical tags pointing to the new addresses, a new XML sitemap, a robots.txt that doesn’t block anything that should be found, and no noindex left over from the staging environment.
That last one sounds obvious. Still, it’s a classic: the staging environment was rightly set to noindex, and that setting quietly moves along to live.
Two shops, two kinds of migration
Stobe
From an outdated Shopify store to a new Shopify store with a custom theme. Same platform, new foundation.
Homie
From WordPress with WooCommerce and separate middleware to one custom platform in Laravel and Vue. Everything new, except the addresses.
Stobe sells portable mini projectors, to consumers and to resellers and wholesalers. The old shop no longer fitted the brand, and every change needed a developer. We took care of the strategy, the design and the SEO safeguarding. Hoort rebuilt the theme from the ground up.
At Stobe there was a strong focus on keeping the SEO value from day one. The rankings the old shop had built up were not allowed to get lost in the switch. Products, customer data, orders and SEO settings all moved to the new shop. According to the case study of our development partner Hoort, the migration went “without loss of orders, customers or rankings”. Read the whole story in the case study of Stobe’s new Shopify store.
How long does it take Google to process a move like that? Google says so itself in its guide to site moves with URL changes: for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or longer before Google shows the new addresses instead of the old ones. So leave your redirects in place as long as possible, according to Google in principle at least a year. Not a few months, until the new shop is “known well enough”.
Homie rents out washing machines, dryers and fridges on subscription. Here the job was bigger. According to Hoort’s case study, more than 40,000 records moved over: customer data, subscriptions, running contracts, orders and products, partly stored encrypted.
But for your rankings the lesson is in something smaller: the category addresses stayed the same. A new platform doesn’t have to mean a new URL structure. If you build custom, you choose your own addresses. So choose the old ones. How that platform is put together is in the case study of Homie’s custom platform.
Which platform fits you depends on what you sell and to whom. Read more about Shopify store development, or about how we approach ecommerce website design, from goal to platform.
After launch the checking starts
The day your new shop goes live isn’t the finish. It’s the moment you start checking whether everything you prepared actually works.
Take a baseline beforehand
Before the migration, record where you stand: impressions, clicks, your most important keywords and your most visited pages. Without a baseline you won’t know later whether you’ve lost something.
Crawl the old URL list
On launch day, run every old address through a crawler. Every address returns a 200, or forwards in one step to a page that returns a 200. No 404s, no chains.
Submit the new sitemap
In Google Search Console, so Google finds the new addresses quickly.
Spot-check per page type
Open a product, a category and a blog. Are the title, the meta description and the canonical right? Is the structured data still there, and does Google’s Rich Results Test approve it?
Keep an eye on Search Console
In the weeks after, watch the indexing report and the pages with errors. A 404 you find in week one is a small fix. A 404 you find after three months has already cost you customers.
A bit of fluctuation in the first weeks is normal: Google has to get to know your new shop again. What matters is that you can tell the difference between fluctuating and leaking. That’s what you need the baseline for.
SEO belongs at the start, not at the end
I’m stubborn about this: whoever only looks at SEO in the last sprint is migrating with their eyes closed.
Our order is always the same. First the goal of the shop, clear. Then the branding and the design in line with it. Only then build, on the platform that fits that goal. And SEO safeguarding runs through all three. In the design you decide which pages there will be, so also which old pages need a new place. In the choice of platform you know whether you can keep your addresses. And during the build, the redirect list is already ready, instead of afterwards.
Going to redesign your online shop? Then don’t start with the theme. Start with the list of everything Google already knows about you.
A new online shop may come fresh out of the oven. Your rankings should simply move house with it.
Rubin is the founder of Online Marketing Bakery in Roermond. You take the stage, we fill the room. And we make sure it buys.
[email protected] · More about the bakers
Further reading: Shopify store development · Ecommerce website design · Custom ecommerce development
How we work: first the offer, then the room. Want to get going with a brief like this? We do that in the Sold-Out Session: your offer and your event structure in one half-day.