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Whether you’re replatforming or changing your domain, this SEO site migration checklist ensures you don’t tank existing SEO performance.
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Ranking at the top of search results is the price of admission to compete in the crucial product-discovery and consideration phases of a customer’s buying journey. Search engines are the number one online discovery channel globally: almost one-third of internet users discover brands via platforms like Google and Bing.
If you’re running a business in today’s ecommerce world, you already know these stats. And you’re still in business after six months, that means you and your team will have undertaken some successful efforts toward the one strategy the importance of which can’t be understated in today’s always-online world: search engine optimization (SEO).
But what happens if you decide to replatform, move domains, or change your ecommerce website’s architecture? The rankings and search visibility you’ve worked so hard to build are vulnerable.
With the right SEO migration strategy, you can not only maintain those rankings, but also boost organic traffic and sales after making the switch. This guide shares how to do it, with a website migration SEO checklist to follow as you go.
A website SEO migration is the process of moving a website while retaining its SEO performance. Many successful ecommerce retailers go through an SEO migration process when they’re replatforming—like moving to Shopify from other ecommerce platforms.
The reasons for an SEO migration can vary. Most often, ecommerce brands go through the website migration process for the following reasons:
Move, launch, and grow in record time
It’s all possible with this comprehensive migration guide.
While there are a lot of reasons why you might plan to migrate your site, and big benefits for doing so, there are risks involved. These include:
The most important part of any successful migration is having a solid plan. Include these items in your enterprise SEO migration process to prevent important tasks from slipping through the cracks, ensure stakeholders are updated, and minimize the impact on user experience.
Things can quickly go wrong when making changes to your website’s code, structure, or platform. Back up your old website and create a staging site for the new changes. That way, if there are major issues with the new site, you can reinstall the old version while you fix the bugs. Search engine crawlers won’t index the pages on your test site’s URL until they’re published.
Export Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data to compare pre- and post-migration traffic. Old analytics data helps you understand which pages, categories, or campaigns drove the most value, which helps with URL mapping and content prioritization during the migration. Importantly, you need to be able to compare metrics between the old and new sites to show stakeholders a good return on investment (ROI) for the expense, time, and effort required for the move.
Combine your GA4 export with detailed annotations, which act as a reference to pinpoint which URLs, pages, or tracking setups may need adjustments. These annotations also help create a timeline to understand the context behind metrics, reducing guesswork in post-migration analysis.
Different teams do different activities on your website throughout the migration process. Product managers might make sure product descriptions migrate successfully or make changes to them as needed, while for UX teams, migration might be the ideal time to make adjustments to your site’s layout with the hopes of increasing conversions.
Without a communication plan between these teams and stakeholders, SEO migration tasks like redirect mapping, content updating, page removals, or sitemap updates can be missed or mistimed.
Your migration communication plan should include:
Coordinating the timing of each step in the migration process is a key element that needs to be communicated to all participants. You may want to establish one or more content freezes throughout the process—periods during which all content updates are paused. This can prevent mistakes like your product team updating descriptions on your old site after the product information is already en route to the new site.
Many ecommerce brands fall into the trap of looking at an SEO migration as an opportunity to revamp their entire website. When you’re doing an SEO migration, it’s wise to stick to one change at a time. For example, if you’re migrating to a new ecommerce platform, keep your website’s design, content, domain name, and metadata the same.
“If a merchant changes too many things during migration, it’s hard to tell why the data points are changing,” says Carla Wright, solutions engineer lead at Shopify, who’s helped lead the replatforming SEO strategies of brands like ColourPop, Quay, Kylie, and CR7.
“Only after you’ve completed your migration and have a benchmark on your new platform should you begin implementing changes to your content strategy.”
If Google has been crawling your site for a while, a major overhaul—including the words and images on the page, meta descriptions, or your site architecture—will be noticed. This can lead to a reindex and a dip in your organic traffic.
The fewer site changes made during the replatforming process, the easier it’ll be to identify the root cause of any issues. That’s because you’ll have a baseline for measurement. It’s as important for testing site performance as it is for improving your overall conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
Large ecommerce websites often have thousands of pages—many of them with information that’s stale, outdated, or no longer relevant. Instead of migrating them all to your new site, review all existing pages and don’t transfer any that are just taking up space or holding dead weight. This can include URLs with poor rankings that generate little to no organic traffic.
Not only does removing dead pages make your website migration easier, it can improve SEO performance. Search engines like Google reward sites with high-quality content. Once URLs with low traffic or rankings are removed and redirected, you’ll improve the ratio of great content on your domain.
Start by creating two inventories as part of your enterprise SEO audit:
It’s rare to simply switch ecommerce platforms while keeping the exact same URL structure across your site. Platforms like Shopify, for example, use a specific URL structure for product and category pages.
Redirects ensure visitors are still able to access the same content on new URLs while directing search engines to the new URLs and informing them the content is legit.
“If managed correctly, your migration will not result in any traffic loss,” says Carla Wright. “That involves informing search bots of the new URL of every page and making as few changes as possible to both the content and the structure of your site.”
Carla always advises retailers to spend time on their redirect-mapping to ensure accuracy. This is where your list of current URLs comes in handy. Use it to match each old URL to a new URL.
Best practices for handling crawl errors include:
Here’s an example of redirects from an ecommerce website that’s replatforming. The old URLs are redirected to the default new URL structures to prevent 404 errors:
Replatforming is a great time to identify and resolve 404 errors on your site—including those old internal links missed in your redirection strategy.
Also known as broken links, 404 errors are the virtual equivalent of dead ends. Shoppers land on these dead pages and their shopping experience is disrupted. They either go back to your homepage, hit the back button, manually search for the item they want to buy—or give up on your site altogether.
Google Search Console’s Page Indexing report and SEO tools like Screaming Frog can crawl your ecommerce website and highlight broken links. If you find a URL that hasn’t already been moved, create a redirection in your website’s back end. Anyone who lands on this broken link will automatically be sent to the next-most relevant page.
Top tip: This is a great time to optimize your 404 error page, if you haven’t already done so. Baby brand MORI apologizes for the error and points shoppers to their main product categories. This ensures customers get back to buying.
If a domain migration is part of your SEO site migration process, you’ll need to submit a change of address in Google Search Console. It tells the platform that your website has moved from one domain to another, and helps Google understand that URLs on your old domain should now be associated with the new one.
Note that this step is only required if you’re changing domains. You can’t use the Change of Address tool when:
Google runs a signal transfer period (~180 days) when you’ve used the Change of Address tool. After this period, it doesn’t recognize any relationship between the old domain and the new one.
Watch for pages with duplicate content—the same words or images used across multiple URLs. Search engine algorithms don’t like duplicate content because they don’t know which URL is most relevant for the search term. In some cases, both URLs can be ranked lower.
Some degree of duplication is not always possible to avoid. There are many reasons why your site might have duplicate content, including:
Most software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms default to hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) and should issue an SSL for every shop’s domain. If you miss a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, the HTTP version would be accessible and would be hosting duplicate content.
Using a number of top level domains (TLD) means you as a domain administrator also need to put in the extra work to inform a search engine that your two, or many, domains are related. Subdomains imply that to the search engine.
If you sell internationally, a hreflang tag tells search engines which version of a page to show to users based on their language or region.
For example, if you use example.com/en-us/product for American users and example.com/fr-fr/product for French audiences, an hreflang signals to Google which one to serve depending on the user’s language or country. Search engines see multiple versions of the same page but understand they’re intentional, not duplicate spam.
💡Tip: Managed Markets lets you sell internationally—without the logistical headache of operating multiple storefronts. It detects a visitor’s IP address to automatically translate website copy and convert currencies, so each shopper gets a truly personalized experience.
Whether you host your own dev shops or use additional stores to create a staging environment, be sure they include no-index tags. In the event that you remove the password on the development shop, you don’t want that indexed by a search bot.
In many of those cases, use canonical URLs (the most authoritative URL you want search engines to see) to direct search engines to the original content. “Canonicals basically say to Google, ‘Hey, if there is more than one result, I want you to pick this one,’” says Carla.
On Shopify, canonicals are set by default to help manage any duplicate content that is created over time. However, they are still editable to accommodate advanced SEO strategies.
If you have dynamic product pages that display different content each time they’re viewed, make sure they’re not indexable. These steps ensure your product pages won’t have diluted rankings and you won’t be penalized for duplicate content.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of key metrics that Google uses to monitor website performance. A migration often involves changes to templates, scripts, images, or hosting—all of which can impact CWV and affect both user experiences and rankings, even if surface elements like redirects and backlinks are preserved.
Core Web Vitals have largely become the standard metrics for measuring UX, including for mobile sites, surpassing Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework in relevance.
Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to track website performance using the latest CWV metrics in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
Websites collect small snippets of data each time a page is loaded in a customer’s browser. A tag management system like Google Tag Manager condenses these JavaScript requests to speed up page=load time, which can positively impact CWV post-migration.
After the launch of your website migration, verify the new property in Google Search Console.
Submit a new XML sitemap through this dashboard, which can speed up the indexing of your new website. Search crawlers will also highlight any errors you missed throughout the website migration process.
Make sure your website is set up correctly in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for seamless data tracking. You can use the real-time analytics report in Google Analytics to quickly see if your website is getting traffic.
It is important that data is being collected accurately so you have a clear view of your site traffic, demographics, and customer journey post-migration. This will also ensure you’re making accurate comparisons between your old data and newly migrated site data.
A correct setup will help you identify any site performance issues that may have popped up during the migration. This includes 404 pages, which can be identified quickly and redirected for a better user experience.
Don’t panic if you’re seeing a drop in organic traffic. This is normal as Google crawls and relearns your site. Use:
Organic traffic should bounce back, and can even exceed your previous organic traffic records. Still, it is important to monitor organic traffic on key pages such as your homepage to ensure authority is being transferred to your new site.
Monitor your site rankings post-migration, and use a tool like Semrush to track keywords and see how you rank against competitors. This can help you identify any site issues before you see a significant drop in traffic.
With ever-changing algorithms and updates, SEO should be an ongoing part of your ecommerce growth strategy. You’ll need to keep the momentum going after you make the switch. Even if your site is performing well, it can always do better.
Think of your website migration as an opportunity to perform an SEO SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) for your site, which can provide you with valuable insights on how to move forward.
For further SEO growth opportunities, ask yourself these questions:
Google Search Console is your main window into how Google views your website. Use this checklist to confirm your account is set up correctly:
As Carla Wright says, content is the most important factor in your search engine rankings. Consider optimizing your product descriptions for SEO to build on the success you’ve achieved.
The more relevant your pages are to a user’s specific searches, the better. Keep an eye on which keywords your website is ranking for—and which ones your competitors are using. Integrate more keywords into your website copy and metadata and create helpful content surrounding them to drive more organic traffic.
HTTPS stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure, which is an important trust signal for customers who give you private information or credit card information. Every domain on Shopify has an SSL certificate issued for it. Shopify also gives you Extended Validation (EV) certification, another trust signal which is often overlooked.
It’s important to ensure URLs are as straightforward and driven by the most relevant keywords for each product or page. Use short, descriptive, stable URLs that contain keywords.
Sites can use specific markup code that makes it easy for search engines to understand page content and the new site structure. Well-structured sites are easy for users to navigate and for Google to understand. Keeping your site to three or fewer levels makes it simpler for Google to crawl and faster for shoppers to find what they’re looking for.
It’s always a good time to test how your pages can be improved even further. Don’t worry if you migrate to another platform and website performance takes a hit. Google completed mobile-first indexing in October 2023—so ensure the mobile version of your site contains all critical content.
Although the thought of replatforming can be scary, it’s important to consider all of the benefits that come from doing it right. One of those positive outcomes is improved SEO.
Use this SEO migration checklist to retain your site’s performance throughout the move, and remember it may take 4-6 weeks for your site to normalize.
Experienced site-migration consultants can also support the transition of your content and ensure technical changes are well planned out. If you’re unsure how to choose one, this ecommerce RFP template can help.
It might take a few months for organic traffic to stabilize, but there’s the potential to improve SEO performance tenfold after making the switch—especially if you’re replatforming from an outdated ecommerce platform to Shopify or Commerce Components by Shopify.
Move, launch, and grow in record time
It’s all possible with this comprehensive migration guide.
Website migration in SEO refers to making major changes to your site’s structure, design, platform, domain, or URLs in a way that can impact how search engines crawl and index it. The goal is to preserve or improve rankings during the transition by carefully managing redirects, content, and technical SEO.
Structural changes to your website will affect SEO performance. Ecommerce merchants that move ecommerce platforms will need an SEO migration strategy to retain search performance and rankings.
Changing your website’s domain name can negatively affect SEO performance because search engines have already indexed your entire site. Minimize this impact with an SEO site migration strategy that redirects internal links, removes duplicate content, and updates the new domain in Google Search Console by using the Change of Address tool.
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