Ecommerce migration SEO checklist: protect products, links and search

Separate a redesign from a change of address

First establish what is actually moving. A visual refresh can retain the same URLs. A platform migration can change product paths even when the domain stays the same. A new domain introduces another set of ownership and routing decisions. These are different projects, so a checklist that simply says launch new website is not enough.

Create one inventory of the public pages that matter to the business: products, collections, buying guides, help pages and campaign landing pages. Include pages that attract enquiries or are linked from customer emails, not only pages with the most recent visits. Record who can decide the destination when an old page has no obvious equivalent.

Build the mapping before the import

Google’s site-move guidance recommends mapping old URLs to appropriate new URLs and using relevant permanent redirects when addresses change. A redirect should help the visitor continue the same task. Sending unrelated discontinued products to the homepage does not provide that continuity.

For a fictional outdoor retailer, keep an old hiking-boot product URL pointing to its replacement product when that is a meaningful successor. A consolidated boot-care article can replace several old overlapping guides. If an item has no replacement, decide how the customer should understand that situation instead of inventing a match solely to avoid a missing-page response.

Test the destination platform’s redirect rules

Shopify’s redirect documentation describes import and export, reserved paths and the requirement that a redirect source be a broken URL rather than a currently valid page. Those constraints matter when a migration company promises to upload a spreadsheet and finish the job.

Give the implementer examples of the actual old path shapes, including a product URL, category URL, older file extension and any language subfolder. Ask for a recorded result for each route. Check the final destination rather than merely counting imported rows. An accepted redirect file does not establish that every intended source path is handled.

Carry the useful product content across

The new product page needs more than its SKU and price. Keep the information a buyer uses to choose: descriptive name, dimensions, compatibility, images, downloadable material and availability explanations where relevant. Identify fields that the new template will render differently or omit.

Use a representative long-description product and a complex variant product in the migration sample. Have someone unfamiliar with the old site find the right option and explain what they are buying. If the new template hides the installation detail or replaces a useful image with an empty placeholder, the import has preserved records without preserving the buying experience.

Review the public page rather than the editor

After launch, check the page a visitor and crawler actually receive. Google’s migration guidance calls for updated internal links, canonical references and sitemaps, and removal of temporary indexing blocks. Include product images and other embedded resources in the move.

Assign someone to examine a small but meaningful sample on a phone: a popular product, a long category, a variant selection and a discontinued URL. Follow internal links from the homepage and buying guides. Keep a list of failures with owners and retest their exact routes. A screenshot of the theme editor is not evidence that an old customer link opens correctly.

Define the monitoring and recovery period

A migration is an operating event, so the project needs people available after the initial launch. Decide who watches missing-page reports, order failures, enquiry submissions and the highest-value landing pages. Keep old-to-new mapping files with the handover and name the person who can change a redirect.

Do not use a single day of rankings as the acceptance test for the whole project. Separate verified technical outcomes from search reporting that develops over time. Our CMS migration checklist covers the broader content, domain and email handover, while the ecommerce directory helps compare the platform responsibilities before a move is commissioned.

Frequently asked questions