Moving platforms (from WooCommerce to Shopify, for instance), changing domains, or restructuring URLs are among the highest-risk moments in ecommerce SEO. Get the redirect mapping, crawl accessibility and technical setup wrong and it's realistic to lose 30% or more of organic traffic, sometimes for months, before it recovers, if it fully recovers at all. This service exists to make sure that doesn't happen to your migration.
Get my free visibility auditA migration is one of the few moments in ecommerce SEO where the downside risk from a mistake is large, fast, and hard to undo once Google has processed a broken redirect structure or a wave of 404 errors. The cost of doing this properly is genuinely small compared to the cost of a poorly executed migration: rebuilding lost rankings after a botched migration typically takes considerably longer than getting the redirect mapping right the first time.
Migration support draws directly on the technical SEO discipline (crawl analysis, indexation control, architecture) applied to a specific, time-boxed event rather than as different work. It's not a separate specialism; it's the same technical SEO knowledge applied under tighter timing constraints and higher stakes. If a migration is planned during an existing retainer, the hours for that month are weighted toward the migration work rather than the usual content and on-page cadence.
It's better to involve SEO before the new site is built, but useful work can still happen closer to launch: reviewing the redirect plan, validating the staging site's crawlability, and setting up monitoring before and after launch. The earlier the involvement, the lower the risk, but a few weeks' notice is still workable.
Some temporary fluctuation is normal even with a well-executed migration, as Google re-crawls and re-evaluates the new URLs, typically a small dip over a few weeks that recovers. Losses beyond that, or ones that don't recover within a couple of months, usually point to a specific redirect or technical error worth investigating rather than being an inevitable cost of migrating.
Developers can implement redirects, but deciding what should redirect where, based on which URLs actually carry ranking value and search traffic, is an SEO judgement call, not a technical implementation task. A developer redirecting everything to category pages or the homepage "to be safe" is a common and costly pattern this service is meant to prevent.
This depends on platform access. On some platforms we can implement redirect rules and technical settings directly; on others (particularly custom-built or heavily developer-controlled sites) we provide the exact specification for a developer to implement, and review it once live.
The same redirect mapping and monitoring principles apply, generally at lower risk than a full replatform since the underlying site and content aren't changing, just the URLs. It's still worth treating with the same care, since URL restructuring without proper redirects is a common self-inflicted cause of ranking loss.
Initial technical signals (crawl errors, indexation status in Search Console) are visible within days to a couple of weeks. Ranking and traffic recovery to pre-migration levels, assuming everything was done correctly, typically takes 4 to 8 weeks, sometimes longer for larger sites with more URLs to be re-crawled and re-evaluated.
A free visibility audit covers all of this, and shows exactly what's worth fixing first for your store.
Get my free visibility audit