The biggest fear when switching platforms is "my rankings will drop and I'll lose traffic". And it's justified: a botched migration really does crash visibility for months. Done right, though, Google doesn't even notice the engine change. Here's how it's done.
Where the drop comes from
The old page /category/17 became /terasna-doshka/, and there is no redirect. For Google, the old page died along with all its rankings, and the new one is a stranger starting from zero.
Category texts, Title, Description and H1 weren't carried over – the pages "slimmed down", and Google re-ranked them lower.
Broken links, duplicates, an accidental noindex – typical "surprises" of the first weeks that linger for months without monitoring.
The process
We record the starting point: which pages bring traffic, for which queries and how much. This is your "insurance policy" – later you'll have something to compare against.
Wherever possible, we keep the old page addresses. What doesn't change can't be lost.
Every page whose address has changed gets a permanent redirect to the new one. The old page passes its "weight" and rankings on to the new page. This is the most important step of the whole migration.
Category texts, Title, Description, H1, image alt text – everything moves over 1:1. Google should see the same page, just on a new engine.
We update the sitemaps, check indexing and monitor crawl errors – Google has to "digest" the changes as fast as possible.
Every week we compare rankings against the starting point. A temporary fluctuation of ±10% is normal; anything bigger we catch and fix right away.
The migration bonus
Since you're moving the store anyway, it's a chance to fix what has been dragging it down for years: slow hosting, a clumsy mobile version, missing structured data, an inconvenient cart. That's why after a proper migration, traffic usually recovers and then keeps growing.
A modern platform with a CDN versus old shared hosting – Google loves that.
70%+ of traffic comes from phones. Responsive design out of the box instead of a 2018 "mobile theme".
Star ratings and prices in search results, ready-made feeds for ads – things the old platform didn't have at all.
Full-cycle migration: an audit, catalog transfer with photos and descriptions without manual retyping, a 301 redirect map, meta tags 1:1 and ranking monitoring for 2 months after launch. You keep selling – we keep an eye on the traffic.
📝 Get a quote for migrating my storeFree consultation. We'll estimate the scope of the migration and give you an honest timeline
