03

Migrations & Replatforming

Migrations are where a year of SEO quietly disappears. We plan the redirect map before anyone talks about design, move your data properly, and run the whole thing so the traffic curve barely blinks.

Themes, apps, integrations and migrations, built properly.

A fixed-scope project. We'll give you a date and stick to it.

Sound familiar?

It's the rankings you're worried about, isn't it.

Everyone says the migration went fine. Then organic traffic drops 40% in week two and nobody can explain why. It's nearly always the same handful of causes, and they're all avoidable.

You've heard the horror stories.

Someone in your network moved platform and lost half their organic traffic. It's put the whole project off for a year.

Your data is messier than you'd like.

Duplicate customers, four variants of the same product, order history nobody wants to lose. Migration day is when all of that surfaces.

You're on a platform you've outgrown.

Every new idea turns into a plugin, a workaround or a no. You already know where you're going — it's the getting there that's the problem.

How it goes

Redirects first. Design later.

The order matters more than anything else here. Get the boring parts right and the exciting parts look after themselves.

  1. 01Weeks 1–2

    Audit and map

    We crawl the current site, pull your top pages by traffic and revenue, and build the redirect map before a single screen gets designed. Every URL that earns something gets a home.

    A complete URL map, signed off before we build anything.

  2. 02Weeks 2–4

    Move the data

    Products, variants, customers, orders, reviews, blog posts — into a staging store you can poke at. We'll flag the mess we find rather than quietly importing it.

    A staging store with your real data in it.

  3. 03Weeks 3–7

    Build and check

    The new storefront gets built while the data settles. Then we check the things that actually break migrations: structured data, canonicals, pagination, sitemaps, hreflang if you sell internationally.

    A launch checklist we both work through, line by line.

  4. 04Launch week + 30 days

    Launch and watch

    We go live, submit the new sitemap, then genuinely watch — crawl errors, index coverage, rankings, revenue — every day for a month. Fixes happen the same day.

    Thirty days of monitoring and a proper report at the end.

What's in scope

Off almost anything, onto Shopify.

Or Shopify to Shopify — more common than you'd think.

  • WooCommerce
  • Magento & Adobe Commerce
  • BigCommerce
  • Salesforce Commerce Cloud
  • Squarespace & Wix
  • Shopify to Shopify
  • Theme migrations
  • Shopify Plus
  • Multi-store consolidation
  • International & multi-currency
  • Subscription migration
  • Review & UGC transfer
What you get

The traffic curve barely notices.

That's the whole brief, really.

  • A full URL and redirect map, signed off up front
  • Products, customers and order history moved across
  • Structured data and metadata preserved
  • A staging store you can test properly
  • A launch checklist worked through together
  • 30 days of post-launch monitoring
  • Before-and-after traffic reporting
  • A rollback plan, just in case
FAQ

The questions we always get asked

Will we lose rankings?

A small wobble in the first fortnight is normal while Google re-crawls. A lasting drop isn't, and it's usually a redirect map done as an afterthought. We do it first, which is why ours tend to recover in weeks rather than never.

Can you keep our order history?

Yes. Orders, customers, and usually reviews too. A few things have no clean equivalent in Shopify and we'll tell you which before we start, not after.

How long does it take?

Six to twelve weeks for most stores, depending on catalogue size and how much custom logic you're carrying. You'll get a date in the quote.

Should we redesign at the same time?

You don't have to. Moving platform and redesigning at once makes it harder to tell which change caused what. Sometimes it's still the right call — we'll talk it through honestly.

What if something goes wrong on launch day?

We keep the old site available and write a rollback plan before we go anywhere near a DNS record. It's rarely needed. It's always there.

Get in touch

Tell us the problem.
We'll put the right person on it.

Every project request answered within one working day. If it isn't something we do well, we'll say so. Or email alex@skulpt.it.