Website migration
What is a website migration?
A website migration is a move to a different platform, a different domain or a different set of addresses, in which the content, the URLs and the search rankings all have to survive. Everything travels: pages, products, images, customers and orders, and every old address gets a redirect to its successor. The work does not end at launch — indexing, errors and traffic are watched for weeks afterwards.
Example
A shop with 640 addresses moves off WooCommerce onto a new platform. Before launch someone builds a two-column table: old address, new address. 420 product pages keep their address exactly; 140 categories collapse into 60 because the structure is being cleaned up; 80 old pages have no successor and point at the nearest category rather than at the home page.
On the night of the move the domain record changes, the redirects go live, and the old sitemap is submitted once more so the crawler is told where everything went. Then comes the part people skip: for the next six to eight weeks someone watches the error report, the indexed count and the traffic by page group, and fixes whatever the table missed.
A migration also moves things that are not pages: images and their addresses, the accounts of registered customers, order history, tax documents, and whatever the old system kept in a field nobody wrote down. Each of those needs a decision before, not after.
Why it matters for a business
Rankings attach to addresses, not to companies. A page that earned its position over three years hands nothing to its replacement unless the old address points at it. A migration without a redirect table does not lose a few visits; it resets traffic to what a new site earns, and the recovery is measured in months.
Next to the search risk sits the commercial one: a checkout that breaks quietly, an order email that stops going out, a stock feed still pointing at the old system. Test orders on a copy of the site find these before customers do. Whether the traffic came back is then read in the analytics, not by feel.
Moving from WooCommerce, OpenCart, Shopify, Magento or any other platform, with addresses and positions kept, is part of the work on our platform.
What to ask
- Is there an old-to-new address table, and can you see it before launch?
- Are the redirects permanent (301), and who checks for chains afterwards?
- What happens to image addresses, customer accounts and order history?
- Is there a staging copy with test orders before the switch?
- Who watches indexing and errors after launch, and for how long?
- Who holds the domain, the DNS and the Search Console account?