Replatforming a store without losing rankings

Record what exists first

Before anything changes, crawl the entire current store and export what each URL currently earns in traffic and revenue. This baseline is the only way to tell afterwards whether a drop was the migration or the season.

Teams skip this constantly, then spend the recovery arguing about whether traffic actually fell.

Map every URL to one destination

Every old URL needs exactly one redirect to its closest new equivalent. One hop, never a chain. Products to the equivalent product, categories to the equivalent category, and discontinued items to the nearest parent.

The failure mode that destroys migrations is redirecting large numbers of pages to the homepage. Google treats that as a soft 404, which means those pages simply cease to exist along with everything they had earned.

Check staging before launch, not after

Verify the redirect map, the canonical tags, the robots rules and the sitemap on staging. Confirm that staging itself is not indexable, which is a genuinely common and completely avoidable disaster.

Expect a dip, and watch it closely

Even a well-run migration dips while Google recrawls and reassesses. A good one recovers within weeks. Monitor index coverage and rankings daily through that window, because problems caught in week one are cheap and problems caught in week six are not.