Crumpler was moving its Australian, Singaporean and Malaysian stores from a headless CMS to Shopify Plus. Every URL on the site was changing. The old pages sat under paths like /au/backpacks/. The new store used Shopify's /collections/ and /products/ structure.
Singapore and Malaysia had an extra change. They were moving from folders on crumpler.com to their own subdomains, sg.crumpler.com and my.crumpler.com.
A move like that can wipe out rankings. If Google can't match the old pages to the new ones, the traffic goes.
The opportunity was clear:
Move platforms and keep the rankings, across 3 countries at once.
We crawled the live site and the staging site for each country. We listed every URL with its title, description and headings. In Australia that was 96 live URLs against 99 on the staging store.
Then we matched each old URL to its new page and looked for gaps. The Australian staging store was missing 3 pages, including the store locations page, and the Online Exclusive category. Singapore was missing 4, including the repairs page. They were all added before launch.
We built the 301 redirect map for each store, so every old URL pointed to a new page. The Australian map covered 196 unique old URLs, including /shop/ paths from an even older version of the site. Singapore covered 106 and Malaysia 65.
Most old pages went straight to their match, like /au/backpacks/ to /collections/backpacks. Where an old page had no match, like a finished sale page, it went to the closest collection or the homepage.
We also ran a technical audit on the staging site and rewrote 9 Australian collection titles before launch, like "Backpacks Australia | Buy Backpacks for Men & Women".
Crumpler set the go-live date and took the password off the new stores. We switched the redirects on, verified the new sites in Google Search Console, updated Google Analytics and updated the links across the site.
Two and a half years on, /au/backpacks/ still sends people and Google to the right page.
A migration is won before launch. The redirect map and the staging audit decide if the rankings survive.
Check what's missing on staging. The store locations page wasn't on the new Australian store until the crawl found it.
Redirect the old old URLs too. Links to pages from two versions ago still send people, and they still carry weight with Google.
Final word
For Crumpler, the move to Shopify Plus didn't cost them their search traffic. The work was in the weeks before launch, one URL at a time.
Here's how we run an SEO migration. And for what it takes to recover after a move goes badly, see Reboot-It.
Planning a migration? Let's talk before you switch.
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