Skip to content
DIGITIKAKEEP AHEAD — Home

Redesign

Website redesign: how to switch platforms without losing your search rankings

URL inventory, redirect plan, staging, launch day, follow-up: the method we use to migrate a site to Shopify or WooCommerce without a traffic drop.

By Digitika3 min read

A redesign that succeeds visually can cut traffic in half within a few weeks. The cause is almost always the same: the old addresses no longer lead anywhere, and Google loses track of pages that took years to rank.

The good news is that this risk can be managed. Here is the method we follow for every migration, whether from WooCommerce to Shopify, from Joomla to WordPress, or from an old custom-built site to a modern platform.

Before touching the design: the inventory

We start by listing every URL that has value. Four sources, cross-referenced in a spreadsheet:

  1. A full crawl of the current site, to capture every accessible page.
  2. Search Console, for pages that receive clicks from Google over the last twelve months.
  3. Google Analytics, for pages that generate traffic and sales, from all sources.
  4. Inbound links, for pages that other sites cite. These carry the domain’s authority.

For an average store, this usually yields a few hundred rows. Each one will need a destination on the new site.

The redirect plan

For every old URL, a new address, with a permanent (301) redirect. The rules:

  • One page to its equivalent, not everything to the home page. Redirecting a hundred product pages to the home page is, in Google’s eyes, the same as deleting them.
  • No chains. If an old redirect already existed, point straight to the final destination.
  • Pages with no equivalent go to the closest category.

Platform changes often impose new URL structures. Shopify, for example, puts products under /products/ and categories under /collections/. Coming from WooCommerce, every URL changes: the redirect plan is not optional. Shopify lets you import redirects in bulk from a CSV file. On WordPress, you manage them with a plugin or directly at server level.

Keep what was working

A redesign is a chance to rewrite, but not indiscriminately. On pages that bring traffic, we keep:

  • titles and meta descriptions that perform;
  • the main body copy, even if it’s laid out differently;
  • existing structured data;
  • internal links to important pages.

Then we improve, page by page, once traffic has stabilised.

Staging

The new site is built on a test address, password-protected and excluded from indexing. That’s where we test the redirects one by one, with a script that checks that every old URL returns a 301 to the right page.

A classic oversight: the staging site gets indexed by Google because the protection was removed too early. You end up with two versions of the site competing against each other.

Launch day

A checklist we follow in order:

  1. Remove the noindex tag and check robots.txt. This is the most common mistake, and the most expensive.
  2. Enable the redirects and test a sample in production.
  3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
  4. Check that tracking tools (GA4, ad pixels) are recording orders.
  5. If the domain name changes, declare the change of address in Search Console.

The following weeks

It’s normal for rankings to move for a few weeks while Google crawls the new addresses. What isn’t normal is a drop that lasts. We track weekly:

  • 404 errors in Search Console and in the server logs;
  • pages losing clicks, compared with the same period before migration;
  • pages from the old site still showing in results.

Every 404 on a page that had traffic gets its redirect the same day.

How much time to plan for?

For a store with a few hundred products, the inventory and the redirect plan take from a few days to a week. That’s small compared with the whole project, and it’s the work that protects everything else.

Planning a redesign? We can audit your current site before you start, so you know exactly which pages to protect.

All articles