Redirects are the part of a migration people forget

On the thing that keeps me up at night,

If there is one part of a migration I refuse to rush, it is redirects. Everything else you can patch after launch. Lost search rankings are far harder to win back, and by the time the traffic dip shows up in your reports, the damage is weeks old.

Why this matters more than it looks

Every URL on your current store may have years of trust built into it. When you move, those addresses often change. Without a redirect, an old link lands on a dead page, and both your customers and Google give up.

• Old product URLs change shape on the new platform
• Category and collection paths rarely map one to one
• Blog posts and landing pages get quietly left behind
• Anything you built a paid or email campaign around can break

Build the map before you build the store

The mistake is treating redirects as a launch-week job. By then you are tired and rushing.

1. Export every live URL from your current site
2. Match each one to its new home, one row at a time
3. Flag the orphans that have no obvious equivalent
4. Test a sample on staging before you go anywhere near live

A redirect map is not glamorous work, but it is the single cheapest insurance policy in the whole project.

The bit people skip

Do not only redirect your product pages. Your highest-value URLs are often old blog posts and guides that quietly pull in traffic every day. Check your analytics for the top hundred pages and make sure every single one has a destination.

Then, after launch, keep watching. Crawl the old URLs and confirm they resolve. Fix the misses within days, not months.

Get this right and a migration should barely register in your search traffic. Get it wrong and you can spend a year clawing back what you had. If you want me to sanity-check your redirect plan before launch, book advisory time and we will go through it line by line.