Data Migration Planning
A successful migration ensures that essential business data is transferred accurately, customer experiences remain uninterrupted, and day-to-day operations can continue smoothly.
You should treat data migration as more than a technical transfer exercise - as we said earlier (but it bears repeating) it’s an opportunity to improve data quality, streamline operations, and eliminate legacy issues that may have accumulated over time.
Careful planning reduces the risk of data loss, operational disruption, and customer frustration.
What data needs migrating?
Customers
One of your most important assets! Migrating this accurately is essential, and covers data like customer profiles, contact details, account history, marketing preferences, loyalty data and tags or segmentation.
Orders
Some brands migrate full order histories, while others only transfer a defined period of transactions. If you only transfer a certain amount, consider whether archived orders should remain accessible somewhere else.
Products
Review this carefully to identify and eliminate inconsistencies. Include titles, descriptions, SKUs, inventory data, images, variants, SEO metadata and product attributes.
Collections (categories)
Migrating collections and navigation structures helps preserve product discoverability and customer journeys. Replatforming also presents an opportunity to simplify overly complex catalogues or improve merchandising structures.
Gift cards
As part of the migration, make sure active balances are preserved and redemption functionality isn’t compromised.
Subscriptions
Depending on your set-up, you may need to liaise with a subscription platform provider. This will be more complicated if you’re changing providers as part of the migration. Make sure you account for renewal schedules and billing agreements.
Blog content
Hopefully you took our earlier advice about a blog audit and spruce-up. That’s the bulk of the hard work done. Just make sure that any blogs you’ve deleted are redirected to a relevant page (don’t point everything back to the homepage if you can help it).
Pages
Static pages such as FAQs, policy pages, landing pages, and brand content should also be reviewed and migrated where appropriate.
Customer data considerations
Customer data migration requires particular attention due to legal, operational, and user experience considerations.
GDPR/privacy compliance
In the UK or EU, businesses must ensure customer data is handled in compliance with GDPR regulations. This includes secure data transfer and proper handling of consent records.
Password migration limitations
One of the most common challenges during replatforming is customer password migration. Depending on the incumbent platform, passwords may not be transferable due to encryption methods.
In many cases, customers will need to reactivate their accounts, reset their passwords and accept new account invitations.
Clear communication is really important here, to minimise confusion and reduce support requests after launch.
Customer account activation
Following on from the previous point, it’s also important to plan the customer activation experience, including email invitations, password reset flows, login instructions and customer support availability.
Consent records
Marketing and comms preferences must be migrated and adhered to. This covers areas including email and SMS consent, and double opt-in records.
Segmentation continuity
This refers to how you’ve tagged, categorised and segmented your customer data for marketing purposes. You need to ensure this carries across for things like email comms, loyalty programmes, retargeting and customer lifecycle automations.
Data cleanliness
As already stressed, platform migration is a perfect opportunity to improve your data quality. Here are some of the areas we mean, and why it’s worth improving each one.
Duplicate customers
A common issue which causes issues for marketing, fulfilment and customer service. De-dupe and consolidate for a lovely clean post-migration dataset.
Product data inconsistencies
Issues we’ve seen include incorrect SKUs, inconsistent naming, poor images and outdated descriptions. It’s a good time to review and update all of this as part of the project.
Taxonomy restructuring
Category structures and product taxonomies often evolve organically over time. Migration projects provide a valuable opportunity to simplify the customer experience through better navigation and searchability.
Data validation
Once this part of the process is complete, you should confirm accuracy and functionality of all migrated data before you launch.
Record counts
Compare source and destination record totals across all the areas explored in this section.
Sampling methods
Carry out some random manual sampling to double check once your automated checks have been completed.
UAT validation
Check all processes and flows, like customer login, checkout, search functionality, product filtering, marketing automations and customer service workflows.
SEO Considerations During Migration
SEO is one of the highest-risk areas of any ecommerce replatforming project. Even when design, functionality, and user experience improve significantly, poor SEO migration planning can result in major traffic, visibility and revenue losses after launch.
Search engines build an understanding of a website over time through its URLs, content, structure, metadata, and authority signals. Replatforming often changes many of these elements simultaneously, which means businesses must carefully protect existing SEO equity throughout the migration process.
A well-executed migration can preserve (and even improve) organic performance. A poorly managed migration can lead to broken pages, indexing issues, lost rankings, and significant declines in traffic - and therefore sales.
When migrating to Shopify, SEO should be treated as a core workstream from the earliest planning stages through to post-launch monitoring.
SEO risks during replatforming
Traffic loss
Traffic drops can be caused by missing redirects, deleted content, broken links on the site, missing metadata, poor crawlability or indexing errors, among other things.
Ranking drops
This can happen if search engines find it difficult to understand the relationship between the old and the new pages. This can be exacerbated by URL changes, content updates or a change in linking structure. Make sure you preserve page intent when you migrate your site.
Broken URLs
The dreaded ‘404 error - page not found’ that nobody searching the internet ever wants to stumble across. It’s easily avoided - just make sure you’ve mapped your redirects properly (which we’ll cover in more detail shortly). Broken URLs ruin the customer experience, your organic rankings, backlink value and crawl efficiency so it’s crucial to get this right.
Metadata loss
This refers to items that appear on the search engine results pages like page titles and descriptions, plus alt text on images, open graph tags, canonical tags and structured data. If these aren’t migrated it can damage ranking and reduce clickthrough rates.
Redirect mapping
Whenever URLs change, businesses must ensure that users and search engines are automatically directed to the correct new destination. Without proper redirects, valuable SEO authority accumulated over time can be lost.
301 redirect strategy
A comprehensive 301 redirect strategy is critical during migration to Shopify.
301 redirects permanently point old URLs to new equivalents, helping preserve:
Search rankings
Backlink equity
Organic traffic
User journeys
Every indexable URL on the existing site should be reviewed and mapped appropriately before launch.
Some key redirect principles to bear in mind include:
Redirect to the Most Relevant Equivalent
Redirects should point to the closest matching page rather than simply redirecting everything to the homepage.
For example:
Old product pages should redirect to equivalent products
Retired collections should redirect to relevant replacement categories
Blog posts should redirect to migrated content versions
The reason for this is that search engines place greater trust in contextually relevant redirects.
Avoid Redirect Chains
A redirect chain is when a URL redirects to another URL, which then redirects again to another one (sometimes multiple times) before reaching the final destination page.
Multiple redirects in sequence can slow crawling and dilute SEO value. Redirects should move directly from the old URL to the final destination wherever possible.
Preserve ‘High-Value’ Pages
Pages with strong rankings, backlinks, or high organic traffic should receive particular attention during redirect planning.
These may include top-performing product pages, high-authority blog content or evergreen landing pages.
Test Redirects Thoroughly
Redirect testing should happen before and after launch to identify broken redirects, redirect loops, incorrect destinations or missing mappings - even a small number of missing redirects can negatively impact SEO performance.
URL mapping spreadsheets
It’s a good idea to use URL mapping documentation to reduce risk.
A URL mapping spreadsheet with four columns will do the trick: ‘old URL’, ‘new URL’, ‘status’ and ‘notes’.
Handling discontinued products
Not all products will remain active during migration. You need a clear strategy for discontinued or retired products to avoid creating large volumes of 404 pages.
Possible approaches include:
Redirecting to Replacement Products
Where suitable alternatives exist, redirecting customers to replacement products helps preserve user intent and conversion opportunities.
Redirecting to Relevant Collections
If no direct replacement exists, redirecting to a closely related collection or category is often preferable to removing the page entirely.
Returning a 410 Status
In some cases, permanently removed products may warrant a 410 (‘Gone’) status if there is no relevant alternative. This signals an intentional removal to search engines.
The correct approach depends on the product’s SEO value, backlinks, and customer demand.
Collections/categories
Collection and category URLs often carry significant SEO authority, particularly for high-volume search terms.
When migrating collections:
Preserve high-performing URLs where possible
Maintain logical hierarchy structures
Avoid unnecessary renaming
Protect existing keyword targeting
Changes to collection architecture should be carefully evaluated from both SEO and UX perspectives.
Preserving SEO equity
SEO equity refers to the authority and trust accumulated by a website over time through content, backlinks, user engagement, and search performance.
Preserving this equity during migration should be a primary objective. You can do this via the following actions:
Metadata migration
Metadata plays an important role in rankings and click-through performance.
Businesses should ensure migration of the following elements:
Page titles
Meta descriptions
Header structures
Image alt text
Social metadata
Where possible, metadata should be audited and improved rather than recreated from scratch.
Structured data
Structured data (also known as schema) helps search engines better understand website content and can support enhanced search result features. This can help you appear more prominently in the results pages. It takes the form of snippets of code, usually added into the head of the page or injected before the closing </body> tag.
Important schema types may include:
Product schema
Review schema
Breadcrumb schema
Article schema
Category page schema
All available schema types can be viewed at schema.org.
Migration projects should validate that structured data remains accurate and functional after launch.
Canonicals
Canonical tags help search engines understand the preferred version of a page when similar or duplicate content exists - for example, with product variants that create duplicate URLs.
Incorrect canonicalisation can lead to:
Duplicate content issues
Indexing problems
Ranking dilution
Canonical rules should be reviewed carefully throughout the migration process.
Internal linking
Internal links (between pages on your store) help distribute authority across the site and support crawlability. Migration projects often unintentionally break internal linking structures through:
URL changes
Navigation rebuilds
Content restructuring
Internal linking should be reviewed and updated systematically before launch.
Image optimisation
Images contribute to both SEO and site performance. Migration presents an opportunity to improve:
File compression
Alt text consistency (alt text is a short written description of the image)
Responsive image handling
Image naming conventions
Optimised images can support both rankings and Core Web Vitals performance.
Technical SEO checks
Technical validation is essential before launching the new Shopify store.
XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps are files that list the important URLs on a website to help search engines discover, crawl, and index content more efficiently.
Businesses should ensure:
Sitemaps are generated correctly
Only indexable URLs are included
Deprecated URLs are removed
Sitemap submission occurs after launch
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file controls crawler access to site areas.
Common migration mistakes include accidentally blocking:
Product pages
Collections
CSS or JavaScript resources
Entire staging environments left indexed
Robots.txt should be reviewed carefully before go-live to ensure crawlers can access all of the above.
Canonicalisation
Canonical tag implementation should be validated across products, collections, paginated pages, filtered URLs and international variants to avoid post-launch indexing issues.
Crawlability
Search engines must be able to access and crawl important content efficiently. Crawlability testing should identify broken links, redirect loops, orphaned pages (pages without any links to them), excessive crawl depth (pages that take too many clicks to reach), and blocked resources.
Site speed/Core Web Vitals
Performance has become increasingly important for both rankings and user experience.
Migration provides an opportunity to improve:
Page load speed
Mobile responsiveness
JavaScript efficiency
Image delivery
Layout stability
Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics defined by Google that measure real-world user experience on a website, focusing on loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. Strong Core Web Vitals performance can positively influence both SEO and conversion rates.
Post-launch SEO monitoring
SEO monitoring should continue closely after launch to identify and resolve issues quickly. The first few weeks after migration are especially important.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console should be monitored daily after launch for:
Indexing issues
Crawl errors
Redirect problems
Coverage reports
Submitting updated XML sitemaps can also help accelerate reindexing.
Index coverage
Businesses should monitor how many pages are indexed before and after migration to identify unexpected drops or anomalies.
Large declines in indexed pages may indicate technical issues requiring immediate attention.
Traffic benchmarking
Comparing traffic performance against pre-launch benchmarks helps identify category-specific declines, geographic impacts, device-specific issues and landing page performance changes.
Benchmarking allows teams to prioritise recovery efforts effectively.
Ranking monitoring
Keyword tracking should continue throughout the migration period to monitor ranking stability across core commercial keywords, collection pages, product terms and informational content.
Some fluctuation is normal, but major or sustained ranking declines should be investigated promptly.
A carefully managed SEO migration helps ensure that moving to Shopify strengthens long-term organic growth rather than disrupting it.
If you don’t have the internal resources to plan and execute your platform migration in-house, get in touch with Radiant - we’ve successfully migrated dozens of businesses to Shopify and will manage everything detailed in this guide for you.
