Question 1

How do you migrate an e-commerce without losing sales?

Accepted Answer

You migrate by working in three distinct phases and keeping the chat open throughout the transition. A drop in organic traffic, when it happens, almost always comes from lost URLs and forgotten redirects, while a drop in sales comes from confused customers who can no longer find the right button and leave. Here's the sequence that works: - Pre-migration: run a full crawl of the current site with a tool like Screaming Frog, then export every URL, meta tag, schema markup and category structure. Define the new URL structure and build the old→new mapping table.

Question 2

How much traffic do you lose after an e-commerce migration?

Accepted Answer

A temporary dip in the first few days is normal, but with the URL mapping done properly it stays small and recovers. The problem isn't the dip itself: it's when it turns permanent because the 301 redirects don't cover every page that held a ranking on search engines. Every URL that used to bring traffic and isn't redirected is a page Google stops finding, along with its share of visits and sales. To keep the organic traffic drop in check, watch these pages in order of priority: 1. Product pages that were receiving organic traffic. 2. Category pages, often the strongest ones on search engines. 3. Blog posts with inbound links. 4.

Question 3

How long does it take to recover rankings after a migration?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the size of the catalogue, but as a rule the first signs of settling show up within a few weeks, and rankings stabilise within one to three months on larger catalogues. Google has to re-crawl every page, read the redirects and recalculate the authority of the new URLs: it's a process you don't force, you accompany. During this period you help indexing by keeping the XML sitemap up to date, checking coverage in Google Search Console every week, and fixing any 404 errors that surface right away. The cleaner the structure and the more consistent the redirects, the shorter the settling window.

Question 4

Do you need 301 redirects when you change e-commerce platform?

Accepted Answer

Yes — 301 redirects are the single most important part of the whole migration: URLs that change can't be left without a destination. The 301 tells search engines the page has moved permanently and passes most of the accumulated SEO value on to the new URL. Without it, every old link leads to a 404, and you lose both the ranking and the customers who click in from an old bookmark or an old email. Don't confuse 301 and 302: the 302 signals a temporary move and passes no value, so in a migration (on WooCommerce and on any other platform) always use the 301. Practical rules: - One 301 redirect for every old URL, even for the minor pages.

Question 5

How do you avoid losing order history and customers during the migration?

Accepted Answer

You export the data from the old platform and import it into the new one before go-live, checking every field. Order history and customer records aren't just an archive: they're the foundation for after-sales service, for returns, for warranty claims and for campaigns aimed at customers you've already won. Losing them means starting from scratch with people who had already chosen you. Here's how to proceed: - Export customers, orders, addresses and payment status in a structured format (CSV or via API). - Check that totals, dates and order statuses match after the import.

Question 6

What mistakes cost you sales during a platform switch?

Accepted Answer

The most expensive mistake is treating the migration as a purely technical event and leaving customers without a point of contact during the go-live days. People land on a new layout, look for the cart where it no longer is, and start to doubt the payment is secure: every hesitation is one more abandoned cart. Carts are abandoned in almost seven out of ten cases even under normal conditions (source: Baymard Institute), and during a migration the friction only goes up. The mistakes we see most often: - Partial redirects: mapping only the top products and forgetting categories and the blog.

Migrating live chat without losing sales