Moving to a new e-commerce platform or CMS is one of the riskiest things a business can do to its organic traffic. Most of the damage is avoidable, and almost all of it comes from work that was skipped before launch.
Before you build
- Export every indexed URL from search console, analytics and a full crawl, then merge the lists.
- Record which URLs earn organic traffic and backlinks. These are the ones you cannot afford to lose.
- Decide the new URL structure early, and keep it as close to the old one as is sensible.
During the build
- Map every old URL to the most relevant new page, never to the home page by default.
- Carry titles, meta descriptions, headings and structured data across deliberately.
- Block the staging site from indexing, and remember to unblock production.
At launch and after
- Test redirects in bulk on launch day and fix chains and loops.
- Submit new sitemaps and watch crawl errors daily for the first weeks.
- Compare rankings and organic revenue against the pre-launch baseline.
A temporary dip is common even when everything is done well. A lasting drop usually points to missing redirects, lost content or a technical block, all of which can be found and fixed if you kept the baseline.