In short
- A poorly prepared redesign can cost a large share of organic traffic: the most common cause is missing 301 redirects.
- The centerpiece is the redirect plan: every old URL with traffic, links or rankings points to its closest equivalent.
- Google recommends permanent server-side redirects, kept in place for a long time, and the Change of Address tool when the domain changes.
- A redesign is also the best moment to rework the tags and texts of every category.
Switching e-commerce platform, rethinking the site structure, adopting a new domain: a redesign is often necessary, and almost always risky for SEO. Sites that lose a large share of their traffic after a migration have generally made the same mistake: incomplete redirects. Here is how to avoid it, and how to turn the redesign into an opportunity.
Before: inventory what has value
- List every current URL: crawl the site, the sitemap, an export from the CMS.
- Add their SEO value: clicks and impressions over twelve months (Search Console), external links, revenue by landing page.
- Identify the strategic pages: the categories and facets that carry most of the traffic and sales.
The redirect plan
This is the centerpiece. Every old URL with traffic, links or rankings must point to its closest equivalent on the new site, with a permanent server-side redirect (301).
| Old page | New target |
|---|---|
| Category kept under a new URL | The new URL of the same category |
| Categories merged | The merged category |
| Indexed facet | The equivalent facet, or the category if it no longer exists |
| Discontinued product | The replacement product or the category |
Avoid redirecting everything to the home page: Google may treat those redirects as errors, and visitors will not find what they were looking for.
During: reproduce what was working
- Keep the tags and texts of pages that rank well, or improve them, but do not lose them along the way: CMS migrations often reset custom title tags and meta descriptions.
- Check canonical tags, robots.txt and noindex tags in the staging environment before go-live: a forgotten
noindexcan deindex the whole site. - Reproduce the facet rules: which combinations are indexable, which are blocked.
After: monitor and fix
When a site moves, Google recommends server-side redirects kept in place for a long time (at least a year), updating internal links and sitemaps to the new URLs, and using the Change of Address tool in Search Console when the domain changes.
In the weeks that follow:
- track 404 errors and non-indexed pages in Search Console;
- compare traffic to the strategic pages before and after;
- immediately fix missing or incorrect redirects.
The opportunity to seize: bring the whole catalogue up to standard
A redesign forces a fresh look at every page anyway. It is the best moment to rework the title tags, meta descriptions, H1s and texts of every category and facet, rather than migrating the generic tags from the previous CMS.
unblind can analyze the new site as soon as it goes live, or in staging if it is accessible to its crawler, write the tags and texts of each page around its main query, then publish them directly to Shopify (with preview, backup and restore available) or export them for your CMS. The migration becomes an opportunity to gain traffic, not just to avoid losing it.
Frequently asked questions
How long should redirects be kept after a migration?
For as long as possible. Google recommends keeping them for at least a year, and ideally permanently, because external links and bookmarks keep pointing to the old URLs long after the migration.
Should URLs be changed during a redesign?
Only when necessary (a new CMS that imposes a format, a genuinely rethought site structure). Every changed URL requires a redirect and introduces risk. Keeping existing URLs, where possible, is the safest option.