Moving your online shop without losing your Google rankings.

Plenty of Norfolk shops start on whatever was quickest to set up, then outgrow it. The fees creep up, the checkout can't do what you need, or you want a proper custom build. Whether you are moving to Shopify, off Shopify, or onto something built for you, moving is often the right call.

The risk is that Google doesn't know you've moved. Every product and category page on your current shop has an address. Google has learned those addresses. Customers have bookmarked them, shared them and clicked them in old emails. Change platform and most of those addresses change too. Handle that badly and the pages that brought in your sales can drop out of search.

Why rankings drop after a move

Different platforms build their web addresses differently. Shopify puts products under /products/ and categories under /collections/. WooCommerce uses /product/ by default. A custom build can use whatever you choose.

So /product/oak-chopping-board on your old shop might become /products/oak-chopping-board on the new one. To a person that looks like the same page. To Google it is a brand new page with no history, and the old one now shows an error.

Rankings usually slip for three reasons:

1. Old addresses break and nothing points them to the new pages.
2. Content gets lost in the move, such as titles, descriptions and reviews.
3. The new site is structured differently, so pages that used to rank well are buried or merged.

Before you switch: list what you've got

This is the dull part, and the part that matters most. Do it before anyone builds anything.

• Export every URL. Your current platform, your sitemap or a crawling tool will give you a full list of product, category, blog and information pages.
• Find your best pages in Google Search Console. The Performance report shows which pages actually get clicks. These are the ones you protect first.
• Save your meta titles and descriptions. Product imports often bring the products across but leave the SEO fields behind.
• Note pages other sites link to. A mention from local press, a supplier or a directory is worth keeping.

Map old addresses to new ones

Every old URL that matters needs a 301 redirect to its closest match on the new site. A 301 tells Google the page has moved for good and carries its standing across. Product to product, category to category. If a product has been discontinued, point it to the category it used to sit in.

Most platforms make this manageable. Shopify has a built-in redirects tool, and a custom build can handle redirects in bulk from a spreadsheet.

The things that quietly go missing

Redirects get most of the attention, but other things slip through just as easily:

• Product descriptions that get shortened or lose their formatting in the import.
• Structured data for price, stock and reviews that helped your listings stand out in search.
• Image alt text, which is often not part of a standard export.
• Reviews stored in an app on the old platform that doesn't come with you.
• Internal links in blog posts and menus that still point at old addresses. Redirects will catch them, but update them anyway.

The new shop is the exciting part. The redirect list is what protects your sales.

Launch day and the weeks after

1. Test your redirects before going live. Work through your top pages first, then a wider sample.
2. Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
3. Watch the Pages report for not found errors and fix any addresses you missed.
4. Avoid redirect chains. Old page straight to new page, not old to older to new.
5. Keep the redirects in place. Google suggests at least a year. We would keep them for good.

Expect some movement while Google catches up. If the groundwork is done, things should settle. If traffic to a key page drops and stays down, check that page's redirect and content first.

What we learned looking after Surplush

Surplush is a Norwich buyers club selling packaging and cleaning supplies to businesses at wholesale prices, delivered by e-cargo bike in Norwich, Cambridge and London. We relaunched their shop in January 2025 and have looked after it ever since, with more than 1,300 commits so far.

The relaunch was not the last time the shop's structure changed. Later SEO work moved products onto readable, slug-based URLs, added Product structured data and brought in new meta titles. The lesson for any shop owner is simple: address changes don't only happen on launch day. Every time you tidy up URLs on a live shop, the same rules apply. Map the old to the new, redirect, and check.

Planning to move your shop? We build and look after e-commerce sites for businesses across Norwich and Norfolk, and we treat the migration plan as part of the build, not an afterthought. Get in touch and we'll look at what you have before anything changes.