Ten years ago, we carried out our first major platform migration. The client in question was already selling close to 750 orders a day, and people would stop our director in the street to tell him he was mad to do it — there were countless stories of ecommerce businesses going under, or never getting back to their previous numbers. But we pressed on and, with great care, we completed the migration some time later. It was a success: the site grew in the very month of the migration. Ten years on, that same site migrated with Lemoon once again, with the same result — growth in the first month, records broken in the second.

What’s behind this success in platform migration?

We created a non-negotiable standard: without these points in place, the store doesn’t go live, simple as that! We also have a rule — “We may lose the client, but we won’t be the ones responsible for putting them out of business.” In other words: we’d rather refuse to launch the new site if it doesn’t meet every security checkpoint, even if that causes friction over go-live dates. Harsh, right? But absolutely necessary.

So what’s the step-by-step for a safe platform migration?

Functionality checklist

Before you even choose the platform, you need to know whether everything the store currently uses can be transferred to the new platform — and, if not, whether there’s something similar or whether it can simply be “dropped”. This stops any critical surprises from turning up at the end of the project. A few examples below, but this list can grow depending on the store:

  • Payment methods
  • Delivery methods
  • Ad integrations and tracking
  • APIs
  • Functions essential to your business, such as wishlists, B2B and others
  • And much more…

SEO relevance

It’s important to migrate all existing content: titles, copy, static content, category and product text, and everything else. Only change what’s genuinely new; as far as possible, don’t touch what was already working well. Migrate every URL, too, with a thorough 301 redirect.

This 301 redirect scares every merchant we’ve ever worked with, but it’s actually straightforward: just export all product and category URLs from the old site — and if that’s not available, it can even be done from GA4 reports. Once you have that material to hand, export all the URLs from the new platform and build a FROM > TO mapping; with the right columns, a simple VLOOKUP does the job.

On top of that, after the migration, keep an eye on Search Console for 404 errors, drops in URL count, and so on.

Test at every stage; don’t leave it until launch day.

From the design stage onwards, check everything carefully. When the agency asks for tests, do them. Don’t leave the protection of your entire operation solely in the developer’s hands — remember: the development team handles many sites, and only you will know the specifics of your business. It’s not incompetence; it’s knowing what to look for.

Test the full purchase journey from start to finish; send the site to friends and staff. That way, any “gaps” will be found and can be fixed before go-live.

A quick story: we once had a case where a former client asked us to review the work another agency was doing. Go-live was seven days away. We opened the site and virtually nothing worked — this was the kind of case where the site would be out of business today. But we took on the project and stopped it ending in disaster.

Another important SEO point: you may need to migrate products that no longer exist, or redirect those links to new ones.

Tracking migration: Google GA4, Meta Ads and others

Platforms sometimes use completely different integrations. So make sure you fully understand whether your current paid-traffic agency knows how to handle the integration, as some of them can be manual. We’ve seen cases where a site’s tracking stayed broken for months after go-live because the client’s agency didn’t know how to do it but wouldn’t admit the mistake. Would that have happened if the whole project had been overseen by Lemoon? 😀

Migrating customer data and order history

The customer base is usually very easy to migrate, but order history isn’t quite so simple. So it’s not something to get hung up on. That said, in some cases the full history can be migrated — for example, when the new platform is Shopify.

Don’t forget to migrate reviews and transactional emails as well.

And on go-live day?

Avoid launch parties and big campaigns. The migration needs to happen during a calm week, with no more pressure than the migration itself already brings.

Want Lemoon’s help with your migration? Click here and get in touch — we’d be delighted to make this process even smoother, and to help you grow.