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Magento migration

Magento migration without losing your SEO

If your shop has grown and you are moving it to Magento from WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopify or a custom build, I prepare the migration so that Google keeps finding every product and every category. I’m based in Valencia and work with shops all over Spain.

Tell me which shop you're migrating

I move your catalogue to Magento with every product and every category at its new address.

What’s specific to Magento

What determines the SEO of a Magento shop

Magento is highly configurable, and several of its options change the URLs of the whole catalogue in one go.

You choose the URL suffix: products and categories can end in .html or .htm depending on the configuration. Choosing it with your current URLs in mind saves redirects.
The category is not included in the product URL: magento leaves it out by default unless you enable the option. I decide this before loading the catalogue, because changing it later moves every product page.
Redirects live in URL Rewrites: each rule has its Request Path, its Target Path and its Redirect Type, Permanent (301) or Temporary (302). The Request Path must be unique within each store view.
Parameters are lost when redirecting: magento strips GET parameters from the URL when it applies a redirect. I review old URLs with filters or sorting separately.
Changing the URL key can redirect automatically: magento can create the redirect automatically when you change the URL key of a product or category. I check that the option is enabled before touching anything.
The sitemap has to be created and scheduled: it is set up under Marketing, SEO & Search, and its generation is scheduled. For large catalogues, Adobe recommends adjusting the cron job so the sitemap is generated in full.

How I work

The three phases of the migration

In Magento, URL decisions come before loading the catalogue, and the rest of the work builds on them.

Before the migration

Defining the scope: moving to Magento usually goes hand in hand with a larger catalogue, several store views or languages and a new design. Each change carries its own risks, and together they get more complicated, so I first put in writing what changes and what doesn’t.
Benchmark of the current situation: I analyse Search Console with at least 12 to 16 months of performance by page and by query, Analytics, the rankings of the keywords that bring you sales, Core Web Vitals and inbound links. This is the snapshot we will compare everything against afterwards.
Full crawl of the current website: with Screaming Frog or a similar tool I extract every URL, status code, title, meta description, canonical, hreflang, internal link and click depth. In a shop that has been running for years, discontinued products, variants, indexed filters and paginated pages turn up that nobody remembered.
Redirect map: old URL and new URL, one by one, starting with those that bring in traffic or have links. Nothing gets sent to the home page wholesale. Anything without an equivalent goes to the nearest category or is marked as removed with a 410. The map is tested before the switchover day and loaded into URL Rewrites or on the server.
Review before opening: while it is being built, the new shop sits in a staging environment closed to Google. I review the product and category templates, canonicals, structured data, speed, store views and languages, check that no internal links point to old addresses and make sure the sitemap lists the new ones.
Plan and timeline: I choose a date outside your peak season (sales, Black Friday or the Christmas campaign), with developers available on the switchover day and the days after, and with a rollback plan in case something goes wrong.

Migration day

I check in production that the 301s work, with no chains or loops, using a large sample of the map before and after the switch. On Magento I also generate the new sitemap from the Admin and check that no part of the catalogue is missing.
I crawl the new website and the list of old URLs to confirm their status codes.
I submit the new sitemap to Search Console. If the domain changes, I verify the new property and use the Change of Address tool.

After the migration

Daily monitoring for the first two weeks: indexing in Search Console, 404 and 5xx errors, rankings for the benchmark keywords and organic traffic by section (categories, products and content). To see what Googlebot is crawling I use the Crawl Stats report in Search Console.
I update the external links you control, such as profiles, marketplaces, distributors or partners, and request changes to the most important links pointing to your website.
I compare against the benchmark at 2, 4, 8 and 12 weeks. A temporary drop is normal, but if it still hasn’t recovered after two months, the cause needs to be found.

Before we start

What I can’t guarantee

That there will be no drop at all. Every migration shakes up traffic for a few weeks, and my part is to shorten that drop and make sure no products or links disappear.
An exact recovery date. How long it takes depends on how many URLs change, the size of the catalogue and when Google comes back to crawl the shop.
That Magento will push you up on Google. It gives you a lot of control over URLs, languages and the catalogue, but climbing the rankings depends on how it is configured.

Questions

Frequently asked questions about migrating to Magento

SEO alone doesn’t justify the change. Magento makes sense when the catalogue, the languages or the way the shop operates call for it, and then my job as an SEO consultant in Valencia is to make sure the change doesn’t cost you rankings.

With the right suffix and category path, some of the addresses can match your current ones. I check this URL by URL before deciding.

Magento drops the parameters when it redirects, so an old filter URL cannot carry its parameters over to the new one. I decide which filters deserve their own category and which go to the category that contains them.

Yes. A Magento migration usually involves an integrator or an agency, and I coordinate with them so that decisions on categories, URLs and redirects arrive before the catalogue is loaded.

Ideally, get in touch before the catalogue is loaded into Magento, which is when the suffix, the category path and the category structure are decided.

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