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PrestaShop migration

PrestaShop migration without losing your SEO

If you are moving your shop to PrestaShop from WooCommerce, Magento or Shopify, or jumping from an old version of PrestaShop itself, I prepare the migration so that Google keeps finding your products and categories. I work from Valencia with shops all over Spain.

Tell me which shop you're migrating

Every product in your shop ends up on PrestaShop at the address it should have.

What’s specific to PrestaShop

What you should know about PrestaShop before migrating

Almost everything that affects SEO in PrestaShop is decided under Shop Parameters, Traffic & SEO.

Product URLs include the ID: the default route is {category:/}{id}-{rewrite}{-:ean13}.html, which produces addresses such as /vestidos/7-vestido-estampado.html. It can be changed, and I decide how by looking at what your current URLs are like.
Friendly URLs depend on the server: they need a server that supports URL rewriting. PrestaShop warns that enabling them without that support can make your shop inaccessible, so I test it first in the staging environment.
You have to choose how it redirects to the canonical URL: when someone arrives through an address that is not the main one, PrestaShop can either not redirect, redirect with a 301 or redirect with a 302. PrestaShop recommends the 301 once setup is complete, and that is the one I leave in place.
The robots.txt button overwrites yours: generating the robots.txt file from the back office replaces whatever was there before. If your shop had its own rules, I save them beforehand and add them back.
The sitemap is generated by a module: prestaShop has an official module, Google sitemap, that creates the shop’s sitemap. I check that it covers the whole catalogue before submitting it to Search Console.

How I work

The three phases of the migration

On PrestaShop, URLs and categories are decided before anything is built.

Before the migration

Defining the scope: moving to PrestaShop usually brings new URLs and, quite often, a different theme and category structure. 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, discontinued products, combinations 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 onto the server or into a redirect module.
Review before opening: while it is being built, the new shop is in maintenance mode or in a staging environment closed to Google. I review the product and category templates, canonicals, structured data, speed and friendly URLs, 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 PrestaShop I also check that friendly URLs are enabled and that the redirect to the canonical URL is set to 301.
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 blog). 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, price comparison sites 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 job is to keep the drop short and make sure no products or links are lost along the way.
An exact recovery date. It depends on how many URLs change, the size of the catalogue and how quickly Google recrawls the shop.
That PrestaShop will rank better on its own. The result depends on how the shop, the theme and the modules are configured.

Questions

Frequently asked questions about migrating to PrestaShop

A temporary drop is normal while Google crawls the new addresses. In the migrations I prepare as an SEO consultant in Valencia, what most affects how long it lasts is the redirect map, along with making sure the new shop doesn’t lose content.

The route is changed under Traffic & SEO, and the more closely the new URLs resemble the current ones, the fewer redirects you need.

I treat that as a migration too. The theme, the modules and sometimes the routes change, so I follow the same method even though the platform has the same name.

Yes. I coordinate with whoever is developing the shop so that decisions on URLs and categories are made before anything is built.

Before you choose the theme and the category structure, which are the decisions that weigh most on SEO and the most expensive to change later.

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