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Senior web & app development · 20 capabilities
oakstone.digital
Websites & commerce / capability

E-commerce platform migration
without losing the rankings.

Wix, Magento or bespoke to Shopify and back again — moved without losing orders, URLs or rankings.

This is for you if
  • Your platform licence or hosting cost no longer makes sense
  • Small merchandising changes require developer time
  • A previous migration lost traffic or order history
A sharper way forward

The work should
change the numbers.

Tools we reach for
ShopifyMagentoWooCommerceWixBigCommerceMatrixifyScreaming Frog

A migration is a data project wearing a design project’s clothes. The visible part — a new theme — is the easy half. The half that decides whether the project is remembered fondly is customer records, order history, SKU mapping, tax configuration, subscription state and several hundred redirects.

We run migrations in a rehearsed sequence: audit, map, dry run, verify, cut over. Nothing goes live until a full test import has been reconciled against the source system and signed off by the person who owns the numbers.

The SEO side is planned with the same discipline. Every indexed URL gets a destination, structured data is rebuilt on the new platform, and we monitor coverage daily through the transition rather than hoping.

What's included

What the engagement
actually contains.

01

Platform and data audit

What exists, what is actually used, and what should not follow you to the new system.

02

Data mapping and dry runs

Products, variants, customers, orders and subscriptions mapped, imported to a staging store and reconciled.

03

URL and redirect strategy

Every indexed URL mapped to a destination, with chains collapsed and parameters cleaned up.

04

Integration re-wiring

Payments, tax, shipping, ERP, email and analytics reconnected and tested end to end.

05

Rehearsed cutover plan

A timed runbook with owners, checkpoints, comms and a rollback path if a check fails.

06

Post-migration monitoring

Crawl, coverage, conversion and order-integrity checks for the first month on the new platform.

What you get
  • Migration audit and platform recommendation
  • Data mapping specification and reconciliation report
  • Complete URL map with redirect rules
  • Cutover runbook with rollback plan
  • Reconnected integrations with test evidence
  • Thirty-day post-migration health report
Signals it is time
  • Your platform licence or hosting cost no longer makes sense
  • Small merchandising changes require developer time
  • A previous migration lost traffic or order history
  • You are consolidating several stores into one
Common mistakes we fix

What usually went wrong
before we were called.

  • 01Importing data without a reconciliation step signed off by whoever owns the numbers
  • 02Skipping the dry run because the timeline looked tight
  • 03Mapping only the top pages and leaving the long tail to 404
  • 04Cutting over inside eight weeks of peak trading
How we measure it
  • Order and customer record parity
  • Organic traffic against pre-migration baseline
  • 404 rate on legacy URLs
  • Cutover window in minutes
Typical timeline

4–7 weeks for a single store; longer for multi-currency or subscriptions

Practicalities

What week one
actually looks like.

First week

A full data audit and field-level mapping document, plus a crawl of every indexed URL. Nothing is imported until the mapping is agreed in writing by whoever owns the numbers.

What we need from you
  • Admin access to source and target platforms
  • A finance owner to sign off reconciliation
  • Integration credentials for tax, ERP and email
  • A preferred cutover window
Not included
  • Rewriting product descriptions
  • Redesigning the brand
  • Migrating unrelated internal systems
  • Ongoing merchandising after handover

Scope boundaries stated up front rather than discovered in a change request.

How the work runs

Four stages, visible throughout.

01

Diagnose

Analytics, search data, sales conversations and a technical audit read together, so the brief is based on evidence rather than opinion.

02

Structure

Message hierarchy, page architecture and URL plan agreed before design starts — the decisions that are expensive to change later.

03

Build

A component system engineered by seniors, with technical SEO, accessibility and performance handled as we go rather than bolted on.

04

Prove

Staged launch, redirect and coverage monitoring, and conversion measured against the baseline we took before starting.

Questions buyers actually ask

E-commerce platform migration, answered.

A single-store catalogue of a few hundred SKUs typically takes four to seven weeks including a full dry run. Multi-store, multi-currency or subscription-heavy migrations run longer, mostly because reconciliation and integration testing take real time.

Cutover is usually measured in minutes, scheduled in your quietest trading window, and rehearsed beforehand. Orders taken during the switch are accounted for in the runbook rather than discovered afterwards.

It migrates. Customer accounts, addresses, order history and subscription state are mapped, imported and reconciled line by line. Where a platform genuinely cannot hold a legacy field, we agree an archive strategy rather than quietly dropping it.

A better brief starts here

Make e-commerce platform migration useful.

Bring us the hard thing. We will bring a point of view, a senior team and a clear next step.

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