We have experience owning and managing ecommerce migration projects across a range of retail sectors and platform environments, from mid-market replatforming projects to large-scale migrations involving tens of thousands of product URLs.
Our dedicated SEO migrations team will work with you to determine the organic performance and revenue that must be retained across your catalogue and categories, partnering with you as your SEO stakeholder throughout every phase of the migration. POLARIS are experts in:
/ Benchmarking your existing ecommerce rankings, category performance and product-level visibility to establish a clear revenue-aligned baseline
/ Auditing architecture, navigation, URL structures and internal linking to ensure the new platform reflects both your commercial goals and SEO requirements
/ Mapping product catalogues, category pages and content at scale to ensure high-value pages retain their search equity through the migration
/ Technically managing the ecommerce-specific challenges that migrations introduce, from pagination and faceted navigation to structured data for products
POLARIS delivered a comprehensive SEO migration for Detecon, a complex project involving a complete re-platforming from Drupal to WordPress, all while safeguarding existing search performance and domain authority. The successful project resulted in a 133% increase in daily site visits post-migration.
Detecon WordPress Website Migration
Our proven process is designed to protect organic revenue, preserve product and category visibility, and give retail businesses complete confidence throughout their migration. We deliver a 5-stage framework refined through hands-on experience with online retailers of all sizes and built on the understanding that, for an ecommerce business, a migration is not just an SEO project but a revenue event.
1. Performance Analysis
We benchmark your existing ecommerce visibility, organic revenue and product and category rankings so we know precisely what must be safeguarded before the migration begins,
2. Content Migration
We map and validate every important category page, product page and transactional user journey to ensure your new platform retains the full SEO strength of the current one.
3. User Tracking & Search Engine Compliance
We set up and verify ecommerce tracking and analytics profiles on your new website or platform so your transactional data stays accurate throughout the transition and search engines fully understand the commercial structure of your new site from day one.
4. Technical Analysis & Changeover
We assess the technical health of your new ecommerce build, covering everything from pagination and product variant canonicalisation to redirect architecture, and deliver a clean changeover with every URL correctly mapped and preserved.
5. Post-Launch Monitoring & Reporting
We manually check redirects, product visibility and category rankings after your platform launch, providing revenue-focused performance reporting and resolving any issues before they compound into sustained losses in organic traffic or transactional performance.
Ecommerce Migration & Replatforming Checklist"We evaluate all 3 pillars of your SEO performance whilst keeping customer intent in mind. We are very analytical and have an open communication policy. We will keep you informed every step of the way. Managing all stakeholders involved, we will protect your performance and reputation as our own."James FooteSEO Director
The journey for many brands is success. POLARIS have consistently guided marketers to embark on website migration projects to informed and confident to make the right decisions for the journey ahead. From redesigning wireframes to restructuring site architectures, we have over 10,000 hours of website migration experience. Read what our partners have to say about their experience of choosing us as their SEO site migration agency.
POLARIS accelerated the re-development of Milton Park’s new website as they were undertaking a slight re-brand on their current site. As identified by our SEO Agency team, the website had multiple technical and content issues which held back their organic visibility due to an inherited website with fundamental legacy issues.
Ecommerce platform migrations are among the highest-risk SEO events an online retailer can undertake. A development partner will manage the technical build and data transfer between platforms, but they will not audit your product and category rankings, map your URL changes for redirects, validate your structured data implementation, or monitor your organic revenue performance after launch. For an ecommerce business, the consequence of unmanaged SEO risk during a migration is direct and immediate: lost rankings on product and category pages translate to lost revenue within days. A specialist SEO migration agency provides the expertise, oversight and accountability that ensures your organic channel is protected throughout the transition.
Ecommerce migration timelines depend on the scale of your product catalogue, the complexity of your category architecture, the platform you are migrating to or from, and the volume of technical work required to replicate your existing SEO performance on the new build. Our 5-stage framework is structured to integrate with your broader replatforming project, working alongside your development, trading and marketing teams without disrupting the day-to-day operation of your retail business. We will define a clear project timeline and milestone plan at the outset, ensuring that no stage of the SEO migration is compressed under the pressure of a platform launch deadline.
As your dedicated ecommerce SEO migration team, we begin by conducting a comprehensive audit of your existing site's organic performance. This covers your product and category rankings, organic traffic and revenue attribution by page type, your current URL structure and crawl behaviour, structured data implementation, and the full URL inventory of your existing catalogue. This baseline informs every subsequent decision, from the redirect strategy and content mapping to the technical evaluation of your new platform build, ensuring that your migration is planned around what your business cannot afford to lose.
WordPress developers are well-placed to manage the technical execution of a migration, but SEO is a distinct discipline that sits outside the scope of development work. Developers routinely overlook permalink changes that break redirect chains, theme switches that strip structured data, or plugin migrations that affect crawl behaviour. An SEO migration agency works alongside your development team to ensure every decision made during the build is evaluated through the lens of search performance.
Product variants generate one of the most common sources of technical debt in ecommerce SEO, and a platform migration frequently changes how variants are handled at URL level. Some platforms generate individual URLs for each variant; others consolidate them under a single product URL with parameter-based selection. The correct approach depends on your catalogue structure, the search demand that exists for specific variant combinations, and the canonicalisation logic your new platform supports. We assess your existing variant URL structure and the behaviour of your new platform before the build begins, and implement a canonicalisation and indexation strategy that preserves variant-level rankings where they carry commercial value, without creating duplicate content issues across the rest of the catalogue.
An ecommerce platform migration has implications that extend beyond organic search. Changes to your product data structure, URL architecture and page speed can affect your Google Shopping feed quality and ad performance; changes to your product schema affect your eligibility for free listings in Google's shopping surfaces; and changes to your site's conversion pathways and user experience affect the commercial efficiency of every channel driving traffic to the new platform. While our primary mandate is SEO performance, we maintain a commercial perspective throughout the migration, flagging changes that affect your paid shopping, feed management and conversion rate performance alongside organic, and ensuring your wider retail marketing team is briefed on the cross-channel implications before launch.
The POLARIS migration team is experienced in conducting a range of complex migration types, including:
WordPress Website Migrations
Enterprise-Level Website Migrations
International Website Migrations
Migration Loss & Recovery
By establishing detailed performance benchmarks at product, category and site level, including organic revenue attribution, rankings by page type, and crawl behaviour across the full catalogue, we identify precisely which assets are most critical to your retail business and must be prioritised for protection throughout the migration.
This positions POLARIS as your ecommerce SEO stakeholder from the outset of the project, ensuring that every platform, architecture and catalogue decision is evaluated against a clear commercial baseline.
By mapping this content inventory against the proposed architecture of your new platform and benchmarking against competitor performance across your key product categories, we ensure the migration preserves the organic strength of your existing catalogue while identifying where the new build has the opportunity to close gaps and capture additional product-level visibility.
Gaps in post-launch transactional data can mask performance problems, delay issue identification and misrepresent the commercial impact of the migration to internal and external stakeholders.
Additionally, we ensure full search engine compliance across your new ecommerce build, including XML sitemap configuration, robots.txt validation, product feed alignment and Google Search Console setup, safeguarding your organic visibility and indexing accuracy from day one of the new platform's life.
We cover faceted navigation handling, pagination, product variant canonicalisation, structured data implementation, crawl budget management and platform-specific technical constraints.
We identify and resolve technical issues before the platform goes live, and produce a comprehensive redirect strategy that maps every product and category URL in your existing catalogue to its correct destination on the new platform, validated and tested at scale to ensure the integrity of your search equity and organic revenue through the changeover.
We provide performance reporting aligned to your commercial reporting cycles, covering organic traffic, category-level rankings and revenue attribution from organic search, for up to four weeks post-launch. Where issues are identified, we triage and resolve them in order of commercial priority, ensuring that any post-launch disruption to organic performance is addressed before it translates into sustained revenue loss.
