What counts as a migration, and why it is risky
A migration is any change that moves your store's content to a new address or a new system. That covers moving from another platform to WooCommerce, moving from WooCommerce to another platform, changing your domain name, moving to a new host, and a major redesign that changes the URLs.
The risk is simple. Search engines and AI assistants know your pages by their addresses. They have built up an understanding that this address sells this thing, with these links pointing at it. If the address vanishes or changes without a signal, that understanding does not carry over. Rankings drop and orders follow.
A well-run migration can keep most of it. Temporary movement for some weeks is normal. A drop that does not recover is almost always traceable to a step that was skipped, not to bad luck.
Which migration you face changes the details. Moving platform changes the address patterns and the way data is stored. Changing host keeps the addresses but changes server behavior. Changing domain changes everything at once and has a specific Google tool for it. Redesigns change layout, headings and internal links even when addresses stay.
The people who run the move matter as much as the plan, and choosing a team to run the move is worth settling early.
If you are still deciding whether to move at all, the page on Shopify versus WooCommerce for SEO covers the decision. This page assumes you have decided and starts at the how.
Before you touch anything: record what you have
You cannot judge a migration without a before picture. Capture it while the old site is still live.
Every URL. Export all products, categories, pages and posts with their addresses. Your sitemap is a start. A crawl of the live site catches pages the sitemap misses.
Search performance. From Google Search Console, export the pages that get clicks and impressions over the last sixteen months, with their top queries. That tells you which URLs matter most. Keep it as a spreadsheet.
Titles, descriptions and headings. A crawl exports these as well. If the new platform will reset them, you need the old ones to copy over.
Pages that have links. Look in Search Console's Links report for the pages other sites link to. These carry authority, and a missed redirect there costs the most.
Baseline numbers. Clicks, impressions, orders and revenue from organic search for the prior months, so you can compare like for like, and so you can see seasonal patterns. A store that sells more in November will always dip in January, and you must not blame the move.
A full backup of the old site, kept until you are confident. Rollback should never depend on a service you are leaving.
Pick the launch date with seasonality in mind. Do not migrate in the weeks before your busiest period.
The redirect map: the one document that matters
The redirect map is a spreadsheet with two columns: old address and new address. Every old address that ever got traffic or had a link gets a row.
The rule for each row is the closest equivalent. A product goes to the same product on the new store. A category goes to the matching category. A blog post goes to the matching post. If a page has no equivalent, send it to the nearest relevant category, not to the home page, because a redirect to something unrelated is read as a missing page.
On a platform move the address patterns differ, so you map by pattern first and by exception second. For example, if every product on the old platform sits under one path and on the new store under another, one pattern rule covers them, then you handle the odd ones by hand. This is the point at which a mismatch between old and new product names appears, and a rename during the move makes it harder, so keep slugs the same wherever you can. Our page on WooCommerce permalinks and SEO covers setting the structure on the WooCommerce side before you build the map.
Use permanent redirects, one hop each, with no chains. The glossary page on 301 redirects for WooCommerce explains them. Test the whole list with a crawler against staging before launch.
Keep the map after launch. It is the document you will use for the next year when a page is reported missing, and it is the evidence of what moved where.
Build and test on a staging copy
Staging is a private copy of the new store where you check everything before real visitors or search engines arrive. Most hosts and platforms offer one.
Block staging from search while you work. A new copy with every page indexable can make Google see two stores, a duplicate problem of your own making. Use a password or a setting that discourages indexing. Then, and this is the classic mistake, remember to remove that block at launch. Stores have gone live with the discourage-search-engines setting still on and vanished from Google for weeks. The first item on launch day is to turn it off, and the second is to check it is off.
On staging, check:
- Every product and category from the record exists, with its title, description and image.
- Titles, descriptions and headings carried over, not reset to defaults.
- Canonical tags point to the new addresses on each page type.
- The sitemap lists the new addresses only.
- Internal links point directly to new addresses.
- Structured data validates. See the page on WooCommerce schema markup.
- Speed on a product page is no worse than the old site.
- The buying path works on a phone, from product to paid order.
Run the redirect list against staging if the redirect tool allows it, and fix every miss before launch.
Launch day
Pick a quiet time and block out a few hours with nothing else on.
Order of work. Take a final backup. Switch the site live. Remove any block on search engines. Turn on the redirects. Clear every cache layer, including the host and any content delivery network.
Immediately after. Test a sample of old addresses, a few from each type, and confirm each lands on the right page with a permanent redirect. Check the home page, a category, a product, the cart and a test order. Open robots.txt and confirm it does not block the store. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
If the domain changed, add the new domain as a property in Search Console and use the Change of Address tool, following Google's own documentation for the current steps. Keep the old domain and its redirects live, ideally for as long as you can afford.
If you are moving host only, the addresses should stay the same. Check the DNS change has propagated and the certificate for HTTPS is in place. Confirm response time is not worse.
Update the surroundings. Analytics tracking, any ad and shopping feeds, payment and shipping settings, email links, social profiles and your Google Business Profile address if you have one. None of these is search ranking, and all of them quietly break after a move.
Do not launch on a Friday afternoon, and do not launch if you cannot check on it the next day.
The weeks after launch
Expect movement. Search engines need time to recrawl and understand the changes, and small stores can see a dip for a few weeks. What you are watching for is the difference between a dip that recovers and a problem that does not.
Daily for the first week: check the Pages report in Search Console for errors, the crawl stats, and any rise in not-found addresses. Fix redirects you missed as soon as you see them. A missing redirect on a page that had links is the most valuable thing to catch.
Weekly for a month: compare clicks and impressions with your baseline, adjusting for season. Look at which top pages lost ground. Check they are indexed, that their titles and descriptions are intact and that their redirects land correctly.
Also check orders, not only traffic. A store can keep its traffic and lose its sales through a broken checkout or a speed problem. Watch both.
Recheck the not-found list for a few months, since external links to old addresses keep arriving long after launch. Review your 404 errors in WooCommerce each month and redirect anything that had traffic.
If a drop is steep and persists past about a month, go back through the launch checks in order. The cause is nearly always among them.
Moving to WooCommerce versus moving away
The method is the same. The details differ.
Moving to WooCommerce from a hosted platform means taking on hosting, plugins and updates, and the URL patterns change because WooCommerce uses its own bases for products and categories. Decide your structure on the new store first, then build the map. Import tools exist for most platforms, but check what they carry over, because they often miss meta titles, redirects and image alt text. Do an import on staging and compare against your record, row by row.
Moving away from WooCommerce to a hosted platform changes your address patterns again, and a hosted platform usually dictates the base paths for products and categories, which you cannot always change. Map accordingly. Export your product data, your customers and your content, and keep the old site's addresses list to hand for the redirects. Blog posts living on WordPress are often forgotten, and they can hold much of your search traffic. Plan for them explicitly, whether they move with the store or stay on a separate WordPress install.
In both directions, keep the old content, even if the new platform will shape it differently. Products that ranked do so because of their content, and thin default text on the new site is the most common reason for a lasting dip.
If your concern is that the store has no search traffic at all, a move will not fix it. Read the page on a WooCommerce store with no organic traffic before paying for a migration.
Who should run it
A migration is a one-off job with a high cost of error, and the skills split in two: the technical move, and the search side. Good developers sometimes forget the redirects and the staging block. Good SEO people sometimes cannot do the technical work.
Ask whoever does it for the redirect map before they start, not after. Ask how they will handle staging, what they will check on launch day and what they will watch afterward. If they cannot show you a documented plan, find someone who can.
Choosing the team is its own decision. Whichever you choose, ask for the written plan and the redirect map in the first meeting, and judge the answer by how specific it is.
Questions to settle before you start
Four decisions made early save the most grief.
Which pages are non-negotiable? List the top products and categories by revenue, not by traffic. Those get the most protection and the closest checks.
Will anything change besides the platform? A migration plus a rename plus a redesign makes any ranking change impossible to explain. Change as little as you can in one move, and save the redesign for later.
Who owns each step? Name one person for the redirect map, one for staging checks, one for launch day and one for monitoring. Shared ownership usually means missed steps.
What would make you roll back? Agree in advance on the signs, such as the checkout failing or a large share of key pages returning errors, so the decision on launch day is quick and calm.
How RunOctopus handles this
A migration is a one-time technical job, so it belongs to your developer or host. What we add is the content on the new store, so there is more for the new addresses to rank with once the move is done.
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website, and it works with WordPress and WooCommerce. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. Pages go live on their own.
In the first week you get 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. Reports show where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.
The promise is more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. For scale, an agency doing this work charges about $3,209 a month (2026 average, 439 providers) and publishes 4 to 12 pieces.
You can see the plan before you decide anything. Paste your address into the free site read and Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.