Will we lose rankings?

Not if every URL is mapped before launch. On our last migration we mapped all 38,708 and equity carried over.

How long does a migration take?

It depends on catalog size and complexity. The scripted approach is faster and far more reliable than manual mapping, and most of the timeline is validation rather than the import itself.

Which platforms do you migrate between?

Most commonly Magento to Shopify, and we work across Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento generally.

What about our custom functionality?

That’s usually the real work. Where the new platform can’t natively do what the old one did, we build it.

Jump sections

Methodology / Zero-Loss Migration

Re-platforming is where brands quietly lose a quarter of their revenue.

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The store launches, everyone celebrates, and then organic traffic slides for three months while nobody can say exactly why. The cause is almost always the same: URLs changed, redirects were partial, and years of earned rankings went with them. It’s avoidable. We built a method to avoid it.

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Migrations fail for two reasons — and both are avoidable.

Most re-platforming projects treat the redirect map as a cleanup task at the end. By then the new URL structure is fixed, the old catalog export is stale, and the team is mapping thousands of URLs by hand under launch pressure. Whatever gets missed becomes a 404, and every 404 on a previously indexed page is ranking equity thrown away.

The second failure is data fidelity. Legacy catalogs are messy — inconsistent variants, orphaned images, collection logic that only made sense inside the old platform. A naive export-import loses or mangles a percentage of products, and someone finds out weeks later from a customer.

Legacy catalog

Extract

From the source database, not the export.

Transform

Scripted CSV — repeatable and auditable.

Map every URL

Each indexed URL gets a destination.

Rebuild

Collections regenerated from rules.

Validate

Reconcile the new catalog vs. the source.

0 indexed URLs lost

The method

Five steps that make a migration something you don’t feel.

Extract from the source, not the export.

We pull directly from the legacy database rather than trusting the platform’s export tool, which is where catalog fidelity is usually first lost.

Extract from the source, not the export.

We pull directly from the legacy database rather than trusting the platform’s export tool, which is where catalog fidelity is usually first lost.

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Transform with scripts, not spreadsheets.

A scripted CSV transformation makes the mapping repeatable and auditable — every rule applied consistently across the whole catalog, and re-runnable when something changes.

Transform with scripts, not spreadsheets.

A scripted CSV transformation makes the mapping repeatable and auditable — every rule applied consistently across the whole catalog, and re-runnable when something changes.

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Map every URL before launch, not after.

The redirect map is built alongside the migration, not bolted on at the end. Every indexed URL on the old site gets a destination on the new one.

Map every URL before launch, not after.

The redirect map is built alongside the migration, not bolted on at the end. Every indexed URL on the old site gets a destination on the new one.

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Rebuild structure programmatically.

Collections and categories are regenerated from rules rather than recreated by hand, so catalog structure survives intact.

Rebuild structure programmatically.

Collections and categories are regenerated from rules rather than recreated by hand, so catalog structure survives intact.

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Validate against the source.

Post-import, we reconcile the new catalog against the original and fix the gap before anyone sees the site.

Validate against the source.

Post-import, we reconcile the new catalog against the original and fix the gap before anyone sees the site.

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The result

A specialty retailer’s move from Magento to Shopify. Rankings kept through the move.

We ran a scripted extraction-and-import pipeline — SQL dump to scripted CSV transformation to bulk import — that moved the whole store cleanly. 99.96% of products migrated successfully, all 38,708 URL redirects were mapped, and 277 smart collections were rebuilt automatically. The brand kept its rankings through the move. That’s the entire objective — a migration you don’t feel.

Product-migration success

Near-zero data loss across the full catalog.

99.96%

URL redirects mapped

Zero indexed-URL loss — ranking equity preserved.

38,708

Smart collections rebuilt

Catalog structure restored programmatically.

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When to migrate — and when not to.

Re-platforming is expensive and risky, so it should solve a real constraint: a platform that can’t support your merchandising, mounting maintenance cost, or an architecture blocking the growth work you need to do. Migrating because the new platform is fashionable is how brands buy themselves a bad quarter. If the constraint is real, the migration is worth doing with a method rather than hope — and it pairs directly with our technical SEO work, since the point of preserving equity is having something to build on afterward.

Questionsbuyersask

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I've worked with Lightdrop on multiple projects over the last 5 years and am always amazed with the level of strategy, guidance and execution they bring to the table. Lior and his team are masters in digital and brand marketing.