A new website is usually seen as an opportunity. A better design. A newer platform. Improved performance. A cleaner customer experience. New functionality that the old website couldn’t provide.
But there is another side to a website migration that businesses can easily underestimate: you aren’t starting with a blank canvas.
Your existing website may have spent years building search visibility, inbound links, customer familiarity and authority with Google. When you replace that website, all of that existing value needs to be considered as part of the migration.
A recent Australian example demonstrates just how significant the consequences can be when something goes wrong.
When a Website Migration Becomes a Business Problem
In September 2026, Maggie Beer made headlines after reporting that organic traffic to its hampers and gifts website had fallen by as much as 38% following a migration to Shopify.
With the important Christmas trading period approaching, the business reportedly responded with an $800,000 advertising campaign in an attempt to replace some of the lost traffic. Despite that additional spending, hamper sales fell 6.3%.
The important point here isn’t that the business moved to Shopify. Shopify is one of the world’s leading eCommerce platforms and is used successfully by businesses of every size.
The lesson is that changing platforms requires more than migrating products, customers and content. You also need to migrate the search equity the existing website has accumulated.
A website migration is therefore not simply a development project. It is a business continuity project.
Your Existing Website Has Accumulated Value
Imagine a business has operated the same website for ten years.
During that time, Google may have indexed thousands of its pages. Other websites may have linked to its products, articles and resources. Individual pages may rank for valuable searches and bring customers to the business every day.
Customers may also have bookmarked pages, shared links or saved product URLs.
All of this has value.
When a new website launches, changing a URL from:/category/gift-hampers
to:/collections/gift-hampers
might appear to be a relatively insignificant technical change.
To a search engine, however, those are two different addresses.
If the relationship between them isn’t properly communicated, the new website doesn’t automatically inherit everything associated with the old URL.
Multiply that across hundreds or thousands of products, categories, articles and landing pages, and the potential impact becomes substantial.
Redirects Aren’t an Optional Finishing Touch
One of the most important parts of a website migration is creating a map between the old website and the new one. Where URLs are changing, every important old URL should have an appropriate destination on the new website.
Permanent redirects — typically 301 redirects — then tell browsers and search engines that:
This page has permanently moved, and this is its new location.
Google specifically recommends creating an old-to-new URL mapping before a site migration and implementing permanent server-side redirects as part of the move.
This helps Google understand the relationship between the old and new pages and transfer the signals associated with them.
It also protects the customer experience. Someone following an old link shouldn’t arrive at a 404 error simply because the business has launched a new website.
Redirects should therefore be planned before launch, not added afterwards when traffic begins disappearing.
But Redirects Are Only Part of the Migration
A proper website migration goes much further than adding some 301 redirects.
Before replacing an established website, you need to understand what you’re replacing. That means creating a picture of the existing website before making the change.
- Which pages receive the most organic traffic?
- Which products and categories rank well?
- Which pages have valuable links pointing to them?
- What URLs are currently indexed?
- What content, titles and headings are contributing to those rankings?
- How is the website internally linked?
- What structured data is currently being provided to search engines?
Without establishing that baseline, it becomes difficult to know whether something important has accidentally disappeared during the rebuild.
Changing Too Much at Once Creates Additional Risk
A website migration often becomes an opportunity to change everything.
- A new platform.
- New URLs.
- New navigation.
- New content.
- New page titles.
- New product categories.
- New design.
- New domain.
Individually, each change might make sense. Doing everything simultaneously, however, can make it extremely difficult to understand what caused a problem if performance changes after launch.
This doesn’t mean a website shouldn’t be improved during a migration. Often improvement is the entire reason for the project.
It means those changes need to be deliberate.
If an existing page performs extremely well, there should be a reason for substantially changing its content, URL or position within the website — not simply because everything is being rebuilt.
Migration Starts Before the New Website Is Built
One of the biggest mistakes businesses can make is thinking about migration at the end of the project. By then, many important decisions have already been made. A good migration plan should begin during discovery.
Before development starts, the existing website should be reviewed and important information captured. That might include:
- existing URLs and their new destinations
- high-performing landing pages
- page titles and metadata
- existing content
- inbound links
- internal linking
- canonical URLs
- structured data
- XML sitemaps
- analytics and conversion tracking
- integrations and third-party services
This gives the development team a baseline against which the new website can be tested.
It also allows migration requirements to influence the architecture of the new website rather than trying to retrofit them immediately before launch.
Launch Day Isn’t the End of the Migration
Even a carefully planned migration needs monitoring. Once the new website goes live, the team should be checking that old URLs redirect correctly, important pages can be crawled and indexed, analytics are recording properly, and unexpected 404 errors haven’t appeared.
Google Search Console becomes particularly important during this period. Search impressions, clicks, indexed pages and crawl errors can provide early warning signs that something hasn’t migrated as expected.
For a significant website, we also want to know what normal performance looked like before launch. If organic traffic suddenly falls 20%, you want to identify that quickly — not discover it three months later when comparing sales figures.
Some fluctuation following a significant migration can be expected while search engines recrawl and process the new website. The objective isn’t necessarily to ensure that every metric remains identical from day one.
The objective is to know what has changed, understand why it has changed, and identify genuine problems quickly.
The Cost of a Migration Isn’t Just the Cost of the New Website
This is perhaps the most important consideration for businesses planning a rebuild.
Imagine spending $40,000 building a new eCommerce website. It can be tempting to think that $40,000 represents the value of the project.
It doesn’t.
The website being replaced may have spent ten years building organic traffic, links, content, customer recognition and revenue. The digital asset being migrated could therefore be worth considerably more than the cost of building its replacement. This changes the way migration should be approached.
If a website generates hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in annual revenue, protecting its existing traffic and customer journeys deserves the same attention as designing the new experience.
The Maggie Beer example illustrates the potential imbalance particularly well: the cost of fixing the consequences of a problematic migration can quickly exceed what it would have cost to plan the migration properly in the first place.
Platform Migration Doesn’t Mean Platform Failure
There is also an important distinction worth making.
Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify, Shopify to BigCommerce, WordPress to another CMS, or an older custom application to a modern platform does not inherently mean sacrificing your existing search performance.
Platforms have different URL structures, capabilities and technical requirements, but these are known factors that can be planned for.
A migration problem should not automatically be interpreted as a problem with the destination platform. A well-managed migration accounts for those differences and creates a strategy for moving from one environment to another while protecting the value of the existing website.
The platform is the destination.
The migration plan is how you get there.
Experience Matters
At MyWebTeam, we’ve been building and migrating websites across multiple generations of web technology. The platforms have changed enormously over that time, but one principle hasn’t:
You need to understand what already works before you replace it.
A migration shouldn’t simply recreate a website on a newer platform. It should preserve the valuable parts of the existing digital asset while creating a better foundation for the future.
That means understanding the website technically, understanding how customers use it and understanding how it currently generates business.
Whether you’re migrating an established eCommerce store, rebuilding a WordPress website, changing platforms or replacing an older custom application, migration needs to be part of the project from the beginning.
Planning a Website Migration?
A new website should move your business forward — without unnecessarily sacrificing the value you’ve spent years building.
MyWebTeam can help plan, develop and manage website and eCommerce migrations from initial discovery through to development, launch and ongoing support.
Talk to us before you start your next website migration.