Ask a merchant why they stay on a platform they complain about and the honest answer is usually fear. Not of the work - of the traffic. A shop that has traded for a few years ranks for things: its products, its category pages, sometimes a blog post that quietly brings in half its new customers. Move platforms carelessly and all of it can vanish.
The fear is justified, because the standard migration does exactly that.
What actually breaks
Your rankings do not live on your domain. They live on your URLs. Google
ranks yourshop.com/product/walnut-serving-board/, not yourshop.com, and
every link anyone has ever posted to your shop - forums, gift guides, a
newspaper's Christmas roundup - points at those exact addresses.
WooCommerce shapes its URLs one way (/product/..., /product-category/...,
and the /?p=123 form WordPress serves everything at). Every other platform
shapes them differently. Migrate your catalogue and every old address starts
returning 404. Google notices within days, treats the pages as gone, and the
rankings with them.
The cruel part is the timing. Sales do not stop on migration day - they fade over two or three weeks as pages drop out of the index. By the time you connect the dip to the move, the rankings are gone, and getting them back takes months of being a brand-new site again.
The fix is boring, which is why it gets skipped
A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines alike that a page has moved permanently: anyone arriving at the old address lands on the new one, and Google transfers the ranking rather than discarding it. This has been the answer for twenty years.
The reason shops still lose their traffic is that someone has to build the redirect map - old URL to new URL, for every product, category and page - and keep it serving forever. Done by hand, for a catalogue of 400 products, it simply does not happen.
What we do about it
When Taberno imports a WooCommerce shop, it records each item's old address as
it comes across - the permalink and the /?p= form both - and your new shop
answers every one of them with a 301 to the right new page. There is nothing
to configure and no list to maintain. A redirects screen in the admin shows
what was recorded and counts how often each one is used, which is also a quiet
record of how much traffic the redirects are saving.
The checklist, whatever platform you choose
If you take nothing else from this, take the list. Any migration, to anywhere, should include:
- Crawl your shop before you switch. A free crawler (or your sitemap) gives you the complete list of URLs that currently exist.
- Check the redirects before the domain moves. Every old product URL should answer 301, not 404, on the new platform.
- Keep the old site up until DNS has settled, so there is never a window where links answer nothing at all.
- Watch Search Console for a month. Crawl errors spike briefly on any migration; what matters is that they fall back.
Moving platforms should be a decision about software, not a gamble with the traffic you have spent years earning.