Ecommerce replatforming and redirects - how much traffic will I lose?

[Cheebee154]

Hey there,I'm looking to hear your experiences in regards to replatforming an ecommerce store and SEO impacts.My company is analyzing the impacts of switching from Magento Entreprise to Shopify Plus. Some background info :

• 900k sessions / month
• 52% of sessions coming from SEO
• Multilingual store : half of traffic is French, half is English
• 945 domains linking to us, according to search console
• Competitive industry (retail)

Moving to Shopify would force us to do two things:

1. Redirect all category pages, brand pages and product pages. Shopify forces a specific URL structure for these pages that is different from our current one.
2. Redirect the English section of the site to a subdomain (https://en.example.com/...). Have multiple stores on Shopify can't be done on the same domain.

I'm especially afraid of the impact of moving the English section to a subdomain. I feel it would lose most of the domain authority - most backlinks go to the website root so very few will be redirected to the subdomain.Even if we spend a lot of time doing redirections, do you think the traffic will significantly suffer? Do you have stats to share on a similar migration you would have done, or other insights?Thanks a lot!

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

900k sessions a month? Completely outside of the spectrum of SEO entirely, moving yer site to Shopify is a horrible idea. I think 4 gig ram stick, dual core intel i7, 120gig+ SSD Virtual Private Server with ubuntu 16.04 install would probably be the thing to move to. 0 downtime 0 impact SEO, keep the same site url structure, shouldn't take a pro more than 2 hours from fresh VPS to site fully xfered and running better than you've ever seen it ran before.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Cheedbe

The very thought of you doing this is mind-numbing. Magneto is a far more configurable than Shopify so stay where you are. If things are not going the way you want then get a better Magento developer working on the site.

The move will cause a huge jolt in traffic that you don't need.

All those redirects will have to be done manually for all product and brand pages but possibly all sorts, filters and brand/category combinations. Each redirect could cause a 15% drop in traffic depending on who you listen to and that's after all the time it will take Google to reindex everything!

It makes sense to separate English and French directories but I would do it on the platform you are on. Use hreflang to point to the two variations. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

We moved from a bespoke platform to Visalsoft and immediately lost 40% of traffic. It took so long to get it back and in the end, we gave up and the company folded. It wasn't the only reason but the drop in traffic and associated turnover was a major factor.

Regards

Nigel

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[Cheebee154]

Hey Nigel,

Thank you for your comment and insights on your experience!

We are looking at changing the platform because we need to reinvest massively anyways (we'll move from Magento 1 to Magento 2 otherwise), but I was curious to get exactly this type of feedback to see what could be the implications.

Greatly appreciated,
Charles

[Cheebee154]

Hey Sean,

We're not only looking at it from an SEO or infra perspective but for website redesign as well. Thank you for your comment.

[Adlanera]

For Ecommerce, we use different strategies of SEO. I have published articles related to eCommerce marketing with Shopify and Magento, which you can read here.