The brief was unusually clear: move everything, break nothing, and do it before the Christmas trading period starts.
Terra Fina had outgrown a hosted store platform that was charging per transaction and refusing to support a second warehouse. Migration projects fail on the boring parts, so we spent the first week on those: a full URL inventory, a redirect map for every one of the 1,400 product pages, and a rollback plan we hoped not to use.
What we did
- Rebuilt the catalogue on a platform they own, with two-warehouse stock logic.
- Mapped 1,412 old URLs to new ones, with 301 redirects tested before launch rather than after.
- Rebuilt product templates around structured data so rich results survived the move.
- Ran both systems in parallel for four days, comparing order totals hourly.
Result
Launched on a Tuesday morning rather than a Friday night, because nobody should debug a store migration at 2 a.m. on a weekend. Organic traffic dipped 6% in week one and recovered fully by week three. Zero orders lost. Transaction fees dropped to nothing, which paid for the project inside seven months.
Planning a migration?
— the redirect map alone is worth doing properly.
