Replatforming a homeware brand to Shopify without losing a decade of SEO
A careful WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration that kept the rankings and rebuilt the buying journey around speed.
- Client
- Craftson Ceramics
- Year
- 2024
Craftson had built ten years of organic visibility on an ageing WooCommerce store that had become slow, fragile and expensive to maintain. Every seasonal traffic spike risked downtime, the mobile checkout leaked sales, and the team couldn't ship changes without a developer on standby. They wanted the stability and tooling of Shopify — but they were terrified, rightly, of torching their search rankings in the move.
The approach
A migration mapped URL by URL
Before touching design, we crawled the old store and mapped every indexed URL to its Shopify equivalent, with 301 redirects for anything that changed. Collections, products, blog posts and filtered pages all kept their place in search.
A storefront rebuilt for speed
We built a custom Shopify theme rather than buying one, stripping the render-blocking scripts and bloated apps that drag most stores down. Core Web Vitals went from failing to green on mobile.
A buying journey worth the traffic
We restructured collections around how people actually shop, added trust signals at the points of doubt, and rebuilt the cart and checkout to remove the friction that was costing mobile sales.
A team that can ship
We handed over a documented theme and trained the team to run merchandising, content and campaigns themselves — no developer required for day-to-day work.
What it delivered
- 98%
- of ranking keywords held or improved through the migration
- 2.1s
- mobile LCP, down from 6.4s on the old store
- +27%
- mobile conversion rate in the first quarter
- 0
- hours of downtime on launch day
“We were dreading the migration for years because everyone warned us we'd lose our Google rankings. The Marketing District mapped the whole thing out, and we came out the other side faster and actually higher than before.”
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Harbour Financial — SEO turnaround
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