eCommerce Replatforming Checklist

Replatforming touches everything: products, customers, URLs, integrations and the team's daily routines. Most problems come from steps that were skipped, not from the new platform itself. Use this list to plan.

1. Before you choose the new platform

• Document why you are moving and which problems the new platform must solve.
• List all current features, apps, scripts and integrations, including the "small" ones (gift cards, reviews, wishlists, B2B price lists, feeds).
• Record baseline metrics: organic traffic and revenue by landing page, conversion rate by device, Core Web Vitals, average page speed.
• Check contract end dates and notice periods for the current platform, apps and hosting.

2. Data migration

• Products: variants, options, images and alt text, SEO titles and descriptions, metafields/attributes, related products, inventory per location.
• Customers: accounts, addresses, marketing consent with dates and sources, tax-exempt flags, B2B company structures.
• Passwords: password hashes usually cannot be moved between platforms. Plan an account-activation email or password reset campaign.
• Orders: history for customer accounts and reporting, open orders and returns in progress.
• Other: gift card balances, store credit, loyalty points, reviews, subscriptions and saved payment tokens (token migration usually needs your payment provider's help).
• Run at least one full test migration and reconcile counts and totals before the final run.

3. URLs, redirects and SEO

• Crawl the current site and export every indexable URL, plus URLs with backlinks and traffic from analytics and search consoles.
• Keep URLs unchanged where the new platform allows it. Where they must change, map each old URL to its closest new equivalent with a 301 redirect. Avoid redirecting everything to the homepage.
• Preserve titles, meta descriptions, headings, product copy and internal links on key pages.
• Re-implement structured data (Product, Offer, BreadcrumbList), canonical tags, hreflang for multi-language stores, and XML sitemaps.
• Block the staging site from indexing with authentication rather than relying only on robots.txt, and make sure the "noindex" setting is removed at launch.
• Keep redirects in place for the long term; Google recommends keeping them for at least a year, and longer is safer.

4. Integrations and operations

• Rebuild and test each integration: payments, ERP, inventory, shipping, tax, email, marketplaces and feeds.
• Re-create tracking and consent setups, and check they meet your privacy obligations.
• Train staff on the new admin: order handling, refunds, product updates and promotions.
• Update transactional email templates, legal pages and customer service macros.

5. Testing

• Place real test orders with every payment method, shipping method, discount type and tax scenario, then refund them.
• Test on real phones and with a keyboard only; check accessibility basics.
• Run performance tests on the templates that matter most (home, category, product, cart, checkout). See Core Web Vitals for eCommerce.
• Test the redirect map automatically: every old URL should return a single 301 to a 200 page.

6. Launch day

• Choose a low-traffic window and freeze product and content changes on the old store.
• Run the final delta migration (new orders, customers, stock), then switch DNS.
• Verify SSL, redirects, robots.txt, sitemaps, payments and order emails immediately.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

7. The weeks after launch

• Monitor 404 errors, crawl errors and redirect chains daily at first.
• Compare organic traffic, conversion and speed with the baseline; some ranking fluctuation is normal in the first weeks.
• Keep the old platform's data export accessible until reconciliation is complete.