The challenge
Northfield Cycles is a speciality bike retailer replatforming from Magento to Shopify Plus. Platform migrations kill organic traffic for most merchants: URL structures change, internal linking breaks, page speed characteristics shift, and redirects are often implemented incorrectly or incompletely.
What we did
We ran a six-month migration project. URL mapping for 4,100 pages with human review of every row. Pre-launch crawl QA comparing old and new sites side by side. Staged rollout with canary testing on low-traffic sections first. A 30-day post-launch monitoring window with daily crawl diffs and hourly traffic checks for the first 72 hours.
The results
Traffic dipped 1.6% in week two and fully recovered by week five. 98.4% of pre-migration organic traffic was retained through the transition. No significant keyword position losses were recorded. The new Shopify Plus platform actually improved Core Web Vitals scores, contributing to a 12% traffic increase by month three post-migration.