Migrating a store without stopping sales
The biggest fear of replatforming: "what about sales during the move?". Our migration playbook answers with specifics, not reassurances.
A store selling tens of thousands a day cannot afford a "maintenance break for the migration". So we design migrations so the old store sells until the last hour and the new one takes over traffic in a controlled cutover.
Step 1: data before code
Migrations almost always fail on data, not code. That is why the Blueprint starts with a catalog audit: attributes, categories, variants, images. Gaps and inconsistencies get fixed during the migration (this is where AI works hard), so the new store launches with better data than the old one.
Step 2: the new platform grows alongside
The new store is built on separate infrastructure and fed real data from the old one throughout the build: products, stock, prices. We test on the real catalog, not a twenty-SKU sample.
Step 3: SEO does not vanish overnight
We map every meaningful URL of the old store to the new one, migrate metadata and structured data, and prepare 301 redirects before the cutover. Rankings earned over years are an asset — we treat them like inventory: nothing gets lost in the move.
Step 4: cutover in hours, not weeks
The switch itself is a DNS change and a final order sync, scheduled in the lowest-traffic window. The old store stays in read-only mode for a while: we have somewhere to roll back to, though we have never needed it.
The result: the client from our case study sold continuously through all 9 weeks of the build, and conversion rose 18% after launch. A migration does not have to be open-heart surgery if the plan exists before the first line of code.