The reason one of my clients came to me wasn’t for a new design.
It was to fix a mistake—one that happened after they got a beautiful new site.

 

They’d recently moved from WordPress to Shopify with the help of a designer. 

 

Clean. Simple. On-brand. Easy to update for them.

All good things.

 

But what went wrong had nothing to do with design—and everything to do with what was left behind.

 

See, their original site had years of SEO work built into it: optimized URLs, backlinks, internal links, blog content, and hard-earned rankings. 

 

But when the new site launched?

No redirects.
No preservation of key content.
No transition plan.

 

To Google, it looked like a brand-new site with no history—so their rankings dropped overnight. Traffic tanked. Years of visibility erased in a single update.

 

What we had to do next was essentially a digital rebuild:
✅ Recreate redirects
✅ Reindex lost content
✅ Rebuild internal linking
✅ Re-establish trust with Google

 

Here’s the part I want you to take away from this:

👉 A website is an ecosystem.

Every piece connects to the next. And when one piece changes, the whole thing can shift.

 

Redesigns aren’t the enemy—unstrategic redesigns are.

 

So if you're thinking about switching platforms, here's your action step:
📌 Export your sitemap before launching the new site.
📌 Track your existing URLs and compare them post-launch.
📌 If any URLs change (because of platform limitations or structure), set up 301 redirects to point Google—and your users—to the right place.

 

This one step can save your traffic, your rankings, and your sanity in 2026.

 

Until next time,

CJ

 

PS: If you don’t have that “someone” on your team yet—check out our Website Optimization Retainer! We'll keep your site healthy, visible, and performing well, month after month.