What are your thoughts on migrating a site to Shopify?

• We are strongly considering changing our current site to the Shopify platform.

  Currently our index page for our domain is #2, (#1 before recent update), so we are very concerned about the platform change.

  If we keep the content basically the same on the home page, (albeit the structure or framework will of course be different), might we lose our positioning?

  I understand that the site structure, i.e., URL convention will most likely change with Shopify, which is what we are concerned about.

  Also, we are the only site in the organic results that actually has a product image next to the description along with 3 links below the description In the organic results.

  We hate to lose those as well as our ranking, but we really do need to update our platform.

  We would love your thoughts on how to proceed.

Answer:

A URL restructure is not for the faint of heart! You should expect it to have at least a moderate impact because what you're planning is actually a big shakeup.

Recently we encountered a somewhat large site with about 3500 URLs that did something similar. Initially, things did not go well due to the fact they failed to appropriately update their links and manage their redirects. However, after making the corrections, and then waiting several months, they seem to be ranking reasonably well even though they're still waiting for about 1000 URLs to get fully re-indexed.

What you need to know is that it can take a while – think, months — for Google to shed the old URLs and get the new ones indexed.

So, IF you're going to do this, prepare for a drop in traffic (not a total loss) for maybe 3-4 months — perhaps less if you do a great job on 301 redirects from old to new, updating on and off site links to the new ones, etc.

But be prepared to lose maybe 20%-30% traffic for a while (this is a guesstimate). Regardless, there's no doubt switching platforms will have some ...