How to leave a platform without leaving your rankings
Applied
Commerce · Migration · SEO
The expensive part of a migration is never the storefront. It is the addresses.
A business on hosted commerce is paying rent in two currencies: a percentage of every sale, and the right to be removed at any time. In restricted categories the second one is not hypothetical.
The thing that stops most of them from leaving is the accumulated search equity sitting on the platform’s URL shapes — the collection paths, the product paths, the pagination. Rebuild the application and change those, and the business trades a platform risk it understood for a traffic collapse it did not.
So the rule I now start from: the URL structure is not part of the old platform. It is part of the business. Rebuild everything underneath it and leave the addresses exactly where they were. The customer notices nothing, the crawler notices nothing, and the company owns its own checkout.