The most expensive part of changing e-commerce platforms is rarely the new subscription. It is the traffic you lose in the weeks after launch: product pages that used to rank now return 404, Google drops them from results, and the organic orders you never had to pay for slowly disappear. A well-run store migration avoids that. The products, customers and orders move with their data intact, every old URL points to its new home with a permanent redirect, and search engines receive clear signals from day one. This guide is written for Gulf merchants moving from Shopify, WooCommerce or Salla. It covers the plan, the tools on Commera that carry the data and the redirects, and the checks that tell you the migration worked.
Why rankings drop after a store migration
Search engines rank URLs, not products. When a product moves from /products/oud-royal to /product/oud-royal, Google sees a new page with no history, unless you tell it that the old address has moved permanently. The usual causes of lost traffic are:
- Missing redirects: old URLs return 404, and the links pointing to them from blogs, influencers and social posts lead nowhere.
- Redirects to the home page: sending every old URL to the home page is treated much like a missing page.
- Temporary redirects (302) used where a permanent move (301) was meant.
- Lost SEO fields: titles, meta descriptions and image alt text that were not carried over.
- Changed content: descriptions rewritten or shortened during the move, so the page no longer matches what it ranked for.
- A sitemap that still lists old URLs, or no sitemap at all.
None of these are technical mysteries. They are planning failures, and every one of them can be prevented before launch day.
Step 1: Build a complete inventory of your current URLs
You cannot redirect what you have not listed. Before you touch the new platform, collect every URL that matters:
- All product, category, collection and brand URLs, from your current platform's sitemap.
- Content pages: about, shipping and returns, FAQs, contact, and blog posts.
- The pages that bring organic traffic, from the Pages report in Google Search Console for the last 12 to 16 months.
- Pages with backlinks, from Search Console's Links report or your SEO tool.
- Arabic and English versions separately, if your store has both.
Put them in one spreadsheet with a column for the old URL, a column for the new URL, and a column for notes. This file becomes your redirect map.
Step 2: Understand how URLs change between platforms
Every platform has its own URL pattern. On Commera, product pages live at /product/{slug}, categories at /category/{slug} and brands at /brand/{slug}, and you can enable a separate address for each language (for example /ar/watch and /en/watch) so search engines index both versions.
| Page type | Shopify (default) | WooCommerce (default) | Commera |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product | /products/{handle} | /product/{slug} | /product/{slug} |
| Category or collection | /collections/{handle} | /product-category/{slug} | /category/{slug} |
| Brand | Usually a collection or vendor filter | Depends on the brand plugin | /brand/{slug} |
| Content page | /pages/{handle} | /{slug} | Your page address |
WooCommerce stores can change these bases in their permalink settings, and Salla and Zid use their own patterns, so always work from your real sitemap rather than the defaults. When the migration tool keeps the product slug, as Commera's connectors do with Shopify handles and WooCommerce slugs, the redirect for a Shopify product is a simple prefix change: /products/oud-royal to /product/oud-royal.
Step 3: Move the data with StoreSync
The StoreSync plugin handles both a one-time full migration and ongoing synchronisation.
From WooCommerce: a full migration
Through the WooCommerce API or from a .sql database file, StoreSync moves categories, brands, attributes, shipping classes, and products of every type (simple, variable and bundle) with their images, tags, SEO title and description, and linked complementary products, plus reviews. You can choose to bring customers with their addresses, and orders. If your old store was bilingual with WPML or Polylang, the two language copies are merged into one product with Arabic and English names and descriptions, instead of appearing as duplicates. A connection test and a preview with item counts run before you start; the migration then works in the background with a live progress log, and there is an option to wipe existing data if the new store is empty.
From Shopify: catalogue, customers and orders
With only the store URL and no token, StoreSync reads products, collections, variants and images from the store's public feed, recording stock as available or sold out. To bring customers and orders as well, you connect the Shopify store with a token or a direct login, which requires permission to read orders, and use the data-import option to import products with variants and images, collections, customers with their addresses, and orders with their lines and shipping addresses.
From Salla, Zid or other platforms
Products, customers and orders from Salla or Zid move to Commera through structured import. The catalogue goes in through the Excel or CSV import, which uploads a full catalogue from a ready template, and the S-Plus team plans the rest of the migration with you, including customers, order history and the 301 redirects that keep your rankings. Agree the scope with the team before you set the cut-over date.
Keep both stores in step until launch
Migrations rarely happen in a day. While you test the new store, StoreSync can keep stock and prices synchronised from the old Shopify or WooCommerce store at an interval you choose, from every 5 minutes to every 24 hours, with instant updates through a secret webhook. New products can enter as drafts for your review, and incoming category names can be mapped to your main categories by rule, or with AI suggestions if you add a Gemini key. Sync never overwrites the name and description after the first import, so your edits on the new store are safe.
Step 4: Set up the 301 redirects
Commera's ManualSeo plugin contains the redirect manager you need for a migration:
- Bulk import from CSV: upload a file with an old-URL column and a new-URL column, and hundreds of redirects are added at once. A duplicated old URL is updated rather than added twice.
- Permanent by design: redirects added from the screen or from CSV are 301 redirects.
- Works for pages that no longer exist, understands Arabic URLs and URLs with or without a trailing slash, and counts how often each redirect is used.
- Admin-only access, so nobody on the team changes redirects or the sitemap by mistake.
Rules that protect rankings: redirect each old URL to its closest equivalent, never to the home page in bulk; redirect discontinued products to their category or to a direct replacement; avoid chains where A redirects to B and B to C; and keep the redirects in place. Google's site-move guidance recommends keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least one year.
Step 5: Rebuild the SEO foundations on the new store
ManualSeo also handles the technical basics that search engines read on every page:
- sitemap.xml with active products and categories, last-modified dates, weekly change frequency and priority. It refreshes when you press the update button, so press it after the import and after adding many products.
- robots.txt served at the correct address; the default allows all pages.
- Meta description, Open Graph and Twitter tags, canonical and robots tags on every product, category and brand page, taken from the SEO fields of the item itself and in the page's language.
- Product structured data with name, description, main image, SKU, price (sale price when there is one), currency and availability, plus organisation data on every page.
The plugin publishes exactly the titles and descriptions you fill in. If your WooCommerce migration brought the SEO titles and descriptions across, check a sample. If not, fill the important ones before launch.
Step 6: Launch day and the first 30 days
| When | Action |
|---|---|
| Before launch | Freeze catalogue changes on the old store; run a final sync; import the redirect CSV; test 20 to 30 old URLs by hand, including Arabic ones |
| Launch day | Point the domain to the new store; update the sitemap; submit sitemap.xml in Search Console; place a real test order |
| First week | Check the 404 monitor daily and add redirects for the most-visited missing URLs; reconnect analytics, Meta and TikTok pixels and Merchant Center |
| Days 8 to 30 | Watch indexing and impressions in Search Console; compare organic sessions and orders with the same period before |
ManualSeo's 404 monitor records every missing URL with its number of visits and the page the visitor came from, sorted by most visited, so you fix what matters first. When you add a redirect for a URL, its log entry is marked as resolved. If you also change your domain, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console after the redirects are live.
Customers, passwords and orders: what to tell your buyers
Customer accounts and order history matter for repeat buyers and for support. Plan for them explicitly:
- Decide whether you bring all customers or only those with orders in the last few years.
- Do not assume passwords move between platforms. Plan a short email or WhatsApp message inviting customers to set a new password on the new store.
- Bring order history where the tool supports it (WooCommerce full migration, or a connected Shopify store), so support can answer "what did I order last time?".
- Re-issue active coupon codes and gift balances on the new store before you announce the move.
A real-world scenario
An abaya brand in Riyadh with 1,200 products on WooCommerce, an Arabic and English site built with WPML, and steady organic traffic from category pages decides to move. The team exports its sitemap and Search Console pages, runs StoreSync's WooCommerce migration from the API with customers and orders, and the two language copies are merged into single products. Because the product slugs are kept and both platforms use /product/, most product URLs need no change of path; the category URLs move from /product-category/ to /category/ and go into one CSV with the content pages. After launch, the 404 monitor shows a few dozen old filter and tag URLs with visits; the team redirects the useful ones to categories and lets the rest go.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my Google rankings if I change platforms?
Not if the redirects, content and SEO fields are handled properly. A short fluctuation while Google processes the move is normal; a lasting drop usually points to missing or wrong redirects.
How long should I keep the 301 redirects?
Google recommends keeping site-move redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year. There is no harm in keeping them permanently.
Can I migrate customers and orders from Shopify?
Yes, from a Shopify store connected with a token or login that can read orders. A migration from the store URL alone brings the catalogue only.
Does the migration delete data on my new store?
No. Wiping existing data is optional and only happens if you select it in the full migration.
I am on Salla. Can I still move?
Yes. Products can be imported through the Excel or CSV import, and the redirects and SEO set-up are the same. Agree the customer and order scope with our team first.
Should I redesign the store at the same time?
Keep the change as small as you can at launch: same products, same descriptions, same URL slugs. Redesign and rewrite after rankings settle, so you can tell what caused any change. For the wider decision, read SaaS platform or custom store and our comparisons of Commera vs Shopify and Commera vs WooCommerce.
Plan your migration with S-Plus
S-Plus has run e-commerce and SEO projects for Gulf brands from Jeddah and Cairo for more than fifteen years. We can audit your current URLs, prepare the redirect map, run the data migration onto Commera and monitor Search Console with you after launch, through our SEO services in Saudi Arabia and e-commerce development teams. Contact us to plan your store migration and get a quote.
