WP → Shopify. Squarespace → Webflow. WordPress → Sanity. Drupal → headless. Monolith → Jamstack. Content modeling, redirect maps, schema preservation, zero traffic loss. 30+ migrations shipped — most break in the same five places, and we know what they are.
The five places migrations actually fail
We’ve done enough of these to know the patterns. Every project of this kind fails in roughly the same places, and our process exists to catch each one:
- Redirect maps that miss long-tail URLs. The first 50 URLs are easy. The 2,400 long-tail blog posts and 15-year-old PDFs are where SEO traffic vanishes. We build the map from server logs, not from sitemap.xml.
- Content-model mismatch. Your old CMS had one content type doing four jobs. The new CMS needs them separated. If you don’t catch this in week one, you catch it in week eight when the redesign falls apart.
- Image and media reference loss. WordPress media library references stop working when you migrate to Shopify. Inline image references in rich-text fields break. We rewrite URLs at migration-script level, not after launch.
- Editor workflow regression. Editors who could publish in 4 clicks now need 11. They quietly hate the new platform. Six months later you’re paying us again to fix it. We rehearse the editor workflow with real editors in week 3.
- Ranking drop after cutover. Even with perfect 301s, Google takes 4–8 weeks to re-establish ranking signals if any of the above broke. Our pre-launch SEO equivalence audit catches mismatches before DNS flips.
How we run a migration
Week 1 — Content audit and model design
We pull a complete inventory of the old site: every URL, every content type, every custom field, every redirect already in place. We map this to the new CMS’s content model. The output is a spreadsheet you can read and a content-model schema we can build against.
Weeks 2–5 — Build + migration scripts
New theme/templates get built in parallel with migration scripts. We do a dry-run import of 100% of content into a staging environment by end of week 3. Editors start checking content in week 4 — long before the launch deadline pressure.
Weeks 6–7 — Redirect map + SEO equivalence
Server-log analysis gives us the actual URL inventory (sitemaps miss things). We build the redirect map. We crawl the staging site with Screaming Frog and check title-tag, meta-description, canonical-tag, schema-markup equivalence against the live old site. Discrepancies get fixed before launch — not after.
Week 8 — Dress rehearsal
Full cutover rehearsal one week before go-live. DNS gets pointed at staging for 15 minutes during low-traffic hours. We test live forms, payment flows, redirect chains, search functions, editor workflows. Everything we find gets fixed in the buffer week.
Week 9 — Launch
DNS cutover at low-traffic hours. We monitor real-time for 24 hours. Search Console gets reconfigured. 301s verified live. Sitemap submitted. We stick around for 30 days post-launch for any redirect tweaks Google flags in Coverage reports.
Migration paths we’ve shipped
- WordPress → Shopify (D2C brand moving from WP+WooCommerce blog to native Shopify storefront)
- WordPress → Sanity + Next.js (publisher needing better performance and structured content)
- Squarespace → Webflow (designer-led brand outgrowing Squarespace’s template ceiling)
- Drupal → Sanity (enterprise migrating from legacy Drupal 7 to modern headless)
- Wix → WordPress (B2B company hitting Wix’s SEO ceiling)
- Joomla → Craft CMS (publishing operation modernizing without losing its custom CMS workflows)
- Custom PHP → WordPress (decade-old custom CMS retiring; editorial team picks WP for its plugin ecosystem)
- Magento → Shopify Plus (mid-market eCommerce escaping Magento’s ops overhead)
Pricing
- Marketing site, <200 URLs: $25K–$60K, 6–10 weeks
- Mid-scale content site, 200–1500 URLs: $50K–$120K, 8–14 weeks
- Publisher / enterprise, 1500+ URLs, multi-locale: $120K–$300K, 14–24 weeks
- eCommerce store migration (Shopify ↔ Woo, etc.): $50K–$200K depending on catalog size and ERP integration
Start a migration
Tell us where you’re moving from, where you’re going, rough URL count, monthly organic traffic. connect@prizorai.com or the form. We’ll come back within one business day with a fit assessment and a scope band.
