Client name withheld under NDA.
Furniture is a big search category in Singapore. Furniture singapore is searched about 8,100 times a month and sofa singapore about 6,600, and retailers rely on hundreds of category and product pages ranking for searches like these. When a furniture store changes platforms, every one of those URLs is at risk, and a careless migration can wipe out years of rankings in a week.
This retailer moved its online store to a new ecommerce platform with another vendor. The launch went live without redirects for most old product and category URLs, and organic sessions fell from 21,400 a month to 11,600. Google was finding 3,870 old URLs that now returned errors, half the products were not indexed, and organic revenue fell from about S$91,000 a month to S$48,000. That was when the retailer asked us to step in. Paid ads were covering part of the gap, but at a cost the business could not sustain for long.
We compared the old site's URLs, rankings and traffic from backups and analytics with the new site, and listed every old URL that had earned traffic or links and now returned an error.
Recovery starts with knowing exactly what was lost. The list showed which pages mattered most, so the most valuable redirects could go live first. The assessment also showed which categories had lost the most revenue, which set the order for the rest of the recovery.
We built a one-to-one redirect map from 3,870 old URLs to their closest new product or category pages, and tested every redirect before it went live.
Redirecting every old URL to the homepage throws away its rankings. One-to-one redirects pass each old page's value to the right new page. Testing every redirect before going live also caught chains and loops that would have wasted Google's crawl of the site.
We fixed duplicate product URLs created by filters, corrected canonical tags, rebuilt the XML sitemaps, restored product structured data and resubmitted the site in Search Console.
The new platform created many near-identical URLs for each product. Cleaning those up let Google focus on the pages that should rank. Product structured data also brought back price and stock details in search results, which had disappeared after the move.
We restored category descriptions that had been dropped during the move, added internal links between related categories and improved product titles for key search terms such as sofas and dining sets.
Some of the old site's rankings came from content that never made it across. Restoring and improving it gave key categories back their strength. Category descriptions were rewritten to be more useful than the originals, with sizing and material guidance shoppers had asked about.
We monitored crawl errors, indexing and rankings weekly, fixed new issues as products changed, and set up a checklist for future product and category changes.
Migrations keep causing problems if nobody watches the details. A simple checklist meant new products and seasonal changes did not create fresh errors. The checklist also covered seasonal sale pages, which are a common source of new broken URLs after each campaign ends.
Five months in, organic sessions reached 24,900 a month, up from the post-launch low of 11,600 and 16% above the 21,400 the site had before the migration. Errors from old URLs fell from 3,870 to 12, nearly every product was indexed and 690 keywords ranked on Page 1. Organic revenue climbed to S$103,000 a month, 13% above where it was before the move. The retailer now has a checklist that keeps future product and category changes from undoing the recovery.
Damage assessed and 3,870 one-to-one redirects live.
Duplicates, canonicals, sitemaps and structured data fixed. Sessions back above 18,000 a month.
24,900 sessions a month and organic revenue 13% above pre-migration.
Most of this traffic loss came from missing redirects. A full redirect map built before launch would have prevented it entirely.
Sending old product pages to the homepage throws away their rankings. Redirecting each one to its closest new page restored them.
Filters on the new platform created thousands of duplicate URLs. Canonical tags and clean sitemaps told Google which pages actually mattered.
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