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21,480 redirectsComplete URL redirect map
Every legacy URL mapped to a new Shopify destination. Years of search equity preserved through the cutover, nothing lost in translation.
Live site
Millars Shoe Store
Shopify migration that kept every URL, every ranking, every customer.
View the live site →
The problem
Millars had been running on a legacy ecommerce platform for years. It worked well enough day to day, but it had stopped keeping up. Admin tasks were slow, the storefront was sluggish on mobile, and making any theme change meant filing a ticket and waiting.
The riskier problem sat underneath that. Years of SEO equity lived across thousands of product and collection URLs. A careless migration would have broken search rankings and taken weeks of traffic down with it. Every dropped URL was a shopper who no longer arrived at the right page.
Losing that visibility for even a week would have meant real money gone. The migration needed to be boring in the best sense of the word: invisible to customers, invisible to Google.
The approach
Before a single page was rebuilt, I audited every URL on the old site and mapped each one to its Shopify destination. 21,480 redirects in total. Old product slugs, old category paths, old marketing URLs, all accounted for.
Content moved through a custom import pipeline so product descriptions, tags, variants and imagery landed in Shopify exactly as they should. No manual copy-paste, no silent data loss.
The new theme was built from scratch with performance as the first decision, not an afterthought. Lean markup, deferred scripts, thoughtful image handling. The result was a storefront that felt fast on the slowest mobile connection we could test on.
01
Audit
Catalogue every URL, product, and asset on the legacy site.
02
Map
Plan the redirect tree so every old URL lands somewhere sensible.
03
Migrate
Move content through a proper pipeline, not a manual clipboard.
04
Cutover
Flip DNS, watch the logs, keep every existing link alive.
What I built
Performance optimisations
Image handling, script loading and theme architecture tuned together. PageSpeed climbed from 58 to 98 and stayed there.
Legacy DB ⇢ Node.js importer ⇢ Shopify
Product data pipeline
Custom Node.js importer moved products, tags, variants and descriptions cleanly into Shopify. No manual copy-paste, no silent drops.
Ranked for Google Shopping
Google rates Millars' overall store quality as Exceptional, meaning their products are eligible to appear in Google Shopping every time someone searches.
Connected to the shop floor
Sell a pair in-store, see the website update in seconds. POS integration keeps online and offline stock perfectly in sync.
Built to increase basket size
Side cart with a free shipping target and smart product suggestions, built to lift the average spend on every sale.
Drew handled our entire migration end-to-end without us losing a single day of trading. The site is faster, easier to update, and we've kept every search ranking we had. Best decision we made last year.
The outcome
58 → 98 PageSpeed
0 URLs lost
Preserved Search rankings
Since launch, Millars has kept its search visibility intact, seen mobile shoppers stay on the site longer, and gained a storefront the team can update themselves. The migration is done, the site is live, and Millars owns every piece of it.
Millars isn't a one-off. If your online shop is losing ground to performance, platform limits, or an agency that's gone quiet, this is the kind of project I take on.
Got a site that needs work?
Three quick questions and I'll come back to you within 48 hours.
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