Case Studies → EU and UK Magento to Shopify Migration

EU and UK Magento to Shopify Migration

A Seamless Transition: How eComOne Helped Splash About Migrate their UK & EU Magento Sites to Shopify While Maintaining Rankings

Insights into the strategy and multi-channel considerations for migrating an international eCommerce store to Shopify.

Executive Summary

Splash About are the leading manufacturers of baby swimming products worldwide, with an extensive multi-award winning product lineup including their famous Happy Nappy™.

Having grown their eCommerce business in the UK, EU and US on their Magento sites, Splash About were looking to go to the next level with a new Shopify Plus multi-market site for their UK/EU and US operations. As Splash About are an established brand with strong eCommerce sales, eComOne were brought in to manage the technical SEO and PPC areas of the migration, to make sure their existing rankings and performance weren’t impacted by the replatform.

Working closely and collaboratively with the client’s appointed web development agency, we put together an in-depth migration plan that could hit Splash About’s targeted go-live date.

The plan included an in-depth audit of the URL redirects across the US, EU and UK domains, extensive checks to ensure important SEO content was successfully brought across to the new site and Google Shopping Feed setups for all three regions to retain their Google Ads campaign structure and performance.

+11% UK & EU Organic Search revenue and +26% Organic Search traffic in the 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months

+21% UK & EU Google Ads revenue in the 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months

+51% increase in Google Search Console impressions in the 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months.

a graph example of the results of this migration project

This case study explores the key technical SEO and PPC areas we worked on to achieve a smooth transition to a new eCommerce platform for an international retailer, with an immediate impact on results.

11%

Increase in organic revenue

21%

Increase in Google Ads revenue

Splash About is a leading manufacturer, distributor and retailer of baby swimming products worldwide. Since their inception over 20 years ago, Splash About’s products have gone on to win multiple prestigious awards from trusted organisations such as Made for Mums and Loved by Parents.

With countless 5 star reviews, Splash About offer an extensive range of products, from their innovative Happy Nappy™ baby swimming costumes to their stylish range of adult swimwear and maternity costumes.

Market Context

Having scaled their direct-to-consumer and trade eCommerce presence on Magento, Splash About had recognised the need to migrate to Shopify Plus to support their growing customer base and product range, and facilitate a stronger international presence with multi-currency and multi-language support for their EU and US markets.

The complexity of migrating their existing UK, EU and US-focused Magento sites to Shopify Plus required careful technical SEO considerations to be made to ensure a seamless transition.

 

As Splash About already had an established international eCommerce presence, it was critical that we prevented any loss in organic performance. The client’s internal team had also built up a strongly performing Google Ads strategy which was achieving excellent return on Ad spend. As a result, it was also crucial that we were able to exactly replicate their existing Google Shopping feeds to prevent any issues in their campaign structure, as well as making sure the site launched with all their required conversion actions firing.

A key objective for Splash About was expanding their international presence with the multi-currency and language features of Shopify Plus, which therefore required us to make sure the new site went live with international SEO best practices in place and localised Google Shopping feeds available for their UK and international markets.

Diving In

Working closely with the client’s web development agency, we first sought to establish a strong, collaborative relationship, planning out and sharing our full technical SEO migration process and Gantt chart with the development agency’s project manager to make sure we were all on the same page.

We find this approach works extremely well for complex migration projects such as Splash About’s. The developers can focus their efforts on their area of expertise, building a site with great UX and design, safe in the knowledge that a team of SEO and PPC specialists are looking after that side of the migration.

Executing the Strategy

Our migration strategy involves a comprehensive process, covering site category checks, full redirect validation, content audits and wider technical checks. Breaking this down, we first assessed the fundamentals of the site and validated that the new site category hierarchy contained all the relevant category pages from the existing site.

Through these checks, we are able to confirm that no valuable organic landing pages are lost during any site hierarchy changes.

As with any migration involving a change in URL structure, a critical step is making sure redirects are in place to transfer link equity and ranking power from the old site’s URLs to the new site’s. As part of this process, we identified all the existing URLs from the US, EU and UK sites that needed to be redirected by crawling the current sites, extracting URLs from the existing sitemaps, and checking for any pages which received organic traffic using GA4 and Search Console data.

Once we had cleansed this list, we were able to crawl the new site to validate that all required URLs had been redirected, were pointing to a working destination and weren’t going through any redirect loops. This also allowed us to flag and fix any broken or missing redirects, and re-validate the sites to confirm everything was in place.

We also audited on-page and meta content for categories, products and blogs to ensure that no important content was missing. This can often be an issue during migrations, where additional content present on product and category pages isn’t picked up during the data export process and is therefore missing from the new site.

In addition to customer-facing content, we validated that no schema mark-up, such as FAQ or Product schema, had been lost during the migration. Once again this is a commonly missed area and can lead to sites launching with invalid or missing schema, which used to be present on the old site.

As part of our holistic checks, we then validated that GA4 had been integrated correctly and any ads conversions were successfully firing. Although this is commonly seen as a given to SEO and PPC teams, it’s surprising how often new sites launch without properly configured Google Ads conversions, leading to significant impacts on PPC performance in the short-medium term.

As our final piece of the puzzle, we set up Google Shopping feeds for Splash About’s UK and international sites, making sure to replicate their existing custom label structure which was being used as part of their Google Ads strategy. Although this may seem redundant with Shopify’s first-party Merchant Centre integration, this is an essential step to avoid product IDs from changing, or custom labels being lost, which can significantly harm campaign performance.

Launching the Site

Through this comprehensive process, we aim to remove the fear factor and deliver a smooth, successful launch, where customers visiting from organic search don’t see 404 errors, GA4 tracking is preserved, and ads campaigns continue to perform as they should.

Roadblocks & How We Overcame Them

Unique Challenges with International Migrations

As with any multinational eCommerce site, there are some unique challenges presented during the migration process.

First and foremost, it was critical that we were able to replicate Splash About’s existing product IDs in the new Google Shopping feed. Although Shopify natively supports passing feeds to Google Shopping through the Google & YouTube app, this will always use the Shopify ID as the Product ID. As this wouldn’t have matched the product IDs from Splash About’s previous Magento site, this would have caused all historic Google Ads PMax learning data for these products to be lost – significantly affecting Google Ads performance.

Fortunately, we were able to use our middleware to remap the product ID field in the Google Shopping feed to match their previous Magento site, preserving their learning history on Google Ads. We were also able to preserve their existing custom label setup from Magento, which was being used as part of their campaign strategy. This meant Splash About’s team would not have to try and recreate their existing campaign structure, which was already performing very well.

Another key aspect of the replatform was that Splash About wanted their new site to be as seamless to use for their international customers as possible and as a result, users would automatically be redirected to their relevant Shopify market based on their geolocation data.

As with any redirection, we had to ensure that crucial tracking parameters such as GCLIDs for Google Ads, FBCLIDs for Facebook Ads and UTM parameters for GA4 were not stripped off during the redirect, as this would have caused significant attribution issues. To prevent this, we were able to work with the developers to prevent any required parameters from being removed during this redirect process.

In addition to these redirects, it was important for us to prevent the geolocation causing issues for beneficial crawlers. For example, Google often crawls sites from US based IP addresses, so it was important to make sure the UK and EU markets would still be successfully crawlable so that these pages would be indexed and products would be available for automated policy checks from Google Merchant Centre.

To make sure this would be possible, we worked with the developers to add in geolocation exemptions for all desired crawlers. Importantly, this isn’t just Googlebot. For example, if the special-case AdsBot crawler isn’t able to crawl relevant pages of the site, Dynamic Search Ads within Google Ads will not be able to serve.

The final piece of the puzzle was validating that the correct hreflang tags had been implemented across the UK, EU and US sites, to prevent any duplicate content issues and ensure the correctly localised version of the site was ranking in each region.

The end result was a seamless international user experience that did not impact on the site’s crawlability or indexability.

We were introduced to Splash About through their web developers and were appointed after running through our plan and process for the site migration. After successfully completing the site migration, we have continued to work with Splash About as their SEO agency and we’re excited to continue accelerating their organic search performance on their new Shopify Plus site.

  • +11% UK & EU Organic Search revenue and +26% Organic Search traffic in the 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months
  • +21% UK & EU Google Ads revenue in the 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months
  • 51% increase in Google Search Console impressions in the 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months.

After a successful migration to Shopify Plus, our role transitioned to further accelerating Splash About’s organic performance through our SEO strategy. We’re continuing to work with the team to write insightful blogs which rank and perform, further optimise their key categories and landing pages, and deliver our AI ranking strategy to make sure Splash About is visible in more than just the traditional search engine results pages.

Abby Barley, Head of eCommerce, Splash About

“eComOne supported us with SEO during our move from Magento 2 to Shopify, and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Their knowledge of both on-page and technical SEO meant we maintained our high rankings on the SERPs with no loss of traffic. We were especially concerned about losing tracking in Google Analytics, but they handled everything seamlessly and made the whole process stress-free. The team are friendly, approachable and highly organised — we’d definitely recommend them to anyone looking for expert SEO support.”

Kieran Wright, Head of Technical, eComOne

 “This was a fantastic migration project to work on. Splash About’s developers had done a great job creating a polished eCommerce site with great design and functionality, so it was a pleasure to work on the SEO and PPC side of things to ensure the new site maintained and grew their organic and paid performance. As with any multi-region site, there were some interesting technical challenges to solve during the migration process, but it’s been incredibly rewarding to see a smooth launch, and the new site go from strength to strength in the UK and internationally.”

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