A Website Migration Is a Marketing Project, Not Just a Development Project

A website migration can look successful from a development team's perspective while quietly damaging the business it was supposed to improve.

The new website is live. The products are there. The checkout works. The design looks better, and the business is now running on a platform with more advanced ecommerce capabilities.

But organic traffic starts falling. Google sends customers to pages that no longer exist. Paid advertisements continue sending people to broken URLs. Analytics stops recording some important events. Customers who previously knew exactly where to find a product are now struggling to navigate the new website.

The development team may consider the migration complete. The marketing team is looking at a different situation.

This is one of the problems with how ecommerce migrations are approached. They are often treated as platform and development projects, with marketing brought in to review the finished website. That is the wrong order.

A migration changes more than the technology running an online store. It can change its URL structure, product architecture, landing pages, tracking, search visibility, customer experience, integrations and the way existing customers interact with the business.

Every one of those changes has commercial consequences.

The reported difficulties surrounding the migration of Australian cosmetics business Adorn Cosmetics provide a useful starting point for thinking about this. There are questions about the platform, the implementation, the advertising and the work performed by the agencies involved. Without knowing the full technical history, it would be irresponsible to assign responsibility to one particular party.

But the broader lesson is worth examining: when a business migrates its ecommerce website, who is responsible for making sure the entire customer acquisition and sales system continues to work?

That responsibility cannot sit with developers alone. It cannot sit with the advertising agency alone either.

Someone needs to understand how all these systems connect.

Choosing an Ecommerce Platform Is a Business Decision

One of the first questions I would ask before a migration is why the business needs a different platform in the first place.

There is a tendency to associate more expensive or technically advanced platforms with better ecommerce performance. A business grows, an agency recommends a new platform, and the conversation quickly moves towards implementation.

But platform capability and business requirements are two different things.

Adobe Commerce, for example, is a powerful ecommerce platform. It can support complex product catalogues, advanced pricing structures, multiple storefronts, integrations and sophisticated business requirements. That does not mean every established online retailer needs it.

A business selling a relatively straightforward catalogue of skincare products may have very different requirements from a manufacturer operating multiple brands, markets, customer groups and complicated fulfilment arrangements.

The right platform depends on what the business actually needs to do.

Before recommending a migration, I would want to understand the current limitations. Is the existing platform struggling with catalogue management? Are there complicated pricing rules? Does the business need better inventory synchronization? Are integrations becoming difficult to maintain? Is the current architecture preventing the company from implementing important features?

Those are legitimate reasons to consider a change.

But if the main problem is a slow theme, poor product-page structure, weak conversion rates or an ineffective marketing strategy, changing the entire ecommerce platform may be an unnecessarily expensive way to solve the wrong problem.

A platform migration does not automatically fix poor merchandising, weak offers, bad landing pages or ineffective advertising.

It can actually make those problems harder to diagnose because the business is now dealing with a new technical environment at the same time.

The decision should be based on requirements, not the size of the agency's commission or the perceived prestige of the platform.

The Migration Begins With the Existing Website

Before moving anything, someone needs to understand what the current website is doing.

This is where technical ecommerce management becomes important.

A website is not simply a collection of pages. It has a structure that search engines, customers, marketing systems and external integrations depend on.

A product page may receive organic traffic from dozens of search queries. A category page may be the main entry point for customers looking for a particular product range. A landing page may be connected to several active advertising campaigns. A blog article may be generating visitors who eventually purchase through an internal product link.

These relationships are easy to overlook when a migration is approached as a design and development exercise.

I would begin with an inventory of the existing website.

That includes the URLs, product pages, category pages, content pages, landing pages, important images, internal links, metadata, redirects and any custom functionality. I would also review the pages generating organic traffic, the pages receiving paid traffic and the pages contributing to revenue.

Google Search Console can help identify the website's search performance and the pages receiving impressions and clicks. Analytics data can show how visitors arrive, what they do and which pages contribute to conversions. The ecommerce platform itself provides information about products, orders, customer accounts and other operational activity.

The objective is to establish what the existing website is worth before changing it.

Without that baseline, it becomes difficult to know whether the migration improved anything.

It also becomes difficult to identify what was lost.

Redirects Are Not a Small Technical Detail

One of the most important parts of an ecommerce migration is URL management.

Consider a store that previously had a product at:

example.com/products/hydrating-face-serum

After migration, the new platform generates a different URL:

example.com/skincare/hydrating-serum

The old URL may already have backlinks, search visibility, indexed pages and customers who have bookmarked it. It may also appear in email campaigns, social media posts, advertising campaigns and external product listings.

If the old URL is removed without a proper redirect, visitors and search engines may encounter a 404 error.

A 404 response is not inherently a disaster. Websites naturally have pages that disappear. The problem is removing valuable URLs without managing what happens to the traffic and references pointing towards them.

This is where a redirect map comes in.

A redirect map documents the old URLs and their appropriate destinations on the new website. Where a page has a genuine equivalent, a permanent redirect, typically a 301, can tell browsers and search engines that the content has moved.

The important part is matching the destination correctly.

If an old product page has a new equivalent, redirect it to that product. If a category has been reorganized, find the most relevant replacement category. If a page has genuinely been retired and there is no equivalent, the decision needs to be considered carefully rather than automatically sending every discontinued URL to the homepage.

Redirecting hundreds of unrelated URLs to the homepage does not recreate the original customer experience or provide a meaningful replacement for the missing content.

The mapping process should happen before launch, not after traffic begins disappearing.

It also needs to be tested after implementation. A redirect can point to another redirect, create a loop, lead to an irrelevant destination or fail entirely.

For larger stores, I would also check for redirect chains, broken internal links, incorrect canonical tags, inconsistent URL formats and pages that are accidentally blocked from crawling.

A migration is not complete because the new URLs load. It is complete when the old website's important relationships have been accounted for and the new structure works as intended.

Your Advertising Campaigns Do Not Automatically Know the Website Has Changed

This is another area where development and marketing teams need to communicate.

A paid advertising campaign does not care that a development team has completed a migration. It continues using the destination URL configured inside the advertising platform until somebody changes it.

Suppose a Meta campaign is promoting a particular skincare product. The advertisement contains a destination URL pointing to the old product page.

The business migrates its website. The product now has a different URL, but the campaign is still active.

A customer clicks the advertisement and arrives at a 404 page.

The advertising platform may continue spending money on that campaign. The click has happened, the budget has been used, but the customer has not reached the product.

This is particularly frustrating because the advertising campaign may appear to be operating normally. The problem is not necessarily the creative, audience, bid strategy or campaign structure. It may simply be the destination.

The same issue can affect Google Ads, shopping campaigns, email campaigns, affiliate links and external product listings.

A migration checklist should therefore include every active acquisition channel.

For paid search, I would review the final URLs configured at the ad and asset level, along with sitelinks and other destination assets. For Meta, I would check the destination URLs used by active ads and any relevant catalogue or product links. Shopping feeds also need attention because the product URLs submitted to the advertising platform must correspond to valid product pages on the new website.

This is not something to leave until the next monthly performance review.

Immediately after launch, someone should test the actual customer journey from the live advertisement to the landing page. Doing this on a mobile device is especially useful because it tests the experience customers are actually receiving.

The check is straightforward: click the advertisement, confirm that the correct page loads, verify that the product is available and make sure the customer can continue towards checkout.

A campaign can have excellent creative and targeting but still waste money because the destination is broken.

Landing Pages Need to Be Part of the Technical Conversation

A landing page is often treated as a design deliverable. Marketing provides the copy, design creates the layout, and development builds the page.

But a landing page is also a technical asset.

Its structure affects how quickly it loads, how it behaves on mobile, how search engines interpret it, how analytics records activity and how easily the business can update it when campaigns change.

Before building one, I want to understand its commercial purpose.

Is it intended to generate leads? Sell a specific product? Promote a seasonal offer? Introduce a new product range? Support a paid advertising campaign?

That decision affects the page structure.

A campaign promoting a single skincare product should not necessarily send customers to the homepage or a broad category page. It should send them somewhere that continues the promise made in the advertisement.

The landing page should explain the offer, present the relevant product information, answer the customer's likely questions and make the next action clear.

There is also a technical side to consider.

The URL needs to be stable and understandable. The page should load properly on mobile devices. Images should be appropriately sized and compressed. Forms need validation and spam protection. Buttons must work. Product variants and pricing must be correct. Analytics events need to fire when customers perform meaningful actions.

If the page is connected to a campaign, the tracking configuration should be tested before advertising spend begins.

I would also pay attention to the relationship between the landing page and the rest of the website.

Some campaigns need a focused experience with minimal navigation. Others benefit from allowing customers to explore related products, reviews, ingredients, delivery information or other supporting content.

There is no universal landing-page template that works for every campaign.

The important thing is that the page supports the customer's decision rather than forcing the customer to work out what to do next.

Marketing Teams Need to Understand How Themes Affect Performance

A marketing team does not need to write every line of PHP, JavaScript or CSS. But it should understand how the website's theme affects what marketing can actually implement.

On platforms such as WordPress and WooCommerce, the theme controls much of the presentation layer. It determines how templates are structured, how content is displayed, how product pages are rendered and how certain components behave.

The same principle applies to themes and storefront implementations on other ecommerce platforms.

A marketing team may want to introduce a new landing-page structure, add a promotional section, change product-page content, improve the mobile navigation or introduce a more prominent customer review component.

Whether those changes are straightforward depends partly on how the theme was built.

A poorly structured theme can make simple marketing changes unnecessarily expensive. A seemingly minor adjustment may require custom development because the original implementation does not provide the flexibility the business needs.

This is why I would want marketing involved in theme planning.

The team should be able to explain what it needs from the storefront, how frequently pages will change and which components need to be reusable.

For example, if a business regularly runs campaigns around different product ranges, it may need reusable landing-page sections rather than a completely custom development project every time.

The same applies to product pages.

Marketing may need dedicated areas for product benefits, ingredients, usage instructions, reviews, delivery information, cross-sells and promotional messaging. If the theme makes those sections difficult to manage, the business will eventually spend more time and money maintaining its marketing activity.

There is also a performance consideration.

A theme can introduce unnecessary scripts, oversized assets, layout shifts and other problems that affect the customer experience. A visually impressive website is not necessarily a technically efficient one.

The marketing team should understand the implications of design decisions and work with developers to make sure the finished implementation supports both the brand and the commercial requirements.

The Relationship Between Marketing and Development Should Start Before Implementation

One of the biggest operational problems in ecommerce is the gap between what marketing wants to achieve and what development is actually asked to build.

Marketing might request a new landing page because a campaign is underperforming. Development receives a brief saying that a new page is required, without knowing the campaign objective, the audience, the offer or the reason the existing page is not converting.

The result may be a perfectly functional page that solves the wrong problem.

A better working relationship starts with requirements.

If marketing wants a new product landing page, the development brief should explain the purpose of the page, its intended URL, the content requirements, the components needed, the tracking events, the mobile behaviour and the expected customer actions.

If the request involves changing the checkout, the team should understand which step is creating friction and what information needs to be captured.

If a new integration is required, the brief should identify which system owns the data, what information needs to move between platforms and what should happen when synchronization fails.

This is where an ecommerce manager can add considerable value.

They do not necessarily need to be the person writing the code. They need to understand enough about the systems involved to translate business requirements into something developers can implement.

They should also understand how to test the result.

A development task is not complete simply because the developer says it has been deployed. It needs to be checked against the original requirements.

Does the page work on mobile? Does the form submit correctly? Does the purchase event fire? Does the new URL redirect properly? Does the product information display accurately? Does the integration transfer the right data?

These are acceptance criteria, not optional finishing touches.

SEO Is Part of the Website Architecture

Search engine optimization is often handed to an SEO specialist after the website has been built.

That approach creates unnecessary problems.

SEO depends on decisions that are made during development and website planning. The way categories are organized, how product pages are structured, how URLs are generated and how internal links connect content all influence how search engines discover and understand a website.

Consider an ecommerce store selling skincare products.

It might have category pages for cleansers, moisturizers, serums and sunscreens. Individual products sit within those categories, while educational content explains ingredients, skin concerns and product usage.

Those pages should not exist independently.

A useful structure allows customers and search engines to move between related products, categories and supporting information.

A customer reading about a particular ingredient should be able to find relevant products. Someone browsing a product should be able to explore related items or understand how that product fits into a routine.

Internal linking helps establish these relationships.

The technical implementation matters too.

Search engines need to be able to crawl important pages. Canonical tags should identify the preferred version of pages where duplicate or similar URLs exist. XML sitemaps should contain the URLs the business actually wants indexed. Robots directives should not accidentally prevent access to important sections.

Product variants, filtering systems, pagination and parameter-generated URLs also need attention.

An ecommerce website can generate thousands of URLs without having thousands of genuinely useful pages. If filters and sorting options create large numbers of near-identical URLs, the business needs a sensible approach to crawl management and indexation.

These decisions should involve development and SEO from the beginning.

An SEO specialist should not be expected to repair an architecture they were never consulted about.

Analytics Must Be Rebuilt and Verified, Not Assumed to Work

A website migration can also interrupt the measurement systems used to make business decisions.

The analytics property may still exist. The tracking script may still be present. The dashboard may even show visitors.

None of that proves that ecommerce tracking is working correctly.

For a store, I would want to verify the important events across the customer journey.

That includes product views, add-to-cart actions, checkout progression, purchases and other relevant interactions.

In GA4, ecommerce events need to be implemented with the appropriate event names and parameters. A purchase event, for example, should contain the information needed to understand the transaction, including its value, currency and transaction identifier.

If the store uses Google Tag Manager, the team needs to verify that the tags and triggers still work with the new website structure.

If Meta advertising is involved, the Pixel and Conversions API configuration should also be reviewed. Where browser and server events report the same conversion, event deduplication needs to be configured correctly to avoid counting the same purchase twice.

The point is not to install every tracking tool available.

It is to ensure that the business can trust the information it uses to make decisions.

A campaign may appear to be generating fewer purchases because tracking has broken. Alternatively, the dashboard may report conversions that are duplicated or incorrectly attributed.

Both situations can lead to poor decisions.

After a migration, I would test the entire journey rather than stopping at the point where the tracking script appears in the website's source code.

A successful test should confirm that the relevant events fire, the correct values are passed and the information appears where it is supposed to.

Customer Journeys Do Not End at the Checkout

There is another part of ecommerce management that is often overlooked during website projects: what happens after someone buys.

A new website can make it easier to acquire customers while making it harder to manage the relationships that already exist.

Customer accounts, order history, consent records, email subscriptions, loyalty information and other customer data may be stored across different systems. A migration needs to account for how that information is transferred and how the connected systems continue to use it.

For a business with an established customer base, this is particularly important.

Consider a customer who purchases a skincare product that normally needs replacing after a few months.

The business should be able to understand what the customer bought, when the purchase happened and whether there is an appropriate reason to communicate with them again.

That information can support replenishment campaigns, product education, complementary product recommendations and relevant offers.

But the process depends on accurate data.

If order history does not synchronize properly with the CRM or email platform, customer segments may become unreliable. A customer who has already purchased a product may receive an acquisition offer intended for someone who has never bought from the business.

A repeat customer may receive irrelevant recommendations because the business no longer has a complete view of their previous purchases.

These are not necessarily visible website errors. The storefront may look perfectly normal while the systems behind it are no longer communicating correctly.

This is why customer data and integrations need to be included in migration planning.

The ecommerce platform, CRM, email marketing system, inventory software and fulfilment systems should have clearly defined responsibilities.

The team should understand which system is the source of truth for products, stock, orders and customer information. It should also know what happens when an integration fails or data synchronization is delayed.

The objective is to maintain a consistent customer experience across the entire relationship, not simply to get someone through checkout once.

Organic Growth and Social Media Depend on the Website Working Properly

Instagram and TikTok are often treated as separate marketing channels.

In reality, they are part of the same customer journey.

A customer may discover a product through an Instagram Reel, watch a demonstration on TikTok, visit the website, read customer reviews and eventually make a purchase.

That journey can happen over several days. The customer may return through a search engine, a retargeting advertisement or an email campaign before buying.

Each interaction is an opportunity to either strengthen or interrupt the relationship.

If a social media post promotes a product, the destination should make it easy to find that product. Sending every visitor to the homepage creates unnecessary work, particularly when the original content was about something specific.

A more relevant product or campaign landing page gives the visitor continuity between what they saw on social media and what they find on the website.

The same principle applies to organic search.

An educational article about a skincare ingredient should connect naturally to relevant products. A product page should answer questions that help customers make a decision. Category pages should make it easy to discover the range.

Social content, SEO content and website pages should support one another.

This does not mean every social media post needs to become a sales advertisement. Instagram and TikTok can build awareness, demonstrate products, answer questions and help customers become familiar with a brand.

But the business should understand what happens when someone moves from those platforms to its website.

Are they reaching the right page? Does it load quickly on mobile? Can they understand the product? Are the relevant reviews and details available? Can they complete the purchase without unnecessary friction?

Social media growth is useful, but the website needs to be capable of converting the attention it generates.

What I Would Check Before and After an Ecommerce Migration

A migration should have a structured process that includes marketing, development, SEO and the people responsible for the business's operations.

Before launch, I would want to see the following areas addressed:

Website structure and content: Inventory existing URLs, important pages, products, categories, landing pages and content. Identify what is being moved, changed, consolidated or removed.

SEO and redirects: Prepare a redirect map, review metadata and canonical tags, check internal links and confirm that the new sitemap and robots directives are configured correctly.

Advertising destinations: Review active Google Ads and Meta campaigns, shopping feeds, email links, affiliate links and other external destinations that point to the existing website.

Landing pages and themes: Confirm that the new theme supports the marketing team's requirements, that reusable page components are available and that important landing pages work properly on mobile.

Analytics and tracking: Verify GA4, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and any server-side tracking. Test the important ecommerce events rather than assuming that existing configurations will survive the migration.

Customer data and integrations: Check customer accounts, order history, email subscriptions, consent information, CRM connections, inventory synchronization and fulfilment integrations.

Checkout and transactions: Test the complete purchase process, including product variants, stock availability, shipping calculations, payment methods, order confirmation and relevant notifications.

After launch, the work is not finished.

I would monitor Search Console for indexing and crawl problems, review analytics for changes in traffic and conversions, test important redirects, check live advertising destinations and confirm that integrations are transferring data correctly.

I would also compare performance against the baseline established before migration.

A drop in organic traffic may have several explanations. It could involve indexing, redirects, page content, internal linking or changes in search demand. A decline in paid conversions could be caused by broken destinations, tracking problems, changes to the landing pages or something unrelated to the migration.

The point is to investigate the actual cause rather than immediately blaming the platform.

For a significant migration, there should also be a documented rollback or recovery plan. The business needs to know who can make the decision, what conditions would trigger it and how the team would protect orders and customer data if the new environment experienced a serious problem.

A launch plan without a recovery plan is incomplete.

The Ecommerce Manager Has to Understand the Connections

There is a reason I think technical knowledge is becoming increasingly important for ecommerce managers.

Managing an online store is no longer simply about updating products, checking orders, reviewing advertising reports and coordinating promotional campaigns.

Those activities still matter, but they sit on top of a technical system.

The website has a frontend and a backend. It has templates, plugins or extensions, APIs, databases, tracking scripts, integrations and hosting infrastructure. Marketing campaigns depend on URLs and landing pages. SEO depends partly on how the website is structured. Customer retention depends on accurate order and customer data. Social media activity depends on the website being able to deliver the experience promised by the content.

An ecommerce manager does not have to become a full-stack developer.

But they should understand enough to recognize when a technical decision creates a marketing problem, when a marketing request requires development work and when a website issue is affecting revenue.

They should be comfortable discussing redirects, page templates, tracking events, integrations, product data, canonical URLs and customer journeys. They should know how to write a useful development brief, test a deployment and identify when something is not working as intended.

More importantly, they should understand how these things connect to the commercial performance of the store.

A developer can build a technically functional website. An SEO specialist can improve search visibility. An advertising specialist can manage campaigns. A designer can create a better interface.

But somebody still needs to make sure all those activities are working towards the same business objectives.

That is where ecommerce management becomes more than coordinating tasks.

A website migration should not be judged by whether the new platform is live, whether the design looks better or whether the development team has completed its deliverables.

It should be judged by whether the business can continue acquiring customers, converting them, fulfilling their orders, measuring performance and bringing them back.

The technology is there to support the business. The business should never be left trying to recover from the technology project.