Successfully Migrating David Austin Roses’ Site from Magento 1 to Shopify Plus

Working with David Austin Roses

David Austin Roses is a family-run business specialising in a variety of rose types. When they approached us seeking support with their site migration from Magento 1 to Shopify Plus, we couldn’t wait to get involved. Working with a complex site, we knew this project would involve an entirely new level of migration.

The Challenge

David Austin was migrating from an old Magento 1 set up to Shopify Plus and, whilst standard site migrations are complex and challenging on their own, David Austin was a new level of migration. The project involved: 

• 5 international websites all migrating, with 3 switching to subdomains
• Each site had a high number of indexed pages, which caused a massive bloat and an unnecessarily large website (close to 10x increasing the complexity of the project)
• David Austin Roses dominates some of the biggest and best rose related terms. They are a true market leader, so we needed to ensure the migration was perfect to mitigate any losses. Even a decline from 1st to 2nd would have a big impact on traffic
• Over 60% of traffic came from SEO, so if the migration failed, it would be a huge loss to the family-run business
• Due to migration development delays, the migration took over a year to complete meaning we were dealing with a constantly changing eCommerce website which was moving between 4 different seasons. This naturally changed the importance of pages, content and the top-level site architecture

Our Strategy

Working closely with our eCommerce partner agency, Vervaunt, we carried out the following:

• Counter-intuitively, we SEO’d the Magento 1 website, despite us migrating in a few months. This decision was made on the basis of the mass amount of ‘junk’ on the M1 website time. We wanted to avoid transferring this ‘junk to Shopify, so needed to remove and clean it up as soon as possible so Google could process the changes ahead the migration 
• In line with the above, we also implemented basic SEO title tag improvements to mitigate any loss from the duplicate pages which were ranking
• Midway through the project, the decision was made (inline with SEO data) to remove the French and German website and have a singular European store. We consulted on the best approach and provided data to understand the potential loss from no longer having geolocated pages
• Due to migration development delays, it was also decided to update the hierarchy of the domain which we consulted on to mitigate impact post-migration

The Results

In total, we manually mapped over 500,000 URLs and implemented the redirects into Shopify, whilst maintaining rankings for David Austen Rose’s most competitive terms. 

Overall, we successfully migrated the site with minimal SEO impact and minor 404 clean up work, which is expected when carrying out a migration of a Magento website of this size.

Note: The numbers above have been hidden to protect the data and rights of the brand - growth uplifts and percentages are representative of this case study. Visibility data has been curated from external tools, such as Sistrix, and do not represent real traffic figures.