50%
Online sales lost after the migration
404s
Old URLs left dead, with no redirects
Recovered
Rankings back, then pushed higher
3 fronts
Design, UX, and SEO rebuilt
Client snapshot
A retailer that had sold fitness equipment online for years. The business ran on OpenCart for a long time and did well there, but eventually outgrew it and wanted features the platform could not offer. So they set out to move to WordPress and WooCommerce. That move is where the trouble started.
What went wrong
Another agency handled the OpenCart to WordPress migration and launched the new store at the start of 2026. Almost immediately, online sales started to slide. When the retailer looked closer, they saw the store had lost its Google rankings in the move. Months went by with no recovery. By the time they contacted us, online sales were down 50%.
The root cause was mechanical. The migration had gone live without redirects. Every product and category URL that Google had indexed on the old OpenCart store now returned a 404 on the new site. Search engines drop dead URLs, and when they did, the rankings, the organic traffic, and the sales that depended on them went too.
There was more on top of the SEO damage. The rebuilt store looked dated and the user experience was rough. And after months of watching revenue fall, the client arrived wary and on edge, which made complete sense given what the last project had cost them.
How we fixed it
We audited the store across three fronts and worked them in parallel:
- SEO. They already had Google Search Console connected, so we could see exactly which URLs had lost rankings and where the 404s were. We mapped every old OpenCart URL to its new WordPress equivalent, put 301 redirects in place, cleared the dead pages, and fixed the technical SEO issues under the surface
- Design. The store had launched looking dated, so we redesigned it into something current that matched the brand
- UX. Our designers reworked the flow and the usability problems the rebuild had introduced
- Automation, later. Once they trusted the work, we added quality-of-life features: a Sale category that assigns itself to any product with a reduced price, and an automatic receipt email to the customer after each order
A lot of the job was carrying the weight of the recovery for a client who had good reason not to trust an agency. So we showed the work at every step and let the numbers do the convincing.
The outcome
Once the redirects and SEO were fixed, the rankings came back, and then climbed past where they had been before the migration. Online sales followed. The store that had been bleeding revenue was growing again.
A migration that halves sales is almost always a redirect and SEO failure, not bad luck. Finding it and reversing it is the recovery work most migration projects skip, and it is the difference between a platform change that costs you nothing and one that costs you half your revenue.
Metric
Before
After
Online sales
Down 50%
Recovering and growing
Search rankings
Lost in the migration
Recovered, then higher than before
Old URLs
Returning 404, no redirects
301 redirected to the right pages
Design & UX
Dated, rough to use
Redesigned, cleaner to shop
Tech and tools
WordPress
WooCommerce
Google Search Console
301 redirect mapping
Technical SEO
Custom WooCommerce automations
Services used on this project
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