Why migrate — and why cost is what decides it
Shopify is an excellent product, but its model — subscription, commissions, apps billed one by one — weighs heavier and heavier as revenue grows. On the stores we run, moving to Prestashop cut the platform cost by three to five times, at equal functional scope.
So the real question isn't "should we migrate" but "what do we risk by migrating". And the first risk, by a long way, is SEO: in sectors where advertising is constrained, organic accounts for most of the acquisition. Losing your rankings means losing your revenue.
Inventory before anything else
Before writing a line of code, we map everything Google knows about the store: indexed URLs, ranking pages, inbound backlinks, structured data. That inventory becomes the migration's contract — every URL must have a destination, and the pages that generate traffic do not change content.
It is also the moment to sort: dead pages, duplicates, empty collections. A migration is the only chance to clean up at no additional SEO cost, since everything goes through a redirect plan anyway.
Redirects mapped precisely, obsessive acceptance testing
The redirect plan is built URL by URL, in 301, with no chains (A→B→C forbidden) and no detour through generic pages. Shopify URL structures (/products/, /collections/) and Prestashop's differ: every pattern is mapped, tested, then verified against the entire inventory — not against a sample.
Acceptance testing happens in staging with a crawler: we compare titles, meta, canonicals, internal linking and structured data between the old and the new site. Until the diff is clean, we don't switch.
Go-live day, and the weeks that follow
The switch happens in off-peak hours, with DNS prepared and the old platform kept readable for verification. Search Console is notified (change of address if the domain moves), sitemaps are submitted immediately, and rank tracking moves to daily.
The result on the migrations we have run, including from Shopify to Prestashop: zero days of downtime, rankings preserved, and revenue that never faltered. The method is demanding, but it is repeatable — and it is exactly what we audit free of charge before any project.