Post-Migration Technical SEO for Ecommerce: The 60-Day Store Health Checklist

Platform migrations are the highest-risk event in ecommerce SEO. Done wrong, they can wipe out 40–60% of organic traffic in 30 days. Done right, they hold rankings through the transition and often improve them within 90 days as the new platform's performance improvements index.

This checklist covers the 60 days after go-live — the period when most of the technical SEO damage happens. The pre-migration work (301 redirect mapping, URL inventory, content audit) is covered elsewhere. This is what you verify, monitor, and fix after the new store is live.

Days 1–3: Immediate Verification

Redirect Chain Audit

301 redirects should resolve in a single hop. Test 50–100 high-traffic old URLs (use GSC's top landing pages report from the 90 days before migration). Redirect chains (A → B → C) lose link equity at each hop and slow load times.

Common pattern: old URL → new URL → trailing slash redirect → canonical URL. Three hops before Google gets to the indexable page. Fix: point the old URL directly to the canonical new URL.

Canonical Tag Verification on Homepage and Top 20 Product Pages

New platforms often set up canonical tags incorrectly out of the box. Verify:

• Homepage canonical is https://example.com/ (with or without trailing slash — be consistent)
• Product page canonicals match the URL you submitted in sitemap.xml
• No variant URLs are self-canonicalized (see our variant canonical guide)

XML Sitemap Submission

Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console within 24 hours of go-live. Check for:

• Sitemap includes all key product, category, and content pages
• Sitemap excludes parameter URLs, paginated variants, and no-index pages
• Sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs (not variant URLs, not trailing-slash variants of what's in the canonical tag)

robots.txt Verification

Many platforms ship with a staging robots.txt that disallows all crawling. Verify https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt does NOT contain Disallow: / or Disallow: /products/. This happens more often than you'd expect — a developer copies the staging config to production and forgets to change the robots.txt.

HTTPS Redirect Verification

All HTTP URLs should 301-redirect to HTTPS. Test: curl -I http://yourdomain.com. Should return 301 Moved Permanently with a Location: https://yourdomain.com/ header. If it returns 200, HTTP is live without a redirect.

Days 3–7: Search Console Monitoring Setup

GSC Coverage Report Baseline

Record the pre-migration counts from GSC Coverage report:

• Valid pages indexed
• Valid with warnings
• Excluded (not indexed, canonical is different)
• Errors

Set a daily reminder to check these numbers for the first 30 days. A 20%+ drop in Valid indexed pages in the first 2 weeks is a red flag requiring immediate investigation.

Crawl Rate and Crawl Stats

GSC Crawl Stats (Settings → Crawl Stats) shows how many pages Google is crawling per day. After migration, crawl rate often drops temporarily as Googlebot re-evaluates the site structure. Expected: 20–40% lower crawl rate in week 1, recovering by week 3. If crawl rate stays depressed past week 4, investigate robots.txt, internal linking structure, and server response times.

Page Indexing by Discovery Method

The Indexing report's "Why pages aren't indexed" section will show new errors that appear post-migration. Set up weekly exports to catch trends. The most common post-migration indexing errors:

• "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" — appears when old variant URLs are still being crawled and pointing to the new base product URL. Normal and expected; resolves as Googlebot crawls the new sitemap.
• "Page with redirect" — old URLs are in the index but redirecting. Will clear over weeks as Google updates its index.
• "Soft 404" — pages returning 200 status but with thin/empty content. Common on platforms that render product pages with "this product is unavailable" content while returning HTTP 200. Should return 404 or redirect.

Days 7–14: Performance Baseline

Core Web Vitals Field Data

New platforms take 28 days to generate CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) data. During this window, Google uses Lighthouse lab data as a proxy. Run Lighthouse on:

• Homepage
• Top 3 collection pages
• Top 5 product pages
• Cart/checkout (first step)

LCP target: under 2.5s on mobile. INP target: under 200ms. CLS target: under 0.1. Document baseline scores in a spreadsheet — you'll reference these when comparing week 4 and week 8 data.

Server Response Time (TTFB)

Test TTFB from multiple regions using WebPageTest with the "Simple Testing" preset. New platforms often have TTFB regressions due to different server infrastructure, cold starts (for edge/serverless), or missing server-side caching configurations. Target: under 600ms TTFB for edge-cached pages, under 1,200ms for uncached server-rendered pages.

Days 14–30: Ranking Monitoring

Track Pre-Migration Top Keywords

Export your top 200 keyword rankings from GSC (Performance → Queries, filter by average position, sort by clicks) before migration. After migration, monitor these weekly. Expected behavior:

• Days 1–7: Position fluctuation of ±3–8 positions as Google re-crawls and re-evaluates
• Days 7–14: Stabilization, some pages may rank lower temporarily
• Days 14–30: Recovery toward pre-migration positions
• Days 30–60: Either full recovery or upward movement (if the new platform has better performance/technical SEO)

If top-20 rankings drop 10+ positions and stay there past day 21, investigate: missing structured data, canonical issues, content differences on the migrated pages, or broken internal links to those pages.

Backlink Destination Audit

Pull your top 100 backlinks from Ahrefs or Moz. Check that the destination URLs either still exist on the new platform or are properly 301-redirected. Backlinks pointing to 404s are losing all their link equity — these are high-priority redirect targets.

Days 30–45: Structured Data Verification

Product Schema Validation

New platforms generate structured data differently. Check 20–30 product pages using Google's Rich Results Test. Common post-migration structured data failures:

• Missing price or priceCurrency in Product schema (often caused by currency/price app incompatibilities)
• Missing availability field (InStock/OutOfStock)
• AggregateRating with zero reviews (imported reviews haven't loaded)
• Duplicate <script type="application/ld+json"> blocks (theme + app both injecting schema)

Breadcrumb Schema

Check that breadcrumb structured data is present on product and category pages. Many platforms install breadcrumb schema from a different source than Product schema — check that the two schemas don't conflict with each other's ID values.

Days 45–60: Final Cleanup

Internal Link Audit

Run a full crawl of your new store (StoreVitals, Screaming Frog, or similar). Export all internal links and filter for:

• Links pointing to old platform URLs (absolute links that weren't updated during migration)
• Links pointing to redirected URLs (your 301s catch these, but they waste redirect budget)
• Links pointing to 404 pages (broken internal links)

Image Alt Text Audit

Image migration tools often strip alt text or replace it with auto-generated filenames. Check 50 product images for meaningful alt text. Auto-generated alt text that reads "image-1.jpg" or "product_photo_final_v2.png" is not helpful for SEO or accessibility.

Page Speed Comparison

Compare Core Web Vitals from day 7 versus day 60. The new platform should show improvement in LCP and INP versus the old platform — if it doesn't, the migration didn't deliver its intended performance benefit and you need to investigate CDN configuration, image optimization, and JavaScript optimization settings on the new platform.

Ongoing: Automated Monitoring

After day 60, set up automated weekly health monitoring so you catch regressions before they compound:

• Broken link monitoring: New content additions create new internal link targets — and new opportunities for broken links
• Canonical drift monitoring: Platform updates and app installs can override canonical tags
• Robots.txt monitoring: A misconfigured robots.txt can disallow all crawling — you want to know within hours, not weeks
• Security header monitoring: New platforms often misconfigure HSTS or CSP headers

StoreVitals automates all of these checks weekly with email alerts when something breaks. After a migration, it's the single best investment for catching regressions before they damage your rankings.

The 60-day window is when migrations succeed or fail from an SEO standpoint. This checklist covers the most common failure modes — follow it, and your migration is likely to land in the "improved" category. Skip it, and you may be explaining a 40% traffic drop to your stakeholders three months later.