From BigCommerce to Shopify: A Complex Website Redesign and SEO Migration.

Leanna Organics wanted their new store to keep everything the old one had: the same categories, products, articles and sub-pages. Our discovery mapped all of it before any design work began.

We then proposed Glozin, a premium Shopify theme that suited the store's needs, and the client approved it as the foundation for the build.

This was a new design, not a copy of the old one. We kept the brand that customers already knew and used it to modernize the store:

• The brand green, applied consistently across the whole site
• A Shop by need section with real product photos in place of generic icons
• Homepage icons that link straight to the key sub-pages
• The footer design, carried over from the old store

We also gave the client access to the design files in Canva, so they could flag any color they wanted changed.

We imported the catalog in bulk. A few products were missing after the first import, so we tracked each one down and added it, along with the wholesale products.

Customer accounts came across too. We cleaned out years of contacts who had never placed an order, while keeping every customer with an order history or a subscription.

735 reviews, matched to the right products

Reviews are some of the strongest trust signals a store has, so we did not want to start from zero. We exported all 735 reviews from BigCommerce, imported them into Judge.me, and assigned them to match how they appeared on the old store. We then checked every one against the original export, row by row.

We also added a Google reviews widget linked to the store's Google Business Profile, which shows shoppers that the reviews come from real customers.

We optimized the product pages for both conversions and SEO. Each one now has clear tabs for the description, ingredients, FAQ and reviews, so shoppers can find answers without leaving the page.

Collection pages kept their SEO copy. We built custom metafields so each collection has a description and its own FAQ at the bottom of the page, and we added breadcrumbs across products, collections, pages and articles.

The content moved in stages: the About and Contact pages, landing pages, a CBD education hub of explainer and comparison pages, the lab results page, local SEO pages and 27 blog articles.

We moved the landing pages with Matrixify, a bulk import tool for Shopify. BigCommerce and Shopify templates work differently, so each page needed adapting rather than a straight copy, with its header structure and internal links kept intact. Where the import failed on a page, we rebuilt it by hand.

Images, by hand

BigCommerce's file storage held none of the site's images, so they could not be exported in bulk. We downloaded each image from the live site and uploaded it to Shopify, and the alt text came across with them.

A cleanup along the way

Not everything deserved a place on the new store. Old events pages from 2023 were left behind. The education pages gained recommended products and links between related pages, so readers have a next step.

Shopify places every URL under a fixed folder, such as /products/, /collections/, /pages/ or /blogs/, and those folders cannot be removed. So nearly every address on the site was going to change. We kept each new URL as close to the original as Shopify allows, and mapped every old URL to its new one in a redirect map.

We also carried over the redirects left behind by earlier versions of the site, so old links from years ago still lead somewhere useful.

Internal links

Redirects catch visitors arriving from outside. Internal links should never need them. We rewrote the internal links across every page, article and product description to point straight at the new URLs, partly in bulk with Matrixify and partly by hand, then crawled the whole site with Screaming Frog to confirm they all worked.

The rest of the SEO checklist

Meta titles and descriptions, alt text, canonical tags and robots.txt were all migrated and checked. Shopify adds product and breadcrumb schema on its own, and we migrated the remaining schema types by hand.

Bots had been signing up through the email form on BigCommerce. On Shopify, we set up the Klaviyo sign-up form with CAPTCHA protection, so the list collects real subscribers only.

We also moved over the discount codes and set up the offers that went with them.

The store was ready to launch at the end of May. One thing was not: the client's payment provider did not work with Shopify, and finding a new one that supports CBD took time. We held the launch until the new provider was approved, and the client used the extra weeks to get to know the new store.

With the Head of SEO's green light, we migrated in the early hours of August 31, 2026, at around 2:00 a.m. Colorado time, when traffic to the store was at its lowest.

DNS, done properly

The domain's DNS had been managed inside BigCommerce. We moved it to GoDaddy, the domain registrar, so the whole DNS zone now sits in one place. Every record came across, including email and Klaviyo. Both stores stayed in maintenance mode while the change spread, so no shopper was bounced between the old site and the new one.

Everything had been checked once before the migration. We checked it all again afterwards, to make sure nothing was missed:

• 301 redirects, including the legacy ones
• Indexing and crawlability
• Canonical tags
• The sitemap, with the new one submitted and the old one removed
• 404 and 5xx errors
• Meta tags and content
• Google Search Console
• Core Web Vitals
• The shopping cart

Because Search Console was verified at the domain level, the store kept its full search history through the move.