Capture the starting state
Export known URLs and relevant first-party search data. Add important links from navigation, campaigns and product feeds where available. Keep the export dated; a sitemap alone may miss useful historical URLs.
Map the customer journey
For every moved URL, identify the closest equivalent destination. Keep unchanged URLs unchanged where practical. Do not send all removed products to the homepage; determine whether a real replacement exists.
Verify after release
Check responses, redirects, canonicals, internal links and the product experience. Test a real checkout separately under the store’s approved test process. Search testing does not establish that payments, tax or shipping are correct.
Put it into practice
Use these prompts for your working brief.
- Dated URL inventory
- Explicit move decisions
- Equivalent redirect targets
- Catalogue and technical QA
- Owner for post-release monitoring
Source and further reading
Check the implementation against the platform’s current guidance.
Keep a before-and-after sample
Save the current response, canonical, title, visible product list and internal links for representative URLs. Repeat the same checks on staging and after release. Include an empty collection, a retired product and a variant so that the easiest page does not stand in for the whole catalogue.
- Record the source revision and the person approving the release.
- Check the agreed redirect destination and preserve useful campaign parameters.
- Keep a tested rollback for templates and URL mappings.
- Review search and enquiry data later; a passing release check is not a sales result.