Replatforming without losing a season
A headless migration is mostly a redirect problem, a data problem and a nerve problem. What we do in the six weeks before cutover.
Every commerce replatform is sold on the new storefront and lost on the migration. The interesting work happens in the weeks before anyone sees a new page.
Redirects first. We crawl the existing site, map every indexed URL to a destination, and diff that map against staging until it is empty. A missing redirect on a category page with backlinks is worth more lost revenue than a slow product page.
Then structured data parity. If the old site had rich results and the new one does not, you lose click-through even where you keep ranking. We assert schema output in the test suite, not in a spreadsheet.
Data is the second half. Catalogue, customers, order history, subscriptions and loyalty balances all have to arrive intact, and at least one of them always has an undocumented field that the finance team depends on. Find it before cutover, not during.
Finally, cut over in daylight, mid-week, outside campaign season, with the old stack warm and a rollback you have rehearsed. We have never had to use one. We have always had one.