Moving Vaping101 to a headless Medusa build re-renders every template, tag and tracking script at once. The URL structure is being preserved — which takes the single biggest risk off the table — but everything Google reads on those URLs is rebuilt from scratch. Our job is to govern the move so your rankings, traffic and revenue carry across intact, then use the rebuild to pull ahead of your competitors.
Most migration checklists are written for shops that can buy their way out of a traffic dip with ads. You can't — which is exactly why the migration has to be right the first time.
Google Ads prohibits ads for nicotine vaping products. Meta and TikTok heavily restrict them. Google Shopping is limited for much of the catalogue. That leaves organic search and email/SMS carrying the revenue — the two channels a careless replatform is most likely to break.
Protecting them through the move is not a "nice to have." It's insurance on the part of the business that funds everything else.
The structure is staying the same. Keeping your existing URLs takes the single biggest migration risk off the table — no wholesale redirect gamble. Our focus shifts to verifying every URL still resolves cleanly and that the exceptions are handled.
Discontinued lines are the real redirect job. The June 2025 single-use vape ban retired SKUs that still hold rankings and links. Those specific URLs need redirecting to compliant alternatives — not left to 404 in bulk.
Measurement breaks silently on headless. The Shopify checkout and app scripts that carried your analytics disappear. Rebuilt deliberately, or you're blind at the riskiest moment.
A custom storefront can be just as search-friendly as Shopify — but only if it's built for it. These are the four failure modes we engineer out from day one.
If key content renders only in the browser, Googlebot receives blank pages. The classic headless de-indexing event.
Titles, metas, canonicals, headings, body copy and internal links get quietly dropped or regenerated template-by-template in a rebuild — even when the URL is identical.
Ecommerce events, conversion data and UK/EU consent all need rebuilding on the new custom checkout.
Product, review-star and breadcrumb markup that Shopify apps injected vanish, taking your SERP CTR with them.
A replatform is high-variance by default. We turn it into a controlled process: nothing progresses until the previous stage is signed off, and the site can't go live until the launch checklist is fully green.
Every one of these is a tracked workstream with an owner, a priority and a launch dependency. This is the size of the work behind a "simple" replatform.
Snapshot rankings, traffic, revenue, backlinks and Core Web Vitals — the yardstick every later phase is measured against.
Confirm the preserved structure resolves cleanly on the new stack; redirect only the genuine exceptions — discontinued disposables SKUs.
Titles, metas, H1s, canonicals, internal links and body copy carried across per template — not regenerated and quietly lost.
Product, review, breadcrumb & organisation schema rebuilt and validated for rich results and SERP CTR.
Products, collections, blog & metafields mapped into Medusa's model without losing the copy that earns rankings.
A deliberate CDN choice, alt text preserved, modern formats and zero layout shift — the headless image win.
The part that most often breaks on headless — rebuilt event-by-event on the new custom checkout and reconciled to real orders.
A consent platform wired to Google Consent Mode v2 that persists across the new single-page storefront.
Server-render every indexable page so Google receives full HTML; crawl-safe faceted navigation and pagination.
A performance budget per template — the headless speed upside, made real, measured and protected in CI.
Reviews, on-site search, loyalty, subscriptions, wishlist & back-in-stock re-provisioned on the headless stack.
Crawler-safe age verification, preserved regulatory content and a catalogue built to flex for upcoming rules.
Protecting what you have is the floor. The rebuild also lets us fix long-standing Shopify limitations and ship new revenue features — offered at three levels, so you choose how far to push it.
Like-for-like, done properly, with the obvious quick wins.
Meaningful redesign of the templates that move revenue, plus a few new features.
Full redesign, new features, IA/URL overhaul and a design system.
The tiers above are really just combinations of these. Start with a cheap sanity-check or take it all the way to a production build — mix and match to the runway and budget. Each one is a defined deliverable with a clear output, so you always know what you're getting.
A UX, SEO and CRO review of the current templates with a prioritised list of what to fix and why — the cheapest way to pressure-test direction before anyone designs.
Low-fidelity, greyscale layouts of the key templates — hierarchy, content order and components resolved before any visual design. Fast to produce and cheap to change.
Full, on-brand visual designs in Figma — responsive across breakpoints, real content, every state considered. What the site will actually look like, signed off before a line of build.
A clickable Figma prototype of a key flow — checkout, a product finder, faceted browsing — that stakeholders can sign off and, if useful, real users can be tested on before we build.
We build the templates and components in the Medusa storefront (React / Next.js) — either handing your dev a production-ready front end or pairing with them to move faster.
A reusable component library and design tokens, documented so your team can extend the site consistently long after launch — the foundation that keeps everything coherent as it grows.
The gate has to be legally sound and crawler-safe — a full-page JS interstitial that hides content from Google can de-index the whole site.
Nicotine strengths, TPD/MHRA product data and health warnings must be mapped and preserved through the catalogue migration.
The catalogue is built flexibly for what's coming — vaping duty from Oct 2026, packaging and flavour consultations — so change is cheap to apply.
We'd start with Discovery: a full baseline and the URL parity plan, so the migration is de-risked before a single template ships. From there you choose how far to take the rebuild.