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Replatforming is one of the riskiest moments in a site's life: rankings, structured data and years of accumulated search equity can be lost in a single launch. A clear strategy and meticulous plan of action must be followed or your site risks losing all of the value that you have already built up. In this case study, we'll detail how we helped Solvar replatform to Shopify.
Solvar is a leading Irish jeweller, offering irish and celtic jewellery including claddagh rings, celtic necklaces and shamrock-themed designs. The brand sells through Solvar.com. They contacted Adaptive & Co for assistance when they were moving from a legacy e-commerce CMS to Shopify.
After we had made our first crawl of solvar.com’s legacy ecommerce platform, we understood that there was a significant degree of risk for this client hiding under the surface of their existing platform.
The legacy platform had generated roughly 300,000 crawlable URLs for a catalogue of fewer than 1,000 real pages. Currency switchers, filter combinations, sort orders and pagination each minted new URLs, which resulted in wasted crawl budget and a bloated index. In fact, the crawl file passed 5 GB before the audit machine gave out at 170,000 URLs, which was itself the diagnosis: the site did not have 300,000 pages, it had a URL generation fault.
The basis of our strategy was to cut the noise before the migration. We traced the URL explosion to four parameter patterns (currency, filters, sorting, pagination), excluded them, and re-scoped the audit to the real catalogue. The migration plan shrank from 300,000 URLs, to the pages that actually earned traffic.
Next, we cleaned up Google's view of the site. A Search Console audit found a dead sitemap from an abandoned beta subdomain that Google had not crawled since 2022, alongside the live sitemap with 974 discovered pages. We flagged the dead sitemap for removal, documented why large groups of pages were not indexed, and made a plan to deal with each group.
Then, we audited the structured data, page type by page type. We compared schema markup on the live site against the Shopify build for every template: home, product, category, blog index and article. The new build was missing organisation contact details, breadcrumb markup, and multi-image product markup that the old site had. Each gap came with ready-to-paste JSON-LD so the developers could fix it before launch, not after.
Finally, we delivered a 10-day migration roadmap. The roadmap specified URL mapping and redirects, transfer of meta tags, headings and structured data, image alt text, post-launch monitoring in Search Console, and an ongoing content and backlink plan; it assigned owners and set durations for each step.
With the background work complete and the migration roadmap in place, we had prepared our client for a seamless migration to their new platform.
Semrush estimated data, June to November 2024:
The site launched on Shopify in mid-2024 from a clean, fully mapped catalogue, with structured data parity verified per template and redirects protecting its search equity.
Within five months the numbers above followed. Organic search now accounts for around 89% of the site's Google SERP presence, with 87% of it coming from non-branded queries: people finding the products, not just the brand.
