Brave x Quickfire: Why website migrations make or break eCom brands (and How to Get Them Right)
Will Phillips
Marketing Manager
Every eCommerce leader reaches a point where their current platform stops being an asset and starts being a ceiling. The question is never really whether to migrate, but how. And the answer to that question determines whether you come out the other side with stronger rankings, better revenue, and a faster site, or spend the next six months firefighting a traffic collapse that never needed to happen.
At Brave, we have seen both outcomes. In this blog, we revisit a recent podcast our Founder, Tony Conte, and Head of Agency, Jessica Kent, recorded with Quickfire’s Co-Founder, Nathan Lomax, to unpack what a website migration actually involves, why so many go wrong, and what happens when development and SEO work together from day one, as we proved with our joint client Kettler alongside our agency partner, Quickfire Digital.
A website migration is the process of moving your eCommerce site from one platform to another. For many brands, that means transitioning from a legacy CMS or bespoke build into a more modern platform like Shopify or Shopify Plus. On paper, it sounds straightforward. In practice, it touches every layer of your digital business: your URL structure, your content, your product catalogue, your checkout flow, your integrations, and critically, your organic search rankings.
Search engines have spent months, often years, learning your site. They understand your pages, your topical authority, and the signals that justify your positions in the results. A migration carried out without proper planning disrupts all of that overnight. You can obliterate years of hard-earned organic equity, customer trust, and revenue in a single go-live event if the groundwork has not been laid correctly.
The most common failure point in a migration is not technical. It is commercial. Brands go to market, shortlist a development agency, and make a decision based on project cost alone. An agency quotes £30,000 to move the site, the board signs it off, and the project begins. What that number typically fails to account for is the platform licence fee, the app subscriptions from Shopify’s ecosystem of 12,000-plus apps, the payment processing costs, and the SEO partner who should have been involved from day one. By the time the project reaches go-live, that £30,000 has quietly become £50,000 or £60,000, and the SEO work has been left to the internal team to handle, or skipped entirely.
Nathan Lomax, co-founder of Quickfire Digital, makes the point plainly: “Would you buy a new car and not take out insurance? A migration is the same concept. You’re moving something with real fragility. Not having the right people in your corner is commercial suicide.” The damage that follows a poorly planned migration is both predictable and painful. Pages that ranked for years disappear from search results, loyal customers land on error pages, and every marketing channel from Google Ads to email is disrupted because the product feed structure has changed underneath them.
The recovery from this situation takes far longer than most brands expect. Because Google recrawls on its own timetable, you cannot simply fix errors and expect immediate results. Every week of recovery time is a week of budget and focus that could have been spent growing the brand, developing new content, or improving conversion rates. As Jessica Kent, Head of Agency at Brave, puts it: “Recouping and firefighting afterwards is not a quick fix. If you have a poor migration, that’s up to six months of fixing, and a crazy amount of additional money added to a project that’s already been signed off.”
The accountability piece is where projects fall apart under pressure. When development and SEO teams work in isolation, with no pre-agreed responsibilities and no shared source of truth, the result under stress is organisations pointing fingers rather than solving problems. Who owns the redirect map? Who is responsible for the URL strategy? Who signs off the staging environment before launch? These questions need answers before a single line of code is written. If they do not have answers, the migration is not ready to begin.
The perception that migrations are inherently risky is only true when corners are cut. When development and SEO align from the very first conversation, a migration becomes a strategic foundation for the next phase of growth rather than a white-knuckle exercise in damage limitation.
Consider the opportunity it presents. The bonnet is already open. You are already rebuilding the engine. This is precisely the right moment to address every friction point in the customer journey, resolve the site architecture that has been holding you back, improve page speed, build in the integrations that support your marketing stack, and structure your content in a way that serves both users and search engines simultaneously. Nathan frames the mindset shift clearly: “Efficiency, profitability, and scalability. Those are the three holy grail metrics. You’re not just doing this for 12 months. You’re doing it for the next two, three, four years.”
A well-executed migration also creates space to audit your entire tech stack. Who handles email marketing, and is the integration with your new platform actually working? Is your fulfilment operation set up to handle the volume a better-performing site will generate? Are there manual internal processes consuming days of staff time each week that automation could eliminate entirely? One client Nathan described had identified a customer service task requiring two full working days per week, every week, with a potential full-time hire on the horizon. A small addition to the migration scope made that hire unnecessary and redirected the budget back into marketing. These are the gains that do not show up in a headline conversion rate figure, but they compound over years.
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Before any code is written, the most valuable thing you can do is bring every stakeholder into a room and agree on why you are migrating. Development team, SEO agency, paid media manager, email marketing lead, and the client brand team all need to be present at discovery. The conversations that happen in that room, about what is working on the current site, what is not, and what each channel needs from the new build, are the conversations that prevent problems six months down the line.
From a technical standpoint, Jessica describes the process in four clear stages. The first is establishing a technical baseline: crawling the existing site, documenting indexation behaviour, Core Web Vitals performance, and structural weaknesses, so that you have a benchmark against which to measure the new site’s performance. The second is URL and architecture strategy, mapping every page on the current site and deciding what stays, what moves, what merges, and critically, why. Those decisions must be driven by data from Google Search Console, not assumptions or aesthetic preferences.
The third stage is the redirect map, which Jessica describes as the holy grail of the whole project. There should be one document, locked down, shared across every team, with a named owner who is accountable for its accuracy. The number of migrations that have gone wrong because five different versions of a redirect map were circulating simultaneously, with nobody certain which was current, is a pattern the industry keeps repeating. The fourth stage is staging checks, and by the time the project reaches that point, all significant development changes should already have been reviewed and approved by the SEO team. If new issues are being raised two weeks before launch, the process broke down somewhere earlier.
Quickfire’s approach reinforces this with a comprehensive technical specification produced as the output of the discovery workshop. That document becomes the binding contract for the entire project: every page, every component, every responsibility, clearly assigned. The formal agency agreement between Quickfire and the brand does not get signed until that specification is agreed, reviewed, and signed off by all parties. This protects everyone at the table, and it means there is no ambiguity when something comes up later in the build, because something always does.
Kettler is a premium outdoor garden furniture brand with strong category leadership in the UK market and a loyal, returning customer base. When Brave and Quickfire were brought in, the brand’s website was holding it back significantly. The existing platform was slow, inflexible, and poorly structured. For a brand whose product range is deeply seasonal and whose customers expect a premium digital experience to reflect a premium product, this was a meaningful problem.
Historically, Kettler’s focus had been on retail partnerships through garden centres and major stockists, with the website operating as a secondary consideration rather than a primary revenue channel. Getting the migration right had the potential to completely transform the brand’s direct-to-consumer performance. Brave had the advantage of an established relationship with Kettler, which meant the team understood the customer, knew the pain points, and could bring Quickfire up to speed quickly at the discovery session.
The joint discovery workshop brought together Brave’s SEO team, Quickfire’s development and project leads, and Kettler’s marketing team in a single full cross-agency meeting. From that session, Quickfire produced what Jessica describes as the most comprehensive scope of work she has ever seen before a website build. The SEO team could visualise exactly what was being built, when, and how, months before anything went into staging. When the SEO team identified that a content section had been missed from the module map, it was raised agency-to-agency and resolved immediately, rather than surfacing as a two-week-before-launch crisis.
One particularly instructive moment came when reviewing the original product listing pages, which featured a prominent “Buy from Stockist” button with the website purchase option sitting below it. This created a genuine tension between protecting Kettler’s retail partnerships and prioritising direct online conversion. Rather than leaving that debate unresolved for the client to mediate, both agencies worked through the options together, arrived at a joint recommendation, and presented it with clear rationale. The client received a solution, not a dilemma.
The results after launch tell the rest of the story. There was no ranking loss on core commercial pages from day one, and key top-level keywords improved in organic positions within the first six weeks. Organic revenue remained stable immediately post-launch and continued to grow with no volatility, where any drop at all would have been considered acceptable given the scale of the project. Conversion rate increased by 28%, average order value increased by 29%, and year-on-year revenue increased by 144%. As Nathan puts it: “The numbers do the talking for this story. We all got in the room together. We went through the process together. We didn’t cut corners.”
A migration handled well pays for itself many times over. It protects the organic equity you have built over years, opens new revenue channels, and sets your business up with a platform and structure designed for the next several years of growth, not just the next twelve months.
Nathan offers a useful reframe for anyone still thinking of migration as a cost: “Investment like, what’s the investment going to make for you? It’s not a cost to the business. It’s an investment, just like investing in machinery. You’re doing it to make lives better, to improve the user experience, to improve internal efficiencies.” Jess adds that the first call to make is to your customers: ask them, through email, social media, or wherever you have reach, what their actual pain points are with the current website, and let that feed directly into the scope.
If you are six to twelve months out from a migration and want to talk through your options, the Brave team is here to help. Whether you want a sense check on your redirect plan, a full discovery process, or simply some reassurance that you are approaching this the right way, reach out. We would rather help you get it right from the start than spend six months helping you recover from getting it wrong.
