Warning signs
Consider migration when: the platform can't support your growth, customization costs keep rising with diminishing returns, performance degrades under load, vendor lock-in limits your integration options, the platform is approaching end-of-life, or your team can't make changes without excessive development cycles.
Planning the migration
Start with a thorough audit of what exists. Map every feature, every integration, every content page, every custom flow. Define what works (keep it), what doesn't (drop it), and what's missing (add it). The goal is a clear scope document with a minimum viable first release and a phased roadmap.
Involve all stakeholders early — sales, marketing, operations, finance. Migration affects everyone. Use our platform comparison guide to evaluate Shopify, Norce, Shopware, and Magento against your specific requirements.
A thorough migration plan starts with a complete inventory of your current setup. Document every integration, custom feature, and data dependency before writing a single line of migration code. Map your existing URL structure and set up 301 redirects to preserve SEO equity. Identify which customizations are genuinely needed on the new platform and which were workarounds for limitations you will no longer have. Prioritize data migration order: products and categories first, then customers and order history, then content pages and media assets.
Data migration
Products, customers, orders, content, and configuration all need to transfer. Clean the data before migration — duplicate products, outdated customers, and broken content waste effort. Map fields between old and new systems carefully. Test the migration on a staging environment multiple times before go-live.
Integration remapping
Every integration needs evaluation: keep, replace, or rebuild. ERP integration is critical — you always need a business system for accounting. Junipeer simplifies this by providing a middleware layer. Standard integrations to Fortnox, Business Central, and Visma.net can be live same-day.
Payment providers (Klarna, Svea, Adyen), shipping (Ingrid, nShift), and CRM (Klaviyo, Dotdigital) often change during migration. Plan each one.
For the frontend, Frntkey provides a plug-and-play headless storefront that can dramatically accelerate the rebuild.
SEO preservation
Map every old URL to its new equivalent. Set up 301 redirects before launch. Preserve meta titles, descriptions, and structured data. Monitor Google Search Console closely after go-live. SEO recovery from a poorly planned migration can take months.
Testing and go-live
Run parallel systems during the transition. Test every integration, every checkout flow, every edge case. Plan the DNS cutover and have a rollback strategy ready. Monitor closely for the first weeks — order flows, inventory sync, payment processing, and email triggers all need verification.
Frontend migration
Migrating the frontend is often the most visible part of a replatforming project. If you are moving to a headless architecture, this is an opportunity to build a faster, more flexible storefront that is decoupled from the commerce backend. Frntkey offers a plug-and-play headless storefront that includes product pages, cart, checkout, and account pages out of the box. Rather than starting from an empty framework and spending months on frontend development, Frntkey lets you go live quickly and refine the experience iteratively. This approach reduces both time-to-market and the risk of a prolonged migration.
Before go-live, run a parallel period where both the old and new platforms process orders simultaneously in a staging environment. Verify that inventory levels synchronize correctly, that payment flows complete without errors, and that email notifications trigger as expected. Test edge cases such as partial refunds, multi-currency orders, and gift card redemptions. Create a rollback plan that can be executed within minutes if critical issues surface during the first hours after launch. Monitor key metrics closely for the first two weeks: conversion rate, average order value, page load time, and error rates in server logs.