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Home improvement UK Shopify Engagement completed Jun 2026

GreenYard Landscaping: recovering from a failed migration, then growing past it.

A UK landscaping and garden-supplies retailer that lost 41% of its organic traffic after an unmanaged move from WooCommerce to Shopify.

+67%
Organic traffic, 4 months post-fix
118%
Of pre-migration traffic recovered
2,100
Broken redirects fixed
+38%
Category page revenue
Client overview

GreenYard Landscaping sells garden design supplies, turf, and outdoor building materials across the UK. A DIY move from WooCommerce to Shopify six months prior had quietly broken thousands of URLs, and organic traffic had been sliding ever since with no clear cause identified in-house.

Challenges
Over 2,000 old WooCommerce URLs returning 404s or redirecting to the homepage
Collection pages restructured with no redirect mapping at all
Duplicate collection URLs created by Shopify's filter and sort parameters
No one on the team had flagged the traffic drop as migration-related
SEO audit & technical issues found
Broken redirect chains

2,100+ legacy URLs with no redirect, or redirecting through 3+ hops to an unrelated page.

Lost backlink equity

Years of earned backlinks pointed at now-404 product and category URLs.

Duplicate collections

Filter and sort parameters generating indexable duplicate collection URLs.

Missing product schema

No product or review schema carried over from the old WooCommerce build.

Implementation & timeline
Week 1Full crawl comparison against an archived copy of the old WooCommerce site to rebuild the complete URL map.
Week 2–32,100+ 301 redirects implemented, replacing the multi-hop chains and 404s.
Week 4–6Canonical tags and collection-URL rules fixed to stop duplicate filter pages from indexing.
Week 7–16Product and review schema added; category page content rebuilt for top revenue categories.
Traffic growth
100%
59%
64%
80%
118%
Pre-migration baselineMonth 4 post-fix
Keyword & ranking growth
Artificial grass supplier UKLost → #4
Garden turf onlineLost → #2
Raised garden beds#19 → #3
Landscaping supplies near meLost → #1
Before / after
BEFORE
AFTER
Anatomy of the redirect failure

The migration tool used for the WooCommerce-to-Shopify move redirected every old URL to the homepage by default rather than mapping to the equivalent new page. Google treated this as a mass content removal, not a restructure, and de-indexed the affected URLs within weeks.

Recovery milestones
Week 1
2,100+ broken redirects identified
Week 6
All redirects live, canonical duplicates resolved
Month 4
118% of pre-migration traffic recovered
Protecting against the next migration

GreenYard now keeps a maintained URL map as a standing document, updated with every collection change, so any future platform move starts from a source of truth instead of relying on migration-tool defaults again.

"We knew traffic was down but had no idea it traced back to the Shopify move six months earlier. Samar found 2,000+ broken redirects in the first week and had us back above our old numbers by month four."

Founder, GreenYard Landscaping
FAQ
01Why did the migration tool's default redirects cause so much damage?

Homepage-only redirects tell Google the specific page is gone with nothing to replace it, causing de-indexing, whereas a mapped 1:1 redirect passes the page's authority to its true replacement.

02How long did it take Google to recognize the redirects were fixed?

Meaningful re-indexing began within about 3 weeks of the redirects going live, with fuller ranking recovery over the following months.

03Did you recover 100% of the lost backlink equity?

Most of it. A small percentage of very old backlinks pointed to URLs with no reasonable modern equivalent and were redirected to the closest relevant category instead.

04What would you have done differently if brought in before the migration?

Built the complete redirect map before launch and run a staging-vs-production crawl comparison, the same process now used in the site migrations service.

05How do you prevent duplicate content from filter and sort URLs going forward?

Canonical tags and indexing rules were set at the platform level so new filter combinations don't get indexed as they're created.

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Written by Samar Hayat

Technical & local SEO consultant, 5+ years working with UK home-improvement brands and US health, finance, and tech companies. More about Samar →

Last updated: July 2026

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