How to Migrate a Product Catalog Without Losing URLs

Inventory

Before anything moves, list every URL the old site serves. Include product pages, category pages, size or variant pages, report files, guides, images that are linked from elsewhere, and old addresses that already redirect.

Pull the list from several sources: the current sitemap, a crawl of the site, your analytics and your search console data. Each one catches pages the others miss.

URL Mapping

Build a redirect map: one row per old URL, with the new URL it should go to. Keep the map as a file you can edit and review, not only as server rules.

• Where a page keeps its address, mark it as unchanged.
• Where it moves, map it to the closest equivalent: a product to the same product, a category to the same category.
• Where a product is discontinued but a close replacement exists, map it there.
• Where nothing equivalent exists, mark it as removed.

Redirects

• Use permanent 301 redirects for pages that have moved.
• Redirect in one hop. If an old address already redirected, point it straight to the final page, not through a chain.
• Do not redirect everything to the homepage. Search engines can treat that as a missing page, and visitors lose what they came for.
• Return 404 or 410 for items that are genuinely gone with no replacement.
• Keep the redirects in place long term, not just for the launch.

Content

Carry the content across, not only the address. Product names, sizes, descriptions, images and report links should arrive intact. Page titles and descriptions that were working should stay unless there is a reason to change them.

Update internal links on the new site to point at new addresses directly, rather than relying on redirects. Update canonical tags, and publish a sitemap that lists only the new, live URLs.

Testing

• Run every old URL from the inventory against the new site before launch.
• Confirm each returns a single 301 to the mapped page, or 404/410 if removed.
• Check that no redirect lands on another redirect.
• Click through the main navigation and product pages for broken links.
• Confirm report files still open from their links.

Monitoring

After launch, watch for 404 errors in server logs and in your search console. Each one is either an address the map missed or a link elsewhere that needs a redirect added.

Submit the new sitemap, check that new pages are being indexed, and keep the redirect map as the record of what moved where. It will be needed again the next time the site changes.