The single most expensive mistake in a Magento 1 replatform has nothing to do with the theme or the checkout. It is letting the URLs change without a redirect map, so every ranked page, every backlink, and every bookmarked product quietly turns into a 404. Google reads that as content that disappeared, and the rankings you spent years earning go with it. A clean URL and 301 strategy is what keeps the traffic attached to the store while everything underneath it changes.
We have moved enough stores off Magento 1 to say this plainly: the migration is a database and code project, but the SEO risk is a URL project. Treat them as two separate workstreams and you keep your organic revenue. Blur them and you gamble it.
Why does a Magento 1 migration put your rankings at risk?
The risk is real because Magento 1 and Adobe Commerce build URLs differently, so a like-for-like move rarely preserves your paths by default. Adobe ended official support for Magento 1 on June 30, 2020, and Sansec has documented that large numbers of stores kept running on the unsupported platform well past that date. Most of those merchants are now migrating, and they are moving catalogs that have accumulated years of ranked category and product URLs.
The downside of getting it wrong is not abstract. A botched migration can drop organic traffic by 30% or more, and recovery is never guaranteed. Search Engine Journal has walked through cases where a site lost roughly a third of its organic traffic after a migration and had to claw it back over months. For a store doing meaningful revenue through search, a drop like that is a full quarter of missed numbers, and it usually lands right after go-live when everyone assumed the hard part was over. Getting the platform mechanics right is covered in our Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration guide; this piece is about the URL layer that sits on top of it.
Rewrite or redirect? They are not the same thing
Before you map anything, get the vocabulary straight, because Magento uses both words and they do different jobs. A URL rewrite changes how a URL is displayed without sending the browser anywhere new, while a redirect actually tells the browser to go to a different address, permanently with a 301 or temporarily with a 302. Mageplaza lays out the distinction clearly, and it matters for migration because you will use both. Rewrites keep your new Adobe Commerce URLs clean and human-readable. The 301 is the tool that carries link equity from an old Magento 1 path to its new home.
That link-equity transfer is the whole point. A 301 tells search engines to move the ranking value and the index entry from the old URL to the new one. Skip it, and Google keeps the old URL in its index, finds a 404, and eventually drops both the page and the authority its backlinks were feeding. The redirect is what makes the move invisible to search engines.
How to build the redirect map without losing pages
Start by exporting every URL that currently exists, then decide where each one lands. In practice we pull the full Magento 1 URL rewrite table, the live sitemap, and a crawl of the store, then reconcile them against the new Adobe Commerce URL structure. Magento 2 supports importing URL rewrites directly, and FireBear documents the export-and-import path that lets you recreate old paths as managed rewrites in the new store rather than rebuilding them by hand.
For the redirects themselves, prioritize instead of trying to boil the ocean on day one. Scandiweb’s redirect mapping guide makes the case that the pages you cannot afford to let 404 are the ones receiving organic traffic and the ones holding valuable backlinks, even if those two sets do not overlap. A product page with almost no traffic but a link from a high-authority publication still deserves a 301, because that backlink is passing authority you lose the moment the target breaks. Map the money pages first: top organic landing pages, high-backlink URLs, then the long tail.
One rule we never break: no redirect chains. Each old Magento 1 URL should point directly to its final Adobe Commerce destination, not hop through two or three intermediate redirects. Chains slow the page, dilute the equity being passed, and give search engines more ways to lose the thread. If a URL moved twice during the project, collapse the history so the live redirect goes straight from the original path to the current one.
What to verify before and after go-live
Verification is not a post-launch nicety, it is the difference between catching a problem in staging and explaining a traffic collapse to your CFO. Before cutover, crawl the staging site against your redirect map and confirm every mapped old URL returns a single 301 to a live 200 page, with no 404s and no chains. Establishing a clean traffic and performance baseline first makes the after-picture readable, which is why we run a pre-migration performance baseline on every M1 project before we touch the new store.
After go-live, watch it like a hawk for the first few weeks. Submit the new sitemap, monitor crawl stats and coverage errors in Search Console, and keep a running list of any 404s that surface in logs so you can patch redirects the same day. Some short-term ranking volatility is normal while Google re-crawls and re-indexes the new structure. A sustained drop is not normal, and it almost always traces back to a mapping gap you can still fix.
Handled this way, the URL layer becomes the boring part of the migration instead of the catastrophic one. We would rather over-invest three days in a redirect map than spend three months explaining a traffic drop that never had to happen. If you are planning a Magento 1 exit and want the SEO side owned as seriously as the code, that is the kind of work our Magento team does.
Related Resources
- Magento 1 EOL impact: what is still running and what is breaking
- Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration: 2026 cost, timeline, and data you cannot lose
- Replatforming off Magento 1: Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, or BigCommerce
- Magento 1 to Adobe Commerce pre-migration performance baseline
- Magento 1 extension mapping: migrate, replace, or rebuild
