The short version: One thing decides this, and it is not the redirects. You have to own the domain. If your store lives at `yourshop.platformname.com`, there is nothing to preserve and nothing to redirect: every ranking, every link in every old post, and every printed bag points at an address you do not control and cannot forward. If you do own the domain, the job is small: find the handful of pages that actually get traffic, map each to its new address, set 301 redirects, and expect a few weeks of wobble. Most small food sites discover that three or four pages carry almost everything, which turns this from a project into an afternoon.
Two things, in strict order.
Everything else, including the platform you are moving to, matters far less than most migration advice implies. Search engines handle sites moving addresses all the time. What they cannot handle is a page vanishing with no forwarding instruction.
The whole discipline fits in one sentence: keep the address, forward the address, or accept the traffic loss knowingly. For the platform-by-platform redirect controls, our guide to what each platform lets you export pairs with this one. And since the destination shapes the redirect plan, a storefront that works with your own domain keeps every option open.
Because a redirect is an instruction you give at the domain level, and you can only give instructions about things you control.
If you own `yourbakery.com` and point it at platform A today and platform B tomorrow, then as far as the outside world is concerned nothing moved. The address is the same. Individual page paths change, and you forward those with redirects.
If your store is at `yourbakery.platformname.com`, that address belongs to the platform. When you leave, it stops resolving or starts showing something else, and you have no way to forward anyone. Every link anyone saved, every old social post, every card you handed out at a market, all of it breaks at once.
That is the single most consequential difference between vendors who move platforms easily and vendors for whom it is a disaster, and it costs about $15 a year to be on the right side of it.
If you do not own a domain, do this before you plan anything else: buy one, point it at your current store, and let it be your public address for a while. Update your bio, your packaging, and your listings to use it. Then, when you eventually move, the move is invisible.
Check rather than guess, because the answer determines how much work this is.
Open whatever analytics you have and look at the last three to six months of search traffic by page. Sort by visits. For most small food businesses the pattern is stark:
If four pages carry 90% of your search traffic, you need four redirects done carefully and can handle the rest with a single catch-all. That is an afternoon, not a project.
The mistake is mapping all sixty pages in painstaking detail and running out of care before you reach the four that matter. Do the important ones first, properly.
Make a two-column list. Old address on the left, new address on the right.
Platforms use different structures, and this is where the work is:
So `/products/sourdough-loaf` might become `/shop/sourdough-loaf` or `/sourdough-loaf` or something else entirely. If your new platform lets you set the URL slug, use that to match the old path as closely as possible, which reduces the number of redirects you need at all.
Rules that keep this simple:
A dip, then a recovery, and the shape is predictable enough to plan around.
The first week or two: search engines re-crawl and follow the redirects. Rankings move around, sometimes down. This is normal and is not evidence you did it wrong.
Weeks three to six: things usually settle back towards where they were.
Beyond that: if a page has not recovered, the usual causes are a missing redirect, a redirect pointing somewhere unhelpful, or content that changed substantially in the rebuild.
Two things that make the dip worse:
Seven things, in order.
Step five is the one small food businesses get most value from and most often forget. For local discovery, your Google Business Profile matters more than your website, because someone searching for a supplier near them is served by a map result. Our guides to getting a food business on Google Business Profile and showing up for near-me searches cover that, and a profile pointing at a dead URL is a live problem.
Then this is a rebuild rather than a migration, and it is worth being honest about the cost.
You cannot redirect anything. What you can do:
The consolation is that for most local food vendors, search was never the main channel. If your customers come from Instagram, a market stall, and word of mouth, losing a platform subdomain's rankings costs you less than the fortnight of confusion does.
Our guide to local SEO for cottage food vendors covers rebuilding, and the fastest lever is almost always the free Google Business Profile rather than the site.
Less than people assume, and in one specific way that does matter.
What matters technically is fairly basic: the pages load quickly, work on a phone, and are crawlable. Every credible platform clears that bar, and choosing one over another for search reasons is usually over-thinking.
What does matter:
Ask about the first one specifically, since it is the one that varies and the one that affects this job directly.
For general standards on how public-facing sites should behave, Digital.gov is a readable reference written for government teams and largely applicable to anyone, and Section508.gov covers accessibility, which is both the right thing and increasingly a factor in how usable your store is on a phone.
Worth quantifying so you can decide how much care it deserves.
For a vendor whose customers arrive from social media and markets, and whose search traffic is twenty visits a month, botching the redirects costs almost nothing. Do the basics and move on.
For a vendor who ranks for something genuinely valuable, a product plus a city, or a "near me" search that brings real customers, a lost page is a lost channel and rebuilding takes months. That vendor should map carefully, test every redirect, and keep the old platform live for a month.
Look at your analytics before deciding which of those you are. It takes five minutes and it tells you whether this is an afternoon of care or a footnote.
The part people forget, and it breaks quietly rather than loudly.
Your web address appears in more places than your website. A partial list worth working through:
Numbers one and six are the ones that matter and the ones you are least likely to update. A market's vendor directory linking to a dead address costs you traffic you never see, and the fix is a polite email to whoever maintains it.
Printed material is the argument for owning a domain in its own right. A thousand bags with a platform subdomain on them become a thousand bags pointing at nothing. The same bags with your own domain keep working forever, through any number of platform changes, which is why the $15 a year is one of the better purchases in this whole category.
If you want to check how a new platform handles URLs before committing to any of this, set up a trial and look at the addresses it generates for a product and a collection point. Whether you can edit them is the one technical question that actually affects how much redirect work you face.
If you are moving to a storefront built for local collection, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it is not a website builder, so there is no blog and no content pages to rank with, and it does not ship nationally. If your search traffic comes from articles or location pages, replacing a site with an ordering tool loses you that and you should keep a site alongside. You can put your products into a trial while your current site stays live, which is the sequence that keeps rankings intact anyway.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | Redirect control when you leave | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | URL redirects configurable in the admin | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Square Online | Limited redirect control | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| Wix | Redirect manager available | Light $17/mo, Core $29/mo | No free trial | $0 platform fee | 2.9% + $0.30 processing (Amex 3.7%) |
| Squarespace | URL mappings supported | $19/mo Basic | 14-day free trial | 2% platform fee on Basic | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Homegrown | Your own domain forwards to your storefront | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Etsy | No control, the URL is theirs | No subscription | n/a | $0.20 listing + 6.5% commission | 3.0% + $0.25 processing |
Not if you own the domain and set up 301 redirects from old page addresses to their new equivalents. Expect a dip for two to six weeks, then recovery. If your store is on a platform subdomain, you lose them permanently.
An instruction that a page has permanently moved to a new address. Search engines follow it and transfer most of the old page's standing to the new one. Use 301 rather than 302, which means temporary and is treated differently.
Usually far fewer than you have. Check your analytics for search traffic by page: most small food sites find three or four pages carry nearly everything, and those are the ones to map carefully.
You cannot redirect anything, and every old link breaks when you leave. Buy your own domain now and use it going forward, so the next move is invisible. About $15 a year.
Typically two to six weeks. If a page has not recovered after that, the usual causes are a missing redirect, one pointing somewhere unhelpful, or content that changed substantially during the rebuild.
No. That tells search engines the old pages are gone rather than moved, and you lose their standing. Map each important page to its closest equivalent, and only use a general fallback for the long tail.
Only in basic ways: pages load, work on a phone, and are crawlable, which every credible platform manages. The one thing worth asking is whether you can set your own URL slugs, since that directly affects redirect mapping.
This whole question reduces to one thing: do you own the domain? If you do, moving platforms is routine, and the work is a two-column list of old addresses and new ones with 301 redirects between them.
If you do not, no amount of technique helps. A platform subdomain is an address you are renting, and when you leave, every link pointing at it breaks with no forwarding available. Buy a domain today, for about $15 a year, and use it as your public address from now on.
Then check your analytics before you plan anything. Most small food businesses find that three or four pages carry almost all their search traffic, which means doing this properly is an afternoon of care on the pages that matter rather than a line-by-line mapping of sixty pages nobody visits.
