OZtrail is a name South African outdoor enthusiasts know well — a trusted retailer of camping, hiking, and adventure gear, with a substantial product catalogue and an established organic search presence built over years on WordPress.
The brief was three-fold: migrate the store from WordPress to Shopify without losing any of the hard-earned SEO equity, optimise the product catalogue for the new platform, and complete the brand’s web presence with three new core pages — About, Blog, and Contact.
The hardest part? The migration. Move a 200+ product ecommerce site to a new platform poorly, and you can lose months — sometimes years — of organic traffic in a few weeks. The brief made it clear: that wasn’t an option here.
Most platform migrations bleed traffic. Pages get dropped, redirects get missed, metadata goes stale, and the index gets confused. We didn’t want OZtrail to live through that — we wanted them to come out the other side stronger.
SEO migration first, then platform migration — full URL mapping, 301 redirect strategy, sitemap planning, and metadata preservation across every product, category, and content page. The migration was treated as an SEO project as much as a development project — because that's what it actually is.
New page design and build — designed and built the About, Blog, and Contact pages from scratch — completing the brand's digital presence with the same considered care brought to the homepage and shop. The plan worked. OZtrail moved platforms without losing traffic — and gained organic visibility on the way through
🔄 Full Platform Migration: WordPress → Shopify A complete replatforming of OZtrail’s online store from WordPress to Shopify — preserving everything that mattered, rebuilding what could be improved, and setting up the store on a platform built for ecommerce growth.
📈 SEO Migration That Held the Line — and Grew It Comprehensive URL mapping, redirect strategy, and metadata preservation across the entire site. The site emerged from migration with no measurable traffic drop — and grew organic traffic in the months that followed.
📦 200+ Product Pages, Optimised Every product page on the store reviewed and rebuilt for SEO and conversion — proper structure, clean metadata, on-page keyword strategy, and product imagery handled with care.
🎨 New Page Design: About, Blog, Contact Three new core pages designed and built from scratch — bringing the brand’s full story to life online and giving customers the full experience, not just the shopping cart.
OZtrail South Africa now operates on a faster, more flexible ecommerce platform built for growth — with its full product catalogue optimised, its brand story properly told, and its hard-earned SEO equity not just preserved, but expanded.
The migration outcome speaks for itself: zero measurable loss in organic traffic across the platform change, followed by month-on-month organic growth in the period afterwards. For a 200+ product ecommerce store undergoing a full platform migration, that’s the kind of result most brands brace themselves not to achieve.
The brand now has a digital presence that’s faster, fuller, and more findable — and a foundation built to keep growing.
Every business we work with is different — and so is every project we deliver. Take a look at a few more we’ve had the pleasure of building, refining, and growing.
