Hartwell & Pike · Fishing tackle retailer · Hereford
How a 70-year-old tackle shop moved platforms without losing a single ranking
Headline reading
0%
traffic loss on migration
Margin note: Seventy years of fly-fishing pages. Not one lost.
§ 1 Preface
A shop on the Wye, and a migration that had already failed once
A replatform from a legacy cart threatened 9,000 product URLs and two decades of fly-fishing authority; a previous attempt had been rolled back after traffic dropped 40%.
Hartwell & Pike sells rods, reels and hand-tied flies from a shop in Hereford and, for the past two decades, to anglers all over the country. Its legacy cart had become impossible to patch, but the business remembered the last attempt to leave it: in a fortnight, organic sessions fell to 60% of normal, and the old site went back up.
The brief was plain. Move all 9,000-odd product pages, the category tree and two decades of fly-tying guides to the new platform, and do it so that Google barely notices anything but the speed.
§ 2 Soundings
What the audit found below the surface
| Area | Depth | Finding | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical | 11,480 | Legacy URLs crawled, with session IDs and sort parameters creating 2,266 duplicates of 9,214 real pages. | Canonical set defined; duplicates collapsed in the map. |
| Technical | 1,230 | 404s already reported in Search Console from the rolled-back attempt, many with backlinks from angling forums. | Every one mapped to its closest living page. |
| Diagnosis | 40% | The earlier attempt pattern-redirected all products to the homepage, which Google treated as soft 404s. | Strict 1:1 rule; no redirect to the homepage. |
| Performance | 480ms | Mobile INP on product pages, driven by a jQuery variant picker and three third-party widgets. | Picker rebuilt; widgets deferred until interaction. |
| Content | 498 | Fly-tying guides and river reports on /articles.php, earning most of the shop's links but orphaned from products. | Kept, re-slugged and linked to the materials they use. |
| Structured data | 0 | Products with Product or Offer markup; prices and stock never appeared in results. | Product, Offer, AggregateRating and HowTo schema. |
§ 3 Sailing directions
4 tides, worked in order
The engagement ran on our Signal plan for technical SEO: migration first, then speed, then the markup that turns rankings into richer results.
- Tide 1
Site migration
A staged cutover out of season: redirects live at the edge before DNS moved, the old sitemap left up for a month so Google could recrawl the 301s, and an hourly log watch for the first 72 hours.
Margin note: Never in March — that's when the salmon men order.
- Tide 2
Redirect mapping
9,214 legacy URLs matched one-to-one: product IDs to SKUs by script, 640 fuzzy matches checked by hand, and every row tested on staging for a single 301 hop to a 200 page.
Margin note: One row per fly. Every one.
- Tide 3
Core Web Vitals
The variant picker was the main-thread culprit. Rebuilt as native radio inputs, with reviews and chat loaded on interaction, mobile INP fell from 480ms to 140ms at the 75th percentile.
Margin note: Pages used to stick. Now they cast clean.
- Tide 4
Schema markup
Product, Offer and AggregateRating on 7,880 product pages, HowTo on the fly-tying guides and LocalBusiness on the shop page, all generated from the catalogue so it can't drift out of date.
Margin note: Prices showing in Google. Should've done it years ago.
Every row of the map can be traced. Pick a legacy address below to see where it lands now, and what happened to the ranking it carried.
301 → /flies/salmon/willie-gunn-tube-fly
Product · one hop · lands on a 200
Held #2 for “willie gunn tube fly”
§ 4 Tide table
5 months, one moon each
Use the arrow keys or tap a moon. The full moon marks the cutover — the spring tide, when the most could go wrong.
Month III · weeks 10–14 · Full moon
Spring tide
Cutover on a quiet Tuesday, out of season
- Redirects deployed at the edge before DNS switched; old sitemap kept live
- Hourly log watch for 404s and 5xx for the first 72 hours
- Search Console change-of-platform checks; new XML sitemaps submitted
Margin note: Kept the kettle on all night. Sessions held at the mark.
| High water | 114 |
|---|---|
| Low water | 100 |
| Mean level | 107 |
22 weeks · this month highlighted
- Month I, New moon: Full crawl and log audit of the legacy cart
- Month II, First quarter: 9,214-row redirect map signed off
- Month III, Full moon: Cutover on a quiet Tuesday, out of season
- Month IV, Last quarter: Core Web Vitals pass on product templates
- Month V, New moon: Product, Offer and HowTo schema; stragglers redirected
§ 5 Readings
The water came up, and nothing was lost to it
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
URLs redirected 1:1
9,214
- Products 7,880
- Categories 612
- Guides 498
- Other pages 224
Post-migration organic sessions
+38%
INP
480ms → 140ms
404s in Search Console
1,230 → 12
| Query | Before | Cutover wk | Month 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| fishing tackle hereford | 1 | 1 | 1 = |
| fly fishing shop near me | 4 | 4 | 2 ▲2 |
| river wye salmon flies | 3 | 3 | 1 ▲2 |
| barbel rods | 6 | 5 | 3 ▲3 |
| fly tying materials uk | 9 | 9 | 4 ▲5 |
| pike lures uk | 14 | 13 | 7 ▲7 |
| hardy reel service | 2 | 2 | 2 = |
| gold head hare's ear pattern | 1 | 1 | 1 = |
No tracked query lost a position in the cutover week. Two of the guide-led terms moved up within days, as consolidated duplicates passed their signals to one canonical page.
By month 5, faster product pages and price-rich results had lifted the long tail: the pike and fly-tying terms gained most.
Margin note: Every one held. Some even rose.
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