<b>Q: New platform forces a different URL structure. How risky is that?</b>

<b>Q: New platform forces a different URL structure. How risky is that?</b>

Short answer: it's the riskiest kind of move — but very survivable with a clean redirect map.

Long answer: When you replatform (say Magento to Shopify, or a custom CMS to WordPress), the danger usually isn't the platform — it's that the new system generates URLs in a different pattern. /product/blue-widget becomes /products/blue-widget-123. Every changed URL needs a 301 to its new address, or you lose that page's rankings.

The trap is platforms that add a forced prefix (/p/, /products/, /collections/) or append an ID. These look small but multiply across thousands of pages.

What saves you:

— Export ALL old URLs from your old sitemap and analytics before the old site goes dark.
— Map every one to its new URL, even orphaned pages you forgot existed.

Next step: do the export NOW while the old platform is still live. The single most common migration disaster is losing the old URL list after the cutover.