Migration

From custom platform to Shopify: fonQ’s successful SEO migration

Client

fonQ

Market

E-commerce

meet our Expert

David

Owner

Migration

From custom platform to Shopify: fonQ’s successful SEO migration

Executive summary

Dok Online led fonQ’s website migration from a heavily customized platform to Shopify for both fonq.nl and fonq.be. With 150,000+ products and high traffic volumes, the priority was controlling risk across every SEO dependency. Together with Ask Phill and fonQ’s team, we ran a phased SEO wesbite migration program from baseline benchmarking to staging QA, launch validation, and post-launch monitoring. Alongside the SEO site migration, we delivered a content roadmap to strengthen topical authority and guide scalable organic growth in home & living niche.

Traffic trend showing a slight drop and then strong recovery post successful Shopify SEO migration for fonQ.

SEO website migration workbook, prepared by Dok Online for fonQ.

Common technical advice provided by Dok Online, as a part of their research and planning for a successful website SEO migration from custom CMS to Shopify for ecommerce client fonQ.

Results

1:1 redirect plan protected key pages and link value.
Brief post-launch dip; traffic returned to baseline within 7 days.
Smooth rollout with zero unplanned downtime and clear go/no-go gates.
Launch-day SEO validation covered canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps, and robots.
Growth roadmap delivered: spotted 120+ content gaps and found 40 new clusters to target.

Our approach

fonQ needed to move from a complex custom platform to Shopify without sacrificing organic visibility. With a massive product inventory and millions of visitors, the website migration demanded strict discipline.

fonQ’s custom webshop was powerful, but increasingly costly and slow to evolve. Every new feature required development time, which reduced agility. At this scale, small technical inefficiencies quickly translate into real commercial impact.

A Shopify website migration introduces SEO risks across redirects, indexation, canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps and robots rules. The goal was simple: execute an end-to-end SEO migration program that protected rankings, link equity and user journeys across both Belgium and the Netherlands.

We started with baseline benchmarking and ran the migration in structured phases with Ask Phill and fonQ. Each phase had clear owners, checkpoints, and go/no-go moments, supported by full tool setup (GSC, GA4, custom tracking and dashboards) for control and accountability.

We built a detailed 1:1 redirect approach with exception rules, migrated SEO inputs into staging, and performed end-to-end QA before launch. After go-live, we monitored daily, triaged quickly with development, and maintained backlink and sitemap continuity to protect performance.