Twelve markets, one switch, zero loss: the Tony’s Chocolonely story

Client

Tony’s Chocolonely

Market

E-commerce

meet our Expert

David Van Brakel

Owner

Twelve markets, one switch, zero loss: the Tony’s Chocolonely story

Executive summary

Tony’s Chocolonely, the mission-led ethical chocolate brand, moved its ecommerce from a single global domain to 12 regional Shopify sites in one launch, in August 2024. With 2,000+ URLs and 200,000+ monthly organic visitors across those markets, a mistimed switch could have wiped out visibility and seasonal revenue in a dozen countries at once.

They brought us in to own the parts that decide whether a migration survives. The site went live with no permanent traffic loss, every region was back to pre-migration performance within 30 days, and the cleaner setup has driven a steady upward trend in organic traffic since.

Results

0% permanent traffic loss across all 12 markets, with no drop in rankings or visibility through the switch.
Every region recovered to pre-migration performance within 30 days, back to full strength well before the year-end gifting peak of Sinterklaas and Christmas.
Core markets (Netherlands, Belgium, Germany) fully picked up by Google and performing within weeks.
2,000+ old URLs mapped and redirected to the new Shopify setup without losing traffic or ranking strength.
A stronger technical foundation that has driven a steady upward trend in organic traffic since.

Our approach

We ran the move as a phased, coordinated process from May to August 2024, the same way we approach every SEO migration: take the launch-day risk out by deciding everything up front, then verifying it live. Nothing was left to chance across development, marketing and local teams.

We audited the old and new sites market by market, mapped the top pages, and worked from a detailed checklist. Before anything moved, we settled how each market’s site would be built, how search engines would know which country every page belongs to, and where each old link would point, then confirmed the top-selling and best-converting pages carried over in every region.

We mapped 2,000+ old URLs to their new Shopify addresses, with a redirect plan for each market. Where no direct match existed, we rebuilt pages into clean collections, blogs or products so visitors and their traffic landed in the right place instead of hitting a dead end, and we watched for broken links so any could be fixed fast.

Other sites linking to Tony’s is a big part of why it ranks. We found the most valuable of those links across every market and made sure they pointed to the right new pages, so that ranking strength carried over instead of being lost.

In the first 72 hours we watched every region closely, checking that the new pages were loading, redirecting and showing up in Google as they should, and caught the odd issue before it became a loss.

The migration was the foundation, not the finish line. It kicked off a year-long partnership in which a full topical map and ongoing SEO work kept organic performance climbing across markets, including a standout holiday-gifting season.