Keep every URL that earns impressions, map every old page to a specific new page rather than a generic one, and launch with at least as many indexable pages as before. Most migration traffic loss is not broken redirects. It is pages that used to exist not existing anymore.
Not the storefront. For catalogs of tens of thousands of SKUs the money goes to product data: getting it out of the systems that hold it, making it consistent, and keeping it that way. Where the budget actually goes, what makes it larger, and what makes it smaller.
If product data already lives outside the platform, go headless, own the storefront and the index, and keep the platform for checkout. If the catalog fits in the admin and the team is small, stay. The deciding factor is where the truth about your products lives, not traffic or brand.
All three, doing different jobs. The PIM or ERP is where product data is authored and correct. The index is where it is assembled, enriched and queried. The platform holds the slice needed to take an order. What goes wrong when one is asked to do another’s job.
Past about ten thousand SKUs the platform admin, the product model, native search, category pages and channel feeds all fail in the same way: they were built for a catalog a person can curate by hand. What breaks, in the order it usually breaks.
Headless took the storefront, AI made the APIs trivial, and catalog-heavy merchants never kept product data in the platform admin anyway. What is left for a commerce platform to own is checkout. Why that is fine, and what it means for merchants and agencies.
Forrester says the retail website is dying. What is actually ending is its monopoly on discovery. For catalog-heavy B2B distributors, the spec-driven research now moving to AI answer engines is exactly where the margin lives.
A spreadsheet import gets products into a store. It does not make them legible to search engines, AI answer engines, on-site search or feeds. Why the platform cannot fix that, how it differs from a PIM, and what an index-first architecture changes.
How vector (similarity) search improves personalization, visual search, synonym handling, discovery, and speed for modern e-commerce.
API-first inverts the dependency chain. Own your data model on an index, and the API takes care of itself — the durable way to build commerce at scale.
The Magento 2 product-gallery spinner makes pages feel slow. Here’s why the Fotorama loader hurts perceived performance and how to fix it.
How Magento 2’s optimistic session locking bottlenecks concurrent AJAX requests to /customer/section/load, and what to do about it.
