Migration glossary
Clear definitions of the data, platform and SEO terms that appear when an online store moves to a new system.
Migration term
A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new URL, and sends anyone - human or crawler - requesting the old address straight to the new one. The "301" is the HTTP status code returned by the server: it's the standard, permanent way to say "this content now lives here instead," as opposed to a temporary (302) redirect.
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A canonical tag (`<link rel="canonical">`) is an HTML tag that tells search engines which URL is the authoritative version of a page when the same or very similar content is reachable from more than one address. It doesn't redirect visitors anywhere - it's a signal to crawlers about which URL should get credit and show up in search results.
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Data migration is the process of moving your store's information - products, customers, orders, content, and everything connected to them - from one platform to another, in a form the new platform can actually use correctly. It's the core technical work of a platform move, distinct from the design, redirect planning, or integration work that surrounds it, though all of those depend on the data migration being accurate.
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Headless commerce is an architecture where the storefront (what customers see and interact with) is built separately from the commerce backend (product catalog, cart, checkout, order management), and the two communicate through an API instead of being one tightly coupled system. "Headless" refers to the storefront - the presentation layer - being decoupled from the backend, which can then serve multiple different "heads" (a website, a mobile app, an in-store kiosk) from one source of truth.
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Hreflang is an HTML attribute (and equivalent HTTP header or sitemap entry) that tells search engines which language and, optionally, which country a page is written for, and points to the equivalent page in other languages or regions. It's how a multilingual site tells Google "here's the Spanish version, here's the German version" instead of leaving search engines to guess.
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A product feed is a structured export of your catalog - typically CSV, XML, or JSON - built for another system to read on a schedule: a supplier sending you their catalog, or your store sending its catalog to a marketplace, price comparison site, or ad platform (like a Google Shopping feed). Each feed follows a specific format the receiving system expects: certain fields, in a certain structure, sometimes with its own required identifiers.
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Replatforming means moving an ecommerce store from one platform to another - not a redesign on the same platform, and not a minor version upgrade, but a genuine change of the underlying system that runs your store. It's the umbrella term for the whole project: data migration, redirect planning, theme/storefront rebuild, and integration reconnection are all pieces of a replatforming effort.
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SKU mapping is the process of matching each product identifier (SKU - stock keeping unit) from your old system to its correct equivalent on the new one, so orders, inventory, and supplier feeds keep referring to the same physical product before and after a migration. It sounds mechanical, but it's one of the places a migration most commonly goes wrong when it's automated blindly instead of reviewed.
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Structured data is markup added to a page (most commonly following the schema.org vocabulary, in JSON-LD format) that describes its content in a machine-readable way - marking up a page as a Product with a price and availability, or an Organization with a name and URL, rather than leaving search engines to infer that from the visible text. It's what lets search results show rich features like star ratings, price, or FAQ dropdowns directly in the results.
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A URL slug is the human-readable part of a page's address that identifies it - in `prevedshop.com/platforms/shopify`, `shopify` is the slug. It's usually derived from a product or page's name, made lowercase and URL-safe, and it's what both visitors and search engines actually see and reference when they link to or bookmark a page.
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