Why are broken links harmful after migration?

Broken links are harmful after migration because they can prevent customers and search engines from reaching important pages.

Common impacts include:

• Poor user experience – customers may encounter “404 Not Found” pages.
• Lost sales – broken product or checkout-related links can stop customers from completing purchases.
• SEO damage – search engines may have difficulty discovering and indexing pages.
• Lost organic traffic – old URLs that aren’t redirected can lose their search rankings.
• Broken backlinks – external websites linking to old URLs may send visitors to unavailable pages.
• Lower trust – frequent errors can make the store appear poorly maintained.

Merchants should crawl the migrated site, identify broken URLs, and implement appropriate 301 redirects from important old URLs to their relevant new pages.