Launch day should be boring
A platform migration moves products, customers, orders and years of search history in one go. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong in public. Our aim is a launch day so well practised that nothing surprising happens.
What a rehearsal is
A rehearsal is a complete migration into a staging store, using real data and the same scripts, mappings and checklists planned for launch. The only difference is that nobody points the domain at it.
What it catches
Record counts that do not reconcile. Variants that lose their options. Customer tags that do not map. Redirects that chain or loop. Product descriptions with hard-coded links to the old platform. Integrations that expect fields that no longer exist.
Each of these is cheap to fix during rehearsal and expensive to fix after launch.
Redirects deserve their own test
We crawl the old site's indexed URLs, map each one, and then request every old URL against staging to confirm it lands on the right page with a single 301. Search visibility depends on getting this right.
Writing the runbook
The rehearsal produces the launch runbook: the content freeze window, the delta import of new orders and customers, the DNS steps, the checks after go-live, and the rollback plan if something critical fails.
By the time the real cutover starts, everyone involved has done it once already.