Bombora: from Squarespace to Shopify without losing its search footing
Bombora Custom Furniture is a boutique, family-run Australian business handcrafting timber furniture. Squarespace had become the ceiling, but a replatform is where established brands quietly lose years of SEO equity. We ran the migration as the product: content, catalog, and search structure carried across intact, then a stronger store built on top.
Executive Summary
A replatform is an SEO event, whether you plan for it or not
Bombora Custom Furniture, founded by Alison Collins, handcrafts timber furniture with a focus on sustainability and quality. Its products are high-ticket and made to order, often paid in stages: a 50 percent deposit at order and the balance at completion, sometimes six to ten weeks later. Squarespace had served the business early on, but it was limiting what the store could do as a commerce operation.
Platform migrations are where established brands quietly lose years of accumulated SEO equity. URLs change, page structures break, crawlers get confused, and rankings that took years to earn erode in weeks. The brief was a Shopify store that looked and worked better than the Squarespace site it replaced, and a migration handled carefully enough that Google would treat the new site as a continuation of the old one, not a stranger. Then the new store had to be wired into the tools a custom-order business actually runs on: CRM, email, and invoicing that matches how customers really pay.
Client at a glance
- Handcrafted timber furniture · Australia
- Family-run, founded by Alison Collins
- High-ticket, made to order, paid in stages
- Years of search visibility built on Squarespace
What we delivered
The Challenge
Everything had to make the trip safely
Squarespace had become the ceiling. The business needed Shopify's commerce capabilities, but everything the old site had accumulated, its pages, assets, product information, and the URL and content structure search engines had already indexed, had to arrive intact.
Years of SEO equity at risk
The product and page structure had to be converted into Shopify's architecture in a way Google's crawlers could follow, or rankings earned over years would erode in weeks.
A full content and asset transfer
Every page, asset, and piece of business information on the Squarespace site had to move to Shopify without loss.
A stock theme would not carry the brand
The front end needed a Shopify theme rebuilt where its defaults fell short of a modern, responsive experience worthy of handcrafted furniture.
A catalog that needs real browsing
A custom furniture buyer browses differently than a commodity shopper, so search and filtering had to work harder than a default setup.
A payment model no template supports
A 50 percent deposit at order and 50 percent at completion up to ten weeks later, with invoices itemized across self-made products, third-party products, and freight.
Inquiries going to an inbox, not a system
Contact and custom-order inquiry forms needed to feed the client's CRM rather than a plain email inbox.
Strategy
Continuity first
Rather than treating the Shopify build as a fresh start, we mapped the existing Squarespace structure and translated it into Shopify's equivalent architecture, so both visitors and crawlers would find the new site familiar.
The CRO roadmap
What We Built
The migration was the product
The usual replatform exports what it can, rebuilds the rest by hand, and hopes the redirects catch whatever breaks. We ran a deliberate transfer against a documented SEO procedure, then built the store's upgrade on top of it.
A structured content and architecture transfer
Pages, assets, and business information moved from Squarespace into Shopify deliberately, mapped against the old structure rather than rebuilt from scratch.
SEO continuity, field by field
Existing URLs preserved wherever Shopify allowed, 301 redirects mapped for everything that had to change, meta titles, descriptions, and alt tags migrated field by field, canonical tags checked, and the updated sitemap resubmitted to Google Search Console with rankings monitored after launch.
A theme build that earns the craft
A Polyform-based build with multiple components redeveloped for a responsive, current design, so the store reflects the furniture rather than the constraints of a stock template.
A catalog you can actually browse
The Search and Discovery app integrated for advanced search filters suited to a custom furniture catalog.
Email working from day one
Klaviyo set up with seven core flows, welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase and more, live from launch so the new platform started collecting and nurturing leads immediately.
CRM and invoicing that match how customers pay
Contact and custom-order inquiry forms wired into GoHighLevel, and Xero configured to automate invoicing around the 50 percent deposit model, itemized across self-made products, third-party products, and freight.
Event-driven and orchestrated in the cloud: every step independently observable, retryable, and parallel.
Why It Worked
Structure first, design on top
Instead of racing to a redesign and cleaning up the structural damage afterward, the work put content, assets, and crawler-facing structure first, then built the design layer on top.
The existing structure was treated as an asset
Search rankings live in site structure. Transferring it deliberately meant Google treated the new store as a continuation, not a stranger.
The upgrade sat on top of the migration
The redesign made the store a visible step up, but it never competed with the careful transfer underneath it.
Operations were part of the build
Email, CRM, and deposit invoicing meant the site was operating as a real commerce platform from the day it launched, not a prettier brochure.
Delivery
What launched
A clean replatform, with the brand's content, catalog, and search structure intact.
Platform
SEO structure
Design
Search
Operations
Common Questions
What this means if you're planning a migration
A replatform is an SEO event whether you plan for it or not. Treat your existing site structure as an asset to be transferred, not debris to be replaced: preserve URLs where the platform allows, map 301 redirects where it doesn't, migrate your meta data field by field, and resubmit your sitemap. That is how Bombora's search footing made the trip.
Outgrown your platform, but can't afford to lose what your site has earned?
We run migrations as structured transfers: your content, catalog, and search structure carried across intact, with a stronger store built on top. Fixed price proposal after one call.