By Jonny Martin, Founder, Built Mighty
For a jewelry store, the product photo does most of the selling. Shoppers scroll image results looking for a particular ring, a stone or a style of chain, and a good photo is often the first thing that brings them to your store. Nicolas Tranchant’s post on SEO for jewelry stores shows how much patient work it takes to build that kind of search traffic.
The risk is that a platform move can undo that work without anyone noticing. The new store looks right, the products are all there, and the launch feels like a success. But photos get new file names and new addresses, alt text gets left behind, variant photos collapse into one image, and old links start returning errors. Search engines treat those as different pages and different images, and the traffic you built goes looking for them.
If you’re moving your jewelry store to WooCommerce, here is how to bring your image SEO with you.
1. Save every product photo at full size before you switch
Start by collecting your original photos. Not the copies your current platform serves on the product page, which are often resized or compressed, but the full-size files you or your photographer delivered.
If you still have the originals from your shoots, gather them in one place and match them to products. If you don’t, download the largest version your current platform will give you for every product and every variant. Do this before you cancel anything. Once an account is closed, you may lose access to those files.
Full-size originals let you produce sharp images for your new theme at the sizes it needs, instead of shrinking already-shrunk copies. For jewelry, where detail is the whole point, that difference shows.
2. List every old image address first
This is the step most moves skip. On most platforms, product photos live at addresses the platform controls, and those addresses usually change when you move. Your image file names may change too.
Before anything moves, build a list of every current image address and the product page it appears on. You can get this by crawling your current site with an SEO crawler and exporting the image URLs, or from your platform’s product export if it includes image links. Put it in a spreadsheet with columns for the product, the variant, the old image address, the file name and the alt text.
Example image-address spreadsheet before a move.
This list becomes your map for everything that follows. Without it, there’s no way to know later what was lost.
3. Rebuild variants so each one keeps its own photo
Jewelry stores rely on variants more than most: the same ring in yellow gold, white gold and rose gold, in a range of sizes, with a choice of stone. Shoppers expect to click “rose gold” and see the rose gold ring.
When you set up products in WooCommerce, rebuild them as variable products with the same options you had before, such as metal, size and stone. Then attach the right photo to each variation. Use your spreadsheet to check every variant against its original photo.
Watch for two common problems. The first is variants imported without their photos, so every option shows the same main image. The second is option names that change slightly, such as “Rose Gold” becoming “Rose-gold”, which can break filters and confuse shoppers. Keep option names and SKUs the same as on your old store wherever you can.
4. Carry over image file names and alt text
A file name like rose-gold-solitaire-engagement-ring.jpg tells search engines far more than IMG_4821.jpg or a string of random characters. If your current photos have descriptive file names, keep them. If the move is a chance to fix poor ones, rename them now, before the new image addresses are created, and record both names in your spreadsheet.
Weak camera file names versus descriptive names that help image search.
Alt text matters just as much. It describes the image for screen readers and gives search engines context. Make sure every product and variant photo arrives in WooCommerce with its alt text intact. If some photos never had alt text, write it now: plain, specific descriptions such as “14k rose gold solitaire engagement ring with round diamond, side view”. Describe what’s in the photo; don’t stuff it with keywords.
Then check a sample of products in the new store to confirm the file names and alt text came through as planned.
5. Redirect old product, collection and image URLs with 301s
Keep your URL structure the same wherever the new platform allows it. Where a URL has to change, add a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one, so visitors and search engines go straight to the right page. Google’s Search Central guide on 301 redirects explains how permanent redirects work.
Start with product pages and collection or category pages. Each old product URL should redirect to the same product in the new store, not to the homepage. Each old collection URL should point to its matching category. If you can keep collection URLs exactly the same, even better.
Then deal with the images themselves. Using your spreadsheet of old image addresses, redirect old image URLs to the new image files wherever your setup allows it, along with the product pages they belong to. Photos that already appear in image search have their own addresses, and those deserve the same care as your pages.
6. Crawl before launch, then watch after
Before you switch your domain to the new store, crawl the new site on its staging address and compare it against your spreadsheet. Check that:
- every product and variant shows the right photo
- image file names and alt text match your plan
- every old product, collection and image URL redirects to the right place with a 301
- there are no broken images or redirect chains
Keep your current store live until you have checked and approved the new one. Then switch at a quiet hour, when few customers are shopping.
After launch, keep watching. In Google Search Console, check for pages and images returning “not found” errors over the following weeks, and add redirects for anything you missed. Look at your top products by traffic and confirm their photos and pages load as expected.
No move can guarantee your rankings. But a careful move keeps the work you’ve already done in place, instead of asking search engines to find your store all over again. For a plain-language checklist of what carries over on a WooCommerce move, including SEO titles, alt text and redirects, see MightyMigrate’s FAQ.
Your image SEO moving checklist
- Download every product and variant photo at full size before you cancel anything
- Build a spreadsheet of every old image address, file name, alt text and product page
- Rebuild variants (metal, size, stone) in WooCommerce, with a photo on each one
- Keep or improve descriptive file names, and carry every alt text across
- Keep URLs the same where you can, and 301 redirect every product, collection and image URL that changes
- Crawl the new store before launch, and check Search Console for errors after
About the author
Jonny Martin is Founder of Built Mighty, a Seattle WordPress and WooCommerce agency. Built Mighty runs MightyMigrate, which moves Wix, Squarespace and Shopify stores to WooCommerce at a fixed price: https://mightymigrate.com/
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