Keeping SEO when changing the theme

Comparing 216 URLs between the old site and the test site.

IGA (Infinity Gems)Updated 21 Oct 2026

How it was measured

  • A fixed list of 216 URLs: the home page, 57 categories and their page 2, 77 products, 25 posts, 20 pages, tags, news, cart, checkout, search, filter URLs, 404, robots and sitemap.
  • For each URL we compare: status code and redirects, <title>, meta description, canonical, meta robots, Open Graph, Twitter, H1 and JSON-LD.

Result (13 Oct 2026)

Result URLs
Identical character for character 4
Differs only in intentional or better items 212
Unexplained differences 0

Example of an improvement: the old site printed 2 conflicting canonical tags on /page/N/ pages, while the new one prints exactly 1 self-referencing canonical.

2,231 internal links were checked; every URL that returned 200 on the old site returns 200 on the new one at the same path.

After go-live

Monitor Search Console for at least 2 weeks, and prefer a 301 redirect over a 404 whenever a URL changes.