Case Study · Marine retail and hospitality
MarineMax: Migrating a Nationwide Boat Dealer from Sitecore to Shopify
10,553 redirect map rows covering every legacy URL
MarineMax, a nationwide boat dealer with more than 60 locations, needed its enterprise Sitecore site replatformed to Shopify without losing years of content or the search equity behind it. Starting in March 2026, I inventoried a legacy site of more than 16,000 URLs, built a 10,553-row redirect map, and migrated 239 blog posts, 141 collection pages, and 72 location pages complete with 850 team member profiles and 1,269 images, then extended the same migration system to MarineMax Vacations. When post-launch audits exposed template gaps, my punch lists drove live placeholder pages down from 71 to 5 in a single week.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
MarineMax is one of the largest boat and yacht retailers in the country, and its legacy Sitecore site reflected that scale: 5,975 crawlable URLs on the live site and a full content inventory of more than 16,000 URLs once redirects and media were counted. The business was replatforming to Shopify, which meant every blog post, collection, location page, and team profile had to be restructured into an entirely different content model.
Three things made this harder than a typical migration. First, the legacy site sat behind enterprise bot protection, so the content could not simply be crawled and exported with standard tooling. Second, Sitecore's freeform pages had to be mapped into Shopify's primitives: blogs, collections, pages, and structured metaobjects for locations, team members, and testimonials. Third, the new site launched before its templates were finished. All 72 location pages initially rendered under a single URL, live collection pages carried Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, and the crawl surfaced 404s and broken navigation that needed a prioritized recovery plan, fast.
The Work
What Was Done
Full inventory and a redirect map for every legacy URL
I crawled and catalogued the entire Sitecore estate, then built a 10,553-row redirect map covering every legacy URL with keep or remove decisions, reviewed line by line with the client team so nothing of value fell through the cracks.
Content migration at enterprise scale
I migrated 239 of 240 blog posts with featured images, 141 collection pages with internal links rewritten for the new URL structure, and 72 location pages covering 54 stores and 18 marinas. Behind those pages I imported 850 team members as structured metaobject entries and 1,269 location images, plus 22 boat type pages with custom styling and 23 standalone pages.
Automated visual QA on every migrated post
Rather than spot-checking, I ran full-page screenshot QA across the entire migrated blog and turned the review into an itemized punch list: 48 posts and 62 specific fixes, each with live and admin URLs so the fixes could be executed without hunting.
Post-launch triage and audits
My April developer priorities report documented the broken location templates, live placeholder text, and navigation failures, ranked by impact. In May I delivered a full technical audit of the new site, with every issue assigned an owner, a priority, and instructions for the fix, then re-crawled a week later to verify progress.
Gap analysis as a client decision tool
I audited 704 legacy URLs against the new site, confirmed 309 as migrated with destination mapping, and classified the 391 not yet migrated into 18 content categories, packaged as a decision document so the client could choose what to migrate, redirect, or retire.
Extending the system across the brand family
I migrated the MarineMax Vacations blog, importing 180 posts and 511 images in a single day on April 23, 2026, followed by internal link cleanup. I also crawled three additional brand sites and began the NewCoast sister site migration in June using the same proven architecture.
The Payoff
Results
The engagement's measurable before and after comes from matched technical crawls of shop.marinemax.com taken one week apart during post-launch cleanup, May 6 and May 12, 2026.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Live Lorem Ipsum placeholder pages | 71 | 5 |
| Pages with multiple H1s | 28 | 5 |
| Pages missing an H1 | 26 | 19 |
| Duplicate meta descriptions | 464 | 424 |
| Missing meta descriptions | 69 | 64 |
In one week of audit-driven cleanup, high-priority placeholder pages on the live store dropped from 71 to 5 and multiple-H1 pages fell from 28 to 5. The engagement was still active as of June 2026, with the punch list in progress and the NewCoast migration underway. Search performance measurement is a post-migration story still being written, so this study leans on the delivered scope and the audit-driven cleanup above. Performance data available on request.
Tools used: Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Matrixify, Shopify metaobjects and Liquid templates, Python, Playwright, the Oxylabs Realtime API, and Excel and Google Sheets for the content matrix, redirect map, and gap analysis workflows.
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