Apps & Replacements

Replacing Vitals (reviews) — losing 3 years of review data is a dealbreaker. Migration paths?

Apps & Replacements

Replacing Vitals (reviews) — losing 3 years of review data is a dealbreaker. Migration paths?

Sara Khan·Asked May 26, 2026
We've been on Vitals for 3 years and currently use it just for reviews. The bundled "all-in-one" approach hurts our LCP (it's our biggest single JS payload — 380KB). I want to move to a leaner standalone reviews app, but I have ~12,000 reviews to migrate. Looking at: - Judge.me — has CSV import from Vitals - Loox — only photo reviews, not great for us - Stamped — heard mixed things lately - Shopify Product Reviews — was deprecated, then revived? Has anyone actually done a Vitals → standalone migration recently? What was the experience? Did the schema.org review markup carry over (this matters a lot for our SEO)?

3 Replies

Maya Iyer·May 26, 2026
Did this exact migration for a client in February. Tl;dr Judge.me is the best receiver right now. What worked: - Exported reviews CSV from Vitals (Settings → Reviews → Export). - Judge.me's Migration team did the import for free — took ~3 business days for 8,000 reviews. They mapped product IDs by SKU, not by Vitals internal IDs, which avoided most ID-collision pain. - Schema.org `AggregateRating` and `Review` markup carried over, but only after I enabled "JSON-LD schema" in Judge.me's SEO settings (it's off by default — easy miss). What didn't: - Customer photos didn't migrate cleanly. About 12% of photo URLs 404'd because Vitals re-hosts them on their CDN with short TTLs. If photos matter, download them BEFORE you uninstall Vitals. - Reply threads on reviews (your store responses) carried over as plain text but lost their "Verified by store" badge. Net SEO impact (rich snippets in SERP): zero loss after ~3 weeks of re-crawl.
Devraj Pillai·May 26, 2026
Adding — if your goal is purely LCP, also worth checking how the new reviews app loads its widget. Judge.me has an "async load" toggle in Settings → Display that defers their JS until interaction. Without that, you'll be back where you started.
Sara Khan·May 26, 2026
This is gold, thanks. Going to start with Judge.me's free tier, do the export this weekend, and download all photos first. Will report back once the migration is done.