10 Things to Consider for a Successful Ecommerce Migration

Intro

A lot of online stores consider eCommerce migration for a variety of reasons.

Either it wants a better platform to scale. The site may be loading too slowly. Or it is not performing up to the mark.

Research shows that the majority of brands are considering opting for eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce for improved performance and cost savings.

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Whatever the reason maybe, one thing is for sure — That a lot of thought has gone into coming to a decision that you need to migrate to a new platform.

Ecommerce migration is not something you can simply plan and implement. You need to carefully consider and articulate numerous activities so that the migration is successful.

What is eCommerce Migration?

Ecommerce migration is the process of transferring your eCommerce website from one platform to another. The act involves transferring site data, integrations, website content, and product pages to a new platform.

We know what you’re thinking. Why would a company go through the hassle of shifting its platforms altogether?

As mentioned, the reasons for eCommerce migration are many. And companies usually opt for it because it needs to improve their site performance and manage scalability.

However, eCommerce migration is a lengthy and time-consuming process, one that requires sufficient research and planning. Listed below are some major points you have to consider before you start the process of eCommerce migration.

Things to Consider for Successful eCommerce Migration

1. Understand your Business Needs

Before you decide where and how you should migrate your data, ensure that you are fully aware of your business needs and goals. Does the prospective platform align with your goals? What are the potential limitations you might face? Does the prospective platform address your current challenges? Will it be able to handle your load and sustain your growth?

Ecommerce migration is not something you have the time and resources to take up every six months or a year. It is a long-term commitment and before you choose the platform, you need to have the list of challenges you want migration to address. You can also revisit your overall goals and explore how the potential platform will help you achieve them.

2. Outline the Plan for Migration

Ecommerce replatforming requires a lot of expertise in a variety of areas — Data transfer, security, integrations, and so on. Identify the scope of your work and set a reasonable timeframe so that you can perform all the tasks as efficiently as possible. Some of the steps you need to include in your eCommerce migration checklist are:

• Defining the hierarchy of the new website
• Defining the cost of the migration
• Auditing and moving the existing content and data
• frontend/backend development
• Choosing the platform
• Tools you will need for migration
• Choosing how you will conduct the migration
• Pre and post-launch training

Once you define your scope, you can choose how you want to migrate. Three ways of ecommerce data migration brands use:

Apps that help and automate the data migration process

Manual or in-house data migration

APIs or microservices to transfer data

3. Develop a Content Plan

Your content migration can get challenging since any errors can lead to duplication of content or irrelevant content that impacts the SEO. Start by cataloging your content that needs to be transferred like product categories, image catalogs, product descriptions, customer data, order data, etc.

Organize the content that you want to move from your old site and mention in your outline where they’re located on your site. This list will prove to be useful when you’re organizing your content on your new platform.

Some other things you need to consider are:

• Ensuring that your content is copied and there is a detailed redirect plan
• All of your rich media are downloaded and backed up to a database
• All images are compressed before they’re uploaded to the new platform
• Title, description, and other tags are optimized for keywords
• Content categories and tags on the new platform match the existing site

4. Optimizing your checkout

Considering that poor checkout is one of the major reasons that eCommerce migrates to new platforms, ensure that your new platform supports your conversion and checkout goals. Optimizing checkouts itself can improve your conversion rate by 35%.

Migration is a good time to optimize your checkout experience. Connect any third-party checkout apps like eCommerce monitoring platforms that you may be using your existing system to a new platform. Optimize your user flow as much as possible and ensure that the new checkout experience aligns with your migration goals. Your end goal should be to ensure a fast, secure, easy checkout experience for your customers.

5. Check for Duplicate Content

It is easy for your online store to have duplicate content considering the amount of product pages you have, and the possibility of having the same content on similar products. Audit your existing content and look for such pages.

This content can work against SEO and take up extra time to crawl multiple versions of the same page. While migrating to a new platform, ensure that you use canonical tags on pages with similar content so that Google only crawls the master copy of the other pages.

6. Conduct SEO Audit

Ecommerce migration can put a grave risk to your SEO, especially if done incorrectly. You’re likely going to run into a wide variety of variables that can impact your search rankings, at least in the short term.

There can be changes in the link structures that can cause pages to break or display incorrectly. If you’re able to identify the array of errors that can occur in advance, you’re setting up your new site for SEO success.

Leverage SEO audit tools to ensure that your new site meets the SEO standards. Run tests to identify problems before you launch your sites such as broken links, page loading speed, page redirects, firewall setups, keyword integration, content duplication, system security, etc.

7. Backup and Migrate your Data

Before you start migrating any of your data, make sure you back up your site. You’ll be reassured if you have a backup of the most recent version of your website if something goes wrong during your ecommerce data migration. Create a backup of your old website before the migration so that you have a copy of all important data.

You can start the data migration process using the options stated above. First, migrate just a part of your site and test to ensure everything works smoothly. Use a staging site for testing before you launch the new site as a live replacement of the old one.

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You can import your database from your old one to the new one using file transfer agents and apps. However, the process will be more complex where the developer has to write a custom script that reads and reforms data across platforms.

8. Implement Schema Markup and Metadata

Schema markup is a code that gives search engines an outlook about your site. Since you need to keep SEO at the forefront of your migration plan and ensure that your site isn’t negatively impacted by the transfer, optimizing your schema and metadata can help.

Ecommerce site migration begins by matching field structures between old and new database schemas. Mapping this will help you know if the corresponding fields align properly. If not, you can optimize the schema markups and metadata and add this process to your SEO audit. You can also leverage schema markup tools to implement markups if you weren’t directly in charge of them previously.

9. Test Redirects

During migration, you’ll come across many URL files that are no longer relevant, haven’t been performing up to the mark, have outdated content, or aren’t converting. You can find such URLs in a PPC landing page report. If they are underperforming and aren’t contributing to your online store, you can consider excluding them from the migration process and changing those URLs.

If they do, you’ll need to set up 301 redirects. Ensure that you complete this step to avoid losing search engine rankings and to make sure that users who access your new site, can access your pages.

10. Test your Site

Before you launch, you need to thoroughly run tests for site navigation, the checkout process, front-and-back-end website functionality, and the product purchase process. The more you test, the more you will be able to improve your site and find bugs and hidden issues. It will ensure that your new platform is up to the expectations on launch day.

Involve the SEO teams and also run a site through a performance auditing tool for page speed to ensure that your pages are loading and behaving correctly. Check for speed or user experience issues and address them so that your site is ready for launch. Also, run these tests through all your stakeholders of the company and gather the required feedback so that you can act on them and smoothly launch for eCommerce migration.

Wrapping Up

Migrating to a new platform can consume significant time and resources. So you have to get it right to avoid iterations later. By considering the mentioned points, you can create a functional plan and easily execute the same to shift your entire website to a new and dynamic platform.

Ensure that you have the right resources and the right team to carry out the tasks for you to avoid major challenges and detours. Having a skilled team can ensure that your project is in the right and experienced hands and that your new website is built for SEO success and revenue generation.