Your Online Store Migration

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(Newswire.net — June 25, 2021) — If you are a website owner and you know “how to sell shoes online”, then sooner or later you will touch on the  issue “How would I move my website to a different engine?”

Weighing all the pros and cons, it’s important to be sure that transferring your site to another CMS will give you more than you lose in the process. And, no matter how hard you try, there will be losses in any case. But, if properly approached, these losses can be made minimal. 

The new structure of the site 

However, changing the structure of the site can be just one of the main issues that can be solved with the transfer. It is necessary to prescribe the types of pages and clearly structure their placement on the new engine in advance. Also, it is important to keep what has been successfully implemented before. 

New URLs

Different engines have their own algorithm for creating URLs. And, although all CMS automatically creates clear and logical links, yet, when translating the site they will be different. 

It is desirable to make sure that the new URLs were minimally different from the old. Of course, this should be done only if they were previously adequate. 

To avoid unpleasant surprises:

  1. Prescribe templates for URLs in advance, based on those previously used. 
  2. In addition, you should carefully check each URL individually. 
  3. Otherwise, there may be broken links or duplicates, which will affect both the site’s ranking and its evaluation by visitors.  

Redirects reconfiguration 

Any site that has even the shortest history usually manages to collect pages that give the server code 301. When you relocate the site, you must also relocate all the redirects so that visits to these pages do not lead to errors and do not lose a fair amount of traffic. 

Create a table of all redirect links in advance, which will not create problems with the transfer of a small site. Difficulties arise when dealing with resources numbering dozens or even hundreds of such pages. In this case, we recommend using several services at once:

  • Google Analytics, 
  • Ahrefs, Notepad++, 
  • Netpeak Checker. 

Now we need to check the response codes of the server’s code for collected URLs, for this purpose service, Netpeak Checker is useful. This way we will know which pages have a code 200, i.e. are accessible.  

The resulting table will be needed not only to check but also to configure redirects from the new location. It will not lose anything and keep all traffic intact. 

After transferring the site, the same check will allow you to find out if the redirects are configured correctly: all similar new pages should also give the appropriate server response code. 

Design 

In order not to lose the position of the site, when transferring to another CMS, it is important to take care not only of the “inner kitchen”, but also the external component, which is primarily evaluated by users. A successful and memorable design is desirable to keep. The exception is a complete rebranding and change of design style. 

To at the new site appearance “did not go”, you must be very careful to carry out the transfer of design layouts (if they were available). If, however, during the creation of the original version of the site templates were used constructor or the old CMS, keep the design without any changes just do not work. In this case, you will need the help of professional designers, for example, magento support agency – Elogic

Content loss 

Content is not just texts, pictures, and videos. In addition to the semantic load, it contains the work of promotion in search engines. Removing content always leads to a loss of traffic. Therefore, it is necessary to either save it completely or change it for the appropriate in terms of SEO promotion.

It is very important to back up all pages and content of the old resource before moving the site from one engine to another. Depending on which platform was originally used, this can be done:

  • either by using the functionality of the old CMS, 
  • or by using a server-side control panel that allows you to back up all the files and databases of the site. 

Before moving the site, you should make sure that the backups are available to work with. If the files cannot be used, we recommend that you send a request to your hosting provider.