Surviving a Redesign

[TheBatesMillStore]

Hi there,

I'm in the process of building a new site using Shopify for our e-commerce site. We are currently using a WordPress site (www.batesmillstore.com) that was built by third party developers. I am concerned that we could see a drop in our organic traffic once we make the transition from the WordPress site to our Shopify site.

Does anyone have any recommendations or a checklist we could use to make sure we're doing this properly and so that it is as smooth of a transition as possible?

Thanks,
Bianca

[customerparadigm.com]

I think that the most important thing is to test.  Everything that you can.  And realize that when you go live, some things aren't going to work, and that is part of the process.  And have people on hand to fix things quickly.

For this reason, don't plan on going live on 5:00 pm on a Friday evening, when everyone is going to be out of the office and unreachable for the weekend.  Try Monday morning, when you can have everyone on hand.

Before you go live, though, these are a few things you should do:

1. Set the TTL (Time to Live) for your DNS A record for the site to as low as possible (i.e. 300 seconds).  This will prevent the DNS from being cached when you finally push it live.

2. Map all of the existing pages, and make sure that you have 301 redirects in place for everything.  Make sure that they only have 1-2 redirects if possible.

3. Make sure that your SSL is going to transfer properly.

4. Make sure that you have all of the key login information for your payment systems, and any other integration parts you might have.

5. Try to pause the PPC advertising during the transistion, to make sure everything is as smooth as possible.

6. I recommend keeping all of the images from the old site still live on the new site, in case they are still used for email campaigns or referenced elsewhere on the site.

7. Test all of the forms to make sure they work well.

I also like Search Engine Watch's 25 things to test before your site goes live:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2287002/Website-Launch-Checklist-25-Things-to-Test-Before-Your-Site-Goes-Live

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[TheBatesMillStore]

This is super helpful! Thanks Jeff. And just out of curiosity, is it guaranteed that things will slow down on the SEO front or if we cover all our bases, is it possible we won't see a dip?

[customerparadigm.com]

Yes, if you cover your bases with testing, and 301 redirect everything, you should be in good shape.  That said, it's important that the new site loads quickly and has a great user experience.  If it's slower than the new site, that won't be helpful for user engagement.

We recently migrated a client from OS Commerce to Magneto, and they saw their conversion to purchase rate increase in the hours after we switched over the site.  I think that the new design helped, and it made it less confusing to the end user.

Let us know how it works for you...
-- Jeff