Is BigCommerce a good CMS for Improving Search Visibility for our E-Commerce Business?

[lisakay]

We have recently moved from Wordpress to BigCommerce and have noticed a decline in our Search Visibility score on MOZ.

Following the recommendations of IT consultants, we were under the impression that moving to BigCommerce would significantly improve our Search Visibility.

We were wondering if there is anyone out there who is currently using or have used BigCommerce and had similar issues?

Any personal reviews/recommendations would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

[ClaytonJ]

Hi

I have to say straight away - there is no way Big Commerce as a CMS for search - all elements being equal is better than WordPress.  Your IT consultants were selling in BC for reasons other than Search.

That said though BC is not "as good" in my view as WordPress generally, there should not have been a substantial drop unless changes are too drastic and poor implementation. Did the URL structure remain the same?  Did you cross check your main traffic page pre-launch and your new corresponding page - what has changed? Do a few little tests..  How long ago did you launch?

Hope that helps.

[effectdigital]

The trick is usually not to migrate from one CMS to anther, but instead to combine the best elements of each. For example I think Magento is a pretty big steaming pile from an SEO POV, but the way it handles eCommerce data is very efficient and regimented. So you'd want the back end on Magento and the front-end on WordPress. I imagine that with BigCommerce it would be much the same thing, WP is so established now from an SEO POV that it's hard to beat so you'd at least want to retain it at your shallow front-end, even if you powered the commerce system(s) a different way

[ClaytonJ]

Big Commerce is a slightly worse version of Shopify... for context..

[effectdigital]

Oh God. Slightly worse? That's nearly Wix level of bad

[ClaytonJ]

slightly better... than wix..

[effectdigital]

That's like saying it's still from Hell but at least it ain't the red devil himself

[troublehorse69]

So I realize this isn't recommended, but I have a client with a very successful site on BigCommerce, and we plan on moving to WordPress and WooCommerce in a couple weeks. He wants a cart design only available with a WordPress plugin, and I want to fix his site structure and I know WordPress. He also currently does not have SSL and we're rebranding so I figured it'd be a good time to just do everything at once. How wrong am I?

My plan is to build the site on WordPress, keep the content, traffic, and pages aligned with the BigCommerce one, and then 301 them over to their twin and move the BigCommerce sales data over to WooCommerce using Cart2Cart. Is there a better way? Other than not doing it.

[effectdigital]

I think that makes sense but make sure your 301s don't get nullified by content dissimilarity, incorrect redirect types entering redirect chains (e.g: Meta refreshes or 302s) or by creating too many redirect chains. You'd be amazed how many people 'think' they have done 1-to-1 redirect mapping to Google's specifications, only to find out upon recursive SF crawls that in actual fact the implementation is between 8-10% of what they anticipated (I have a redirect scoring system)

I'd do it separated out. First I'd do the redesign and platform change, then wait 2 months, then go ahead with the HTTPS migration. You don't want too many redirects tangling themselves up in one go

e.g: http://oldsite.com/category/product 301 to https://oldsite.com/category/product 301 to https://www.oldsite.com/category/product

You want to just go strictly A to B and working the flexible redirect rules out which allow that (to backplate the 1-to-1 / A-to-B redirects) can be a total nightmare. Often you get devs saying in shock "but I did it this is just the normal way this is just normal" - but the redirects all chain up and results are lost. Be VERY careful

[lisakay]

Thanks for your detailed answer! It's been very helpful.

We will certainly review our results and do a few small tests to measure to see what the next best steps are.