There may come a time when your current website just isn’t working anymore. Not that there’s anything wrong with the website itself, but you might run into platform or server limitations.
If you get to a point where your website is too slow and keeps breaking, or simply doesn’t offer the basic functionality you need to run it effectively, you’ll want to think seriously about getting off your current platform and onto a new one.
With that said, a migration is not something that any old eCommerce entrepreneur can or should handle on their own. There are some seriously good reasons to let an agency that specializes in those sorts of services take care of it for you.
What Can Go Wrong?
This short post will only take a look at a few of the things that can go wrong with an eCommerce migration if it is not handled by an experienced specialist.
- Broken links: If you migrate your website and the new URLs are not exact matches of the old ones, the old links will become 404 errors. That will create a massive technical nightmare for your website and can result in much bigger problems.
- Drop in rankings: With a bunch of broken links on your website, your new website will likely experience a catastrophic drop in rankings that will rank organic traffic. There could be other adverse SEO effects as well.
- Data loss or corruption: Unless the migration is handled by an expert (or at least by capable software) your website could lose critical data associated with customer accounts, order history, and much more.
- Content loss/duplicate content: A botched migration can result in content loss and even in duplicate content populating in the wrong places, which can result in a poor user experience or even harm your SEO performance.
- Bounce rate can increase: Sometimes, website traffic to newly migrated sites incurs a higher bounce rate in the wake of a migration. An expert can help you forestall this though.
- Technical issues: If you migrate to a new website and forget to reconfigure technical aspects like your new robots.txt file, once again your website will experience drops in organic traffic and will have issues with search engines indexing its pages.
- Performance issues: Poorly planned migrations can bring you to new hosting platforms or datacenters that are not well equipped for the needs of your website, resulting in slow loading times and possibly even security issues.
- Unplanned downtime: A botched migration can result in a lot of downtime, or worse, and during that time your website will need to be frozen anyway, so you won’t be able to take new orders.
These are just a few of the issues you can run up against if you fail to properly plan or execute your migration. They could be much worse and your business could lose a lot of money.
They are only a few of the best arguments in favor of hiring an agency that offers eCommerce migration services.
Hiring an Agency That Offers eCommerce Migration Services
If you do make the wise decision to let the experts do what they do best, make sure you partner with an agency that expressly offers eCommerce migration services. Don’t just hire any run of the mill digital agency to handle data migration services for your online store.
To save yourself some time, consider working with 1Digital Agency. Over their 12 year tenure of service, they’ve handled hundreds of successful migrations and have cultivated a top-tier migration process that prevents drops in search engine rankings and makes sure data populates where it’s supposed to, without getting corrupted or lost.
