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Disclaimer: Magenticians does not necessarily agree with the views expressed in this guest post. They are presented to bring to light all diverse views in the Magento and general ecommerce community.
Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms out there today. A common decision that many ecommerce store owners take is to migrate their stores from other platforms to Magento. However, remember that migrations could prove to be disruptive, particularly for the visitors, and require careful planning before the execution. Here are the important ways you could mitigate risks associated with Magento migration.
Select the Optimal Time for Migration
Selecting the best time for migration is crucial since the store would not be available during the process. Thus, the best time is when the store sees its lowest traffic. Thus, you should have an accurate traffic report of traffic patterns. Based on this, select a time when the traffic is considerably low to avoid business loss due to downtime.
The best practice is to notify the customers well in advance. In addition, discuss the process with a Magento expert to identify critical sub-goals of migration and deadlines. This helps avoid uncertainties surrounding the migration. Automated migration tools can also be deployed to mitigate the risk of longer downtime.
Backup all the Data
Store’s data provides you the strategic advantage over competitors. Data loss is the last thing you want to happen during a Magento migration. The data includes everything from images to customer comments.
When planning a migration, the first step should be a complete backup of the store’s data. In many cases, your hosting provider should already have a back system in place. When moving to Magento, you should have a verified backup so that you could be prepared in case of any disasters.
Give a Face-lift to Product Data
Now that you have decided to migrate, it is a good time to revamp the product data by filtering out old and products and improving the quality of the existing products. This improves the efficiency of the store and ensures that the Magento version of the store offers maximum outcome. Discuss the idea with your developers and try to find Magento extensions that help ease the task. Next, use migration tool provided by Magento to migrate customer and product data. Even though Magento is effective in managing huge data, it is advisable to use techniques such as AJAX to manage huge multimedia content.
Take Care of SEO
Involving a professional SEO service provider is essential to ensure that the migration process doesn’t affect the current SERP standings of the store. Use the sandbox to verify that the platform is handling all the redirects effectively. To start, use a tool to crawl the website and save the data. This will help in verifying the accuracy of the migration and that all elements have been migrated successfully.
When you are migrating to Magento from another platform, try to minimize structural changes in terms of pages so that search engines could realize that the new store is identical to the previous version. The best option is to conduct a site audit after migration to ensure the accuracy of the SEO efforts.
Reduce the Probability of Damaged Internal Links
One of the common problems associated with Magento migration (for that matter, any migration) is the high probability of broken internal links. These broken links affect the navigation and the user experience of the store. This can be mitigated by formatting the internal links in accordance with the rules of Magento. Automated migration tools can come in handy for reducing the probability of broken internal links.
Post-Migration Maintenance
Once the migration is over, it is essential to review the performance of the store and ensure that the store is fully functional. This where your store would greatly benefit from professional Magento support.
Author Bio
Ali Ibrahim is currently working a Content Strategist at Kenhike. As a technology enthusiast, He loves to write about recent technological innovations and emerging trends in web application developments.
