How to migrate your store safely without losing visibility
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Background
Quiosque is a Polish manufacturer of women’s clothing. The brand’s designs can be purchased from quiosque.pl and at more than 170 local stores distributed across Poland.
At Harbingers, we relish in taking on ambitious projects. For that reason, with the start of 2019, together with our partner Quiosque, we set in motion a risky operation – migrating the online store from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.0.
Why do we consider our objective challenging? The consequence of improper SEO migration is a decrease in website visibility, which results in drops in traffic and organic revenue.
Strategy
Our partner wished to revamp the website’s graphic design and structure. Changes were applied to key webpages, such as the home page, product categories, and product webpages.
Harbingers set out to meet the expectations of the brand. Our goal was to flawlessly implement all the SEO elements which are of fundamental importance during site migration. Our migration strategy utilised a holistic approach and ensured SEO support at all stages of the process.
To prepare ourselves for any eventuality, we divided the migration process into two stages:
- Before migration:
- collection of analytical data,
- beta audit,
- transfer of the correct structure of the website,
- implementation of optimisation guidelines,
- content migration.
2. After migration:
- checking the indexing status of the website,
- another site analysis (crawl) to identify any webpages with the 404 error,
- checking redirection validity,
- monitoring of statistics (positioning, visibility).
How did we minimise the risk linked to migration? We created a unique and comprehensive migration checklist.
Here are the principal components of the checklist:
- running an SEO audit of the new website for its full optimisation
- maintaining the correct structure of URLs (transfer of old URLs)
- setting 301 redirections for modified URLs
- migration of old redirects, elimination of redirect loops
- ensuring SEO optimisation – creating optimal titles, meta descriptions, and H1 headers
- content migration – transfer of all category and product descriptions
Results
So, this was how the project was implemented, but did the results satisfy the expectations of our business partner and ours? By following a well-thought-out strategy, not only did we avoid the frequently occurring decreases but we also recorded an increase in visibility!
Boosts in visibility achieved within a month following the migration:
- +2% visibility increase TOP3
- +11% visibility increase TOP10
- +35% visibility increase TOP50
The migration of the online store to a new version of Magento was of strategic importance to our partner. The Quiosque store has been successfully transferred to Magento 2.0, and this new technology provides clients with a revamped version of the company website.
How did we achieve it? Each stage of the project was carried out in line with a carefully prepared scenario, while a well thought-out and effective SEO strategy allowed for safe migration of the store.
“We were apprehensive about the negative consequences of the website’s migration onto a new platform. Our fears were unfounded – Harbingers allowed us to achieve our objectives without losing organic traffic.”
Sergii Sologubovskyi
E-Commerce Manager
Conclusions
- A suitable migration strategy minimises the risk of drops in visibility and organic traffic.
- Therefore, it is worthwhile to plan a number of detailed actions which are needed before and after site migration.
- An SEO analysis of a website, performed directly after its migration, allows to detect potential irregularities and gives scope for immediate reaction in order to avoid drops in visibility.
