In this post we discuss how you can move your website from one platform to another. It is a process we are very familiar with having moved several websites from WordPress to Shopify, Squarespace to WordPress and Wix to Shopify. Many businesses set up their websites as one of the first things they do when starting out. This means they quite often do it themselves to save money, this can work in the early stages just to get an online presence, but as time goes on, it can produce problems that cost money and have a negative effect on how your customers view you as a business. It may be time to migrate your website to a new platform that is more suited to your growing needs.
Why move your website to a new platform?
Your website, now more than ever is often the only interaction a customer will have with you, especially in lockdown. You may never find out they visited and got to the checkout and left because they had a bad experience. Unlike a physical shop you can’t pop up and say “Can I help you?”, unless you have live chat of course, but that’s for another blog. You need to ensure that their experience is the best it can be and using a new platform might allow you to achieve this.
A lot of businesses get stuck with one provider and want to change platforms but don’t know they can do it quite easily, either themselves or with help (which is where we come in). You may be finding the back end of WordPress/Woocommerce quite complicated as your product catalogue grows. The functionality that you know exists with Shopify is not available without spending a fortune on untested plugins that might not work with the next WordPress update.
A legacy agency that won’t let go can be the source of your issues with managing your website. Other reasons to move might be the lack of creativity allowed by your current platform when creating blog content, the cost of hosting, payment provider lock ins, does your website accept Paypal? Perhaps you just don’t like the CMS that comes with WIX – a platform that gives start ups a quick and easy website – a ‘jack of all trades’ if you like, but a master of none, particularly when it comes to eCommerce. Whatever your reason for moving platforms, we can help.
Can you move all your products and blogs across to a new platform?
The answer is yes. Don’t worry it is not a case of cut and paste for hours on end! The value in your website is the content you have built up over the previous years. This can include blogs, images and products. No one wants to start again when they are looking to re-platform. Imagine having to copy and paste or re-write all your descriptions from scratch. What you are looking for is a migration platform to do the work for you. There are a lot of them out there but only one we would highly recommend due to excellent support and a clear pricing strategy. They even have a free transfer service which is great if you only have a few products and blogs.
Cart 2 Cart Migration
Cart2Cart have helped us migrate 20+ websites from a variety of platforms. This has included moving from WordPress to Shopify and vice versa, Wix to Shopify and WordPress and Magento to Shopify. They have also produced some fantastic stats around the most popular transfers of platforms.
What is the most popular target platform for website migration?
Shopify has been the target for website transfers in 2020 taking a whopping 45.5% of the market. Followed by WooCommerce (28.9%) and Magento (9.8%). If you are wondering why we chose Shopify as our favoured platform for eCommerce, then these useful stats point out that we are not alone.
Magento is the most likey platform to be migrated from and the most popular destination for Magento migrations is again, Shopify.
What can you do to preserve SEO when migrating to a new platform?
The key to a smooth website migration is to plan every aspect of the move out in detail first. It is vital not to leave anything behind that may benefit your SEO rankings. To do this we need to ensure that your URL (web address) configuration either stays the same or, as is likely when moving platforms, you don’t lose the ranking juice of your old URLs. Some platforms will alter the look and order of your URLs. This can lead to a large amount of 404 errors which are not good for SEO. We solve this by implementing a redirect strategy that ensures all of your old URLs point to the new version of those pages. We wouldn’t recommend doing this yourself and suggest asking for expert help which we or your agency can provide.
Which is the most popular eCommerce platform?
According to Google Trends for the past 12 months, search queries for the top three eCommerce platforms reflect these findings. Shopify is much more popular in terms of search results on Google. Magento and WooCommerce, as you can see from the graph, occupy just about the same space in terms of popularity.
If you are looking to migrate your website from one platform to another and just want to find out the best advice then please get in touch. Not only can we help with the migration, we are familiar with the other platforms so we can ensure your transfer is seamless.
