There comes a time in most websites’ lives, when the only option, in order to meet customer needs and technology demands, is to upgrade your website’s platform. Whether this be after upscaling within your current platform has reached its limit, or you’re wanting to achieve new goals not available on your existing platform, you need to make sure you’re fully prepared to have a seamless and as minimal damage migration as possible.
Platform migration can create many opportunities for your business, but what are the risks?
Downtime can be a serious problem – the longer your site is down, the longer you’re not making sales, the longer you give your customers to lose faith and search for their products elsewhere.
If you don’t plan and carve out a sufficient amount of time to prepare, work on and test a site on a new platform, you are leaving yourself open to a number of glitches and bottlenecks, which you then won’t have time to rectify. This will lead to a poor customer experience when the site is live and could result in prolonged downtime.
Loss of customers. This can be easily done when it can be so easily avoided. As discussed above downtime, glitches and bottlenecks can lead previously loyal customers to lose faith in a previously trusted site, or make new customers turn away instantly if achieving their goal takes too long, has too many hoops to jump through or they receive error messages at pivotal stages (such as payment).
These issues can be overcome, and the risks to your business removed to achieve a smooth and positive platform migration – this is where thinkTRIBE’s FREE Ten Point Checklist will help:
Audit your business processes – which parts of the old system need to be incorporated into the new one – how can processes be modified to make the most of the features of the new platform.
Create goals – establish ways of measuring success or failure to better understand your ROI.
Devise a timetable – ensure every department is aware of their involvement and goals for the migration and maintain regular meetings to ensure all are on track.
Prioritise data and product migration – how will the new platform interface with your existing inventory.
Sort out your SEO – ensure your optimisation is transferred appropriately and ensure enough time is allowed for this to be done properly.
Allow time for training – Staff will need to get up to speed on the new platform, schedule this in at the beginning
Test early and often – Assign a way of testing the new site before it is set live, when it goes live and then regularly to avoid glitches and bottlenecks.
Keep your old site – run your old site in parallel until you’re 100% happy with your new site.
Maintain customer communication – if any part of your customer service has changed, let them know.
Monitor performance throughout – measure your KPIs on your old platform and then on your new, keep this maintained at regular intervals to ensure you can measure the impact of changes.