One of the biggest challenges faced by online brands is matching platforms performance to high user experience (UX) expectations. Re-platforming is often the only way to upgrade sluggish legacy systems that can’t easily be scaled to meet current or projected demand.
Migrating to a new platform offers an opportunity to build a more customer-centric UX that can prioritise personalisation and closer engagement. But you need clear objectives from the outset, together with agreed metrics for gauging success. Remember, there’s the potential for short-term damage – in terms of lower conversion rates and lost revenues – as well as for longer-term hits on brand valuers and customer loyalty.
What can go wrong?
Testing. Leaving insufficient time for testing can risk deploying a solution with bugs that will compromise performance
Technical blind spots. You risk missing glitches if you’re essentially marking your own homework. Seek experts to help who can offer independent analysis.
Support and maintenance. Who is responsible for ongoing support? Without a clear support model, a new platform risks failure – or racking up unexpected costs – after go live
How to overcome the risks of re-platforming?
The only way to know that your new site is ready to rollout is via a scheduled programme of testing: load testing to ensure it can stand up to the rigours of real-world demand; and performance testing to check the user experience is flawless. Testing can reduce risk by identifying glitches or bottlenecks before they become customer-facing.
Leaving testing too late into a migration project can prove costly in terms of time and money. Ideally, testing is proactive, not reactive and should take place at a number of iterations throughout your plan while it’s easier to rectify problems.
The only way to know how your new platform or upgrade will perform is by realistic testing and monitoring before launch, and thoroughly monitoring afterwards to measure the impact of migration on performance.
To truly understand your online performance, and to identify those technical issues your end users will encounter, it’s imperative to test and monitor in a way that replicates real behaviour – by making selections from page content at each stage of the journey and testing the performance of all aspects of your site. When businesses don’t monitor website performance in the same way that users experience it, errors can go unnoticed, leading to abandonment and reduced conversions, directly impacting ROI.
How can thinkTRIBE help?
Realistic capacity testing. We can help you understand at what point your customers are likely to experience performance degradation
User-impacting issues. Our 24/7 monitoring can identify and help resolve any customer-impacting issues
Ongoing support. Trust our expert Customer Success team to manage your testing schedule so your tech team can focus on your re-platforming project.