How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?

[s2bkevin]

We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month.  It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth.  We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses).  Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address.  Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!

[alex.nguyen]

Hi Kevin;

You should use Volusion to Magento migration tool from Litextension to get your job done. This tool supports migration full data including URLs from Volusion to Magento and you wont lost your search ranking. I think Litextension provides the best solution to keep old urls after change to Magento, you can read their solution at this blog post.

watch?v=BSFtOzYzD2Q

[s2bkevin]

Thank you so much Dana, I am actually a partner of this company so I will not get fired, but it WILL HURT US A LOT if I don't manage this right.  As you can see I'm already planning from getting answers and seeking others experiences so I'm able to do the best I can.  There's actually a lot we can do during the dip, as we already bring in a lot of traffic from our weekly newsletter and we are very active on our social network too, and our most searches online is actually our brand so I'm pretty sure people will be able to find us, and of course there are other things we can do like adwords to get more traffic in.  This change is all for the better, or else why would we consider migrating? We have many plans to implement onto the new site, but this dip will make us re-evaluate all the potential benefits vs potential down falls, maybe we'll need to save up more capital just to prepare for this and set a new time.  Thanks!

[danatanseo]

Hi Kevin,

I responded to your more recent question about 301 redirects, but I thought I would share some thoughts here too as well. I hope you find this helpful.

If you will be managing this transition (or to whomever will be held accountable for whether it was successful or not), part of what you need to start doing right now is managing expectations. To embark on this project and having someone (the owner, the CEO, your boss, whomever) hold you to the expectation that you will not lose any rankings or traffic as a result of this transition may be a recipe to get you fired. Part of what you need to do right now is beginning managing those expectations. I am not saying this because I don't think you will do a good job, I am saying this because, speaking from a lot of experience and studying what happens to sites when they migrate, replatform, rebrand, or all of the above, you must be prepared for a period of time when your rankings and traffic drop. They might even drop significantly. You need to have a plan in place for how you are going to deal with the business ramifications of that (decrease in revenue, etc). Are you going to rely on paid search to boost things up for a while? Print advertising? You need to plan for this.

Now, on the rosier side, if you do a really good job, hopefully after you power through the post-replatform dip, things swing up on the other side and become better than they were before. I have also seen this happen. Although I'm not at liberty to say which one, one of the major search engines replatformed and rebranded their News site and experience a significant dip for several months, but then powered through that and increased traffic by 80% after enduring the drop. So, in the end, they were better off.

While there are probably some folks here who may have witnessed a replatform with no impact on traffic and rankings, I myself have never seen this. I think it's important for you to make it clear to stakeholders that there will be a period of decline that could be as short as a few weeks, as long as a year and, yes, perhaps permanent. There are many things to consider other than just the URLs...i.e. does the replatform cause your bounce rate to skyrocket, which possibly could impact your rankings? And about 1,000 other things. How well all of that is managed will significantly impact how successfully you bounce back from the project.

Good luck to you. I feel your pain! But replatforms are inevitable and hopefully for you they will lead your business to much success!

Dana