Moving a website to a new platform, what are the 10 most important checks to make before moving?

[robbieire]

I am moving my website to a new platform. The URS's will be the exact same. What are the 10 most important items I should check before I swap over to the new platform.

[HashtagHustler]

If you are sold on prestashop and are sure you have the URLs taken care of then that is pretty much all you can do in that regard.

I still think you should look deeply at the links after the site is done, and possible do all of this on a dev server to make sure everything copies over as well as you hope.

I am not super familiar with Prestashop. So I am hesitant to give much specific advice on it. Some of my concerns come more with that. I personally use Magento if the client is sold on a eCommerce based CMS. They are the largest, most SEO friendly, and the most protected when it comes to plugins etc. Plus eBay owns it now, so you have that behind it.

Regardless, I don't know if I really even have '10 things" for you.

1. Check links before and after to make sure everything matches up.

2. TEST, TEST, TEST. Try to break your website, on a dev server. Someone else will if you don't, that way you can identify it before somebody else does.

3. Check plugins. Plugins are one of the best ways to ruin a website. One update, or lack of an update can throw an entire website offline.

4. Accept that any change you make will have an effect. SEO is just like Newtons laws. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Now, in the long run, switching to a CMS could be extremely beneficial, at first it very well may hurt you. I would highly doubt that it would drastically impact your rankings, but in my opinion, you cannot make a change in this world and not have there be some sort of ripple felt somewhere else.

Good Luck

[robbieire]

Hi,

The website is an commerce website. ShamrockGift.com is the name of the website. I am moving it from a custom platform to prestashop. We have changed the way the system writes the URS's so we will be able to copy them exactly as they appear on my current website. Also all content etc will be the same. I was going to keep it on the same server. I was hoping drop no ranking but I was worried if google will just crawl it the same.

It is a hard area to get advice on, it is difficult to find an SEO company that has actually did this for a small commerce website.

[HashtagHustler]

I think we would all need a little bit of clarification (at least I do) as to what exactly you are trying to do before I can truly give you an adequate answer, but my general advice is as follows!

What is your website? Are you selling something? Providing information? Answering questions?When you say "new platform" what exactly do you mean? Wordpress to Drupal? HTML5 to Magento? Or are you going as deep as switching from a LAMP server to a Linux Server running Bootstrap & NoSQL?

Depending on the size of your website and the amount of traffic there is a lot to consider, like if it's even worth it. And what your website does will drastically effect which platform you choose.

Switching from Wordpress to Drupal for example is pretty much guaranteed to change your URL unless you fiddle with the preferences. And switching from a Static website to a CMS is 100% going to do the same. You would have to spend a decent amount of time making sure every URL is the same. Remember URLs are not only important for the structure of your website, but every other place on the interwebs that links to you.

Anytime you switch a platform, regardless if it's on the top level or at the sever level, there is no way for it to be 100% seamless. Spend as much time as you can making sure you really want to make this change. Clean up as many loose ends as possible, and organize the structure of the site. Make SURE that this is the platform you NEED & WANT so you don't have to change again later down the road.

I agree with Jedi RobertFisher about Screaming Frog, It will scan 500 URLs for free. There is also Xenu's Link Sleuth. Other than that, you are gonna have to spend some time doing some good old fashion QC on the website making sure everything is A-OK!

Good Luck!

[RobertFisher]

Even though you believe the urls are going to be the same, I would suggest running screaming frog before and after just to be sure. If the site is smaller this is less critical, but for a larger site, where you can lose valuable rankings, etc. I would check it. 
I would make sure you are indexing after change and resubmit sitemap as soon as change takes place.

Best

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Robbie,

If the URL's are remaining the same then that is the first thing, you won't have to worry about redirects etc. Make sure any blog posts that you have will remain the same as well and also any RSS feeds you have.

You'll want to know how easy it is to add/remove pages from the CMS and how easy it is to edit pages. If you've got an e-commerce website then look what happens when products become out of stock etc. I

If the URL's are staying the same then you haven't got much to worry about really, it is just functionality really. If you are moving to a new server then there are issues like speeds and uptime to think about but that's a different ball game!