Migrating e-commerce platform (same domain). Do I need to be concerned about these changes?
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We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices.I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration?
- title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different)
- meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before)
- h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products)
- additional table with product features (additional content in product pages)
- adding additional products to store
- moving to https instead of http
Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same.
Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go.
Any thoughts?
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Many business asked about migrating data with change of ranking. I suggest SEO URLs migration plugins to supports users to transfer data successfully and safely. Check it: http://litextension.com/seo-urls-migrations-plugins.html
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Then do them during the migration, but make absolutely sure that you won't launch the problem with any issues on the site.
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I just moved my site from Volusion to Big Commerce and made all of the changes you listed above.
Somethings I noticed is that it took us a little longer to regain organic traffic than if we had not made any additional changes aside from moving platforms and changing URL structure. It wasn't a huge difference, only about 2 weeks.
Once the changes had been implemented, the site was fully indexed and all of the 404 errors were fixed we surpassed our previous organic traffic by 25% and moved our keywords up significantly. I also noticed that I had far less duplicate html errors in GWT while the old site was deindexing and the new site was becoming indexed.
I would make the changes up front. If these changes are better in the long run, why not get them done when it is convenient? Just make sure to add all of the versions of your site to GWT and set the preferred version to the https.
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Martijn, thanks.
Regarding potential: We would want to make the changes anyway at some point.
So would you do all changes now with platform migration or would you do them later (which implies significantly more work), maybe in several stages? -
I would be very concerned but on the other side I would also be interested to see what the potential of changes is.
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