Table of Contents
“More than 1.7 million online merchants are using the Shopify platform, generating over $988.6 million as total revenue at the beginning of 2021.”
Shopify has achieved a tremendous milestone by inciting e-commerce sales on an exponential scale over the past few years. The numerous features of Shopify make selling and purchasing go hand-in-hand seamlessly. For the same reason, most merchants prefer to host their online store on the Shopify platform. Besides, the latest upgrades of Shopify such as Shopify 2.0 further promote its usability among the users.
Now, if you have an online business and have been wondering how to manage one, then let us help you! Shopify is one of the few platforms which you could totally rely upon to scale up your business with better revenue as well as flexibility. Read ahead to discover why Shopify will help you expand. Further, explore our quick checklist to ensure that your website undergoes a smooth platform migration.
Why Should You Migrate To Shopify?
After establishing a business online, you may be in constant search of new ways to expand and upscale. Platform migration is an effective step during this process. Especially, when you choose a powerful hosting platform, it can contribute considerably towards your brand voice and audience outreach.
Often, merchants may be hesitant to initiate a website migration due to a general myth that migrating their site might affect the ranking of the website, adversely affecting the business revenue. However, this is not true as an effective migration and a proper action plan will not damage your business in any way. The technical end of website migration is easy to understand with a little research.
Basically, through website migration, you will change your eCommerce hosting. Your aim will be to achieve better visibility, functionality, and profitability. With the advanced and on-demand features of Shopify, your migration will benefit your business in ways that you might not expect. Following are the specific characteristics of Shopify that will promote your business:
1. Enhanced user experience
The number one reason for migrating your current Online Store is to improve the user experience. Welcoming your customers with a great user interface plays an essential role in boosting sales as well. If you feel like your current eCommerce site doesn’t offer this, then it’s probably time to migrate your website to Shopify.
With the latest technology levied through Shopify, you can easily customize your storefront for your specific audience. You can create a better-ranked website with extended functionality.
2. Lesser service costs
As technology improves, every hosting platform will change. Accordingly, you have to keep upgrading your online store too to stay on the trend. This means you have to allocate a significant amount for maintaining your website every month.
However, Shopify is a “Hosted Solution ”, which means that they take care of updating, security and most importantly scaling your store. Compared to other platforms the fees associated with this are competitively smaller. You can easily ensure security and high performance of the store with Shopify.
3. Highly performing
Your website must support seamless navigation for every customer. The website layout and design should include everything starting from product browsing to checkout & payments.
Shopify has a seamless integration of design, speed, structure, and other essential components of an e-commerce website. Hence, you can ensure better sales and a fast user experience on your storefront.
Things To Do Before Migrating Your Website
Are you making an impulsive decision to initiate website migration to Shopify? You need to perform a few steps before starting the website migration. Similarly, there are many factors to consider besides goals and objectives before deciding to migrate to Shopify. Taking up such mindful factors into consideration and acting in accordance is essential to make website migration profitable and easy to manage. Let’s look at some of these precautionary activities.
- Make sure to create 301 redirects for all of your old URLs. When moving from one platform to another often the URL structure of your online store can change. It is important to use a 301 redirect to point old pages to new pages. By doing this you ensure that anyone who visits an old URL still finds the content or product they were looking for. Most importantly, 301 redirects tell Google and other search engines that this page has permanently changed to the new URL and Google will continue to crawl the new site without any loss of SEO.
- Test the new website before going live. You are changing the domain, site design, and hosting, all of it through website migration. So, testing is extremely important. Crawling your site will help you identify and resolve the errors if any.
- Be wise and perform migration when the site traffic is lower. The process requires some time for completion. So, migrating during a peak time may lead to a fall in potential sales. Choosing a time of the year when traffic is low, or a time of day to perform the migration is very important.
- Keep track of your site metrics throughout. Migration is done to improve your site performance. And, it’s the numbers that should reveal its magic! Compare your old and new website performance to double-check that your decision to migrate was perfect. Else, be ready to adopt a new action course that will improve your site ranking.
- Finally, inform your customers about the migration. After migration, there will be a lot of changes and your customers need to get accustomed to them. Sometimes, there could be glitches as well. So, giving a heads up will alert your customers and thus, you will not lose out on your client base due to migration.
Your Checklist While Migrating To Shopify
Migration may sometimes seem quite tedious and difficult to manage. But, if you have a checklist handy, it will turn out to be an essential and smooth process. It’s always recommended to ensure that your goals are achieved through website migration. So, here’s a list of points to check while migrating your store to Shopify.
1. Make an action course before migrating
Your decision to migrate shouldn’t just randomly appear one day. It needs to be based on your goals and objectives that will aid your business further. So, the first and foremost step in migration is to list out the reasons why you prefer website migration.
Some of the reasons may include, migrating for:
- Better SEO performance
- More efficient site structure and design
- No-code editing tools for merchants
- Better product and inventory management
After listing out your objectives, hold a discussion with your business partners, team members, and other stakeholders to review their perspectives. Further, discuss how the action plan should be, including decisions on various elements such as budget, data to be migrated, new platform, and launch of the new website. Create a comprehensive roadmap for the entire process.
2. Partner with a digital team for migration
Migrating your website all by yourself might seem too daunting and hectic. You can hire a third-party website services agency. Choosing a team of experienced experts will help you to successfully migrate. Besides, agencies like us will ensure that your new website is customized to meet your needs and goals.
Keeping Shopify as your new eCommerce platform, you can set up your store with the help of professionals. Find a suitable theme and work on upgrading your website to offer an enhanced user experience.
3. List out the upcoming changes
While migrating, you have to shift a lot of your data and product info to the new website. Maybe, you wish to retain some of the old features which were quite lucrative for your business. It’s necessary to make a list of things that will change as well as remain during migration.
Elements that remain will include product information, product images, existing customer details, order summaries, privacy policies, inventory system, and more. Among these, try and avoid outdated data as far as possible. Find out new app integrations that can bring desirable outcomes to your website.
4. Prepare a data backup system
Before you migrate it is a good idea to take a complete backup of your online site. This will help you to import your data to the new website without much difficulty.
5. Test, review, and optimize the new storefront
Finally, once the migration is done, it’s time for testing and running. After migrating all your necessary data, review whether the data is in place without errors. Manually enter the data that you might have missed.
Then, check the functionality of the new website. Test whether order placement, payment, and checkout are in place. If the test turns out successful, Hooray! Your website is ready to conquer new revenue and sales margin under your digital niche.
Make Website Migration Easier With Three Acres
Migrating your online store to Shopify will boost your brand voice and increase your sales tremendously. With better app integrations, an efficient inventory management system, and quicker checkout, many brands see a higher conversion rate too. Switching to Shopify is now made easier with Three Acres! Contact us today to migrate your store effortlessly. We look forward to expanding your business with Shopify!
