The Art of a Well-Executed Migration
How we safeguard your business, and your reputation.
We’re certainly no strangers to migrating businesses from one software system to another. In fact, we’re experts! We have over 30 years experience of successfully performing mission critical migration projects for some of the largest companies in the World, so you’re definitely in safe hands with us.
We understand that migrating to a new platform is a critical undertaking for you, which is why we place your business at the absolute centre of our highly structured process. Our proven, step-by-step methodology is designed to provide complete transparency and predictability, ensuring that there are no nasty surprises.
We work in close partnership with your team, making certain that your operational needs guide every single decision, from initial planning to the final go-live. This ensures a seamless and successful migration that minimises disruption and delivers a platform perfectly tailored to your current needs and future goals.
Your SEO is Safe With Us
Migrating to a new Ecommerce platform can be disastrous for SEO if it’s not done properly. Our rigorous 4-stage process ensures that you maintain your current rankings and preserve your online authority. Our goal is to signal to search engines that your content has moved, not disappeared, and this is a standard part of all of our migrations.
We ensure a flawless migration that preserves your digital footprint.
Pre-Migration Audit
This stage involves documenting your current site's SEO performance to create a benchmark. This helps us measure success and quickly identify any issues.
1) We crawl your current site using specialised tools to get a complete list of all your URLs.
2) We use Google Analytics to identify your top-performing pages in terms of organic traffic, conversions, and backlinks.
3) We document all key SEO data for every page, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 headings.
4) We identify and fix any broken links or crawl errors on your current site to avoid carrying over old problems.
Redirection Mapping
Redirection mapping involves creating a full 301 redirect framework to tell search engines exactly where every old URL has permanently moved to.
1) For every URL on your old site, we create a map to its corresponding new URL on ProStore®.
2) We test for, and eradicate, all redirect chains i.e. make sure each old URL redirects directly to a single new destination.
3) We ensure that old pages are never redirected to your new ProStore® homepage as this is bad practice.
Pre-Launch Testing
These are our final set of checks and balances that will ensure that everything goes smoothly during go-live.
1) We keep your ProStore® site blocked from search engines until we have completed and signed off all of our checks.
2) We thoroughly test the redirect map to ensure every URL is working as intended.
3) We implement the redirect map at server-level on your new ProStore® environment.
4) We create and submit a brand new ProStore® sitemap to help search engines find and index your new pages.
Post-Migration Monitoring
Our work doesn't end when your new ProStore® site goes live. We continue tracking your SEO so that we can identify and fix any anomalies fast
1) We continually check for Page Not Found errors and immediately implement redirects for them.
2) We continue to monitor your organic traffic and keyword rankings. A temporary dip is normal, but a prolonged drop means we need to investigate and fix any problems immediately.
SEO preservation is a fundamental component of every ProStore® migration as your search engine ranking is one of your most valuable digital assets. A poorly executed platform migration can cause a catastrophic loss of traffic and authority, effectively erasing years of SEO work in an instant. Our SEO preservation strategy ensures a seamless transition that will protect your hard-earned digital footprint, safeguarding your investment and providing a stable foundation for continued growth.
Maintain your hard-earned search rankings... with ProStore®
The Crucial Role of Pre-Launch Testing
We do migrations better than anyone else. Why? Because we believe in the “test today, thrive tomorrow” principle. This means that we perform and tightly manage every single activity for you, and you get the chance to thoroughly test your new ProStore® environment from end to end, for as long as you like, BEFORE you go live (with no current business interruption and no loss of existing revenue). This is how we ensure that you can truly launch with certainty.
Our methodology de-risks your migration, and protects your business.
Unlimited Acceptance Testing
Unlike any other platform, our unique Sandpit Mode enables you to fully test your entire environment from end to end, impersonating both customers and your own team back at base.
For example, you will be able to use Unify Surface™ to generate any number of dummy orders as if acting as a customer, and then process those orders, instigate returns, perform exchanges etc etc etc as if it were your live environment.
We will provide you with a structured test plan to ensure that every single area is covered and formally tested and approved by you before going live.
Unlimited Data Resets
Any part of ProStore® can be reset at any time when in Sandpit Mode with just the click of a button. For example, if you were testing Blog posts and wanted to start again, a simple one-click process will clear all test data just for Blogs and leave that area factory fresh again.
This feature is a game-changer as it enables real structure and rigour to be applied to the whole acceptance testing process. For example, you could send various emails from Unify Surface™ that relate to specific types of actions (e.g. asking for a quote). When you are happy with the test results, you can clear down the Inbound Messages and start a new action type (processing Price Match requests for example).
By thoroughly testing and familiarising your team with every area of ProStore® before going live, we can ensure that your launch day doesn’t become a recovery mission. We believe in getting it right first time and our exhaustive testing phase is the final checkpoint in ensuring that every feature, button, and workflow performs exactly as it should under real-world conditions. This guarantees a smooth, successful, and professional go-live that you can be confident in.
While in Sandpit Mode, you will be using your real ProStore® environment, fully configured for your business, and with a copy of your full Product inventory pre-loaded. This provides real context and realism to all testing exercises, without any risk of corrupting your live data.
Sandpit Mode enables you to keep any data created during testing that will have value after go-live, such as tried and tested config settings, approved wordings etc. You can, of course, clear down anything you don’t want to be there at go-live (test customers, dummy Orders etc).
Enjoy peace of mind and a smooth, risk-free transition to ProStore®.
The Full ProStore® Migration Plan
1. Business Continuity
Our main priority during your migration will be to protect your existing revenue streams. We want there to be as little disruption to your business as possible, and we will certainly not de-stabilise any of your current systems or add unnecessarily to your current workload.
2. Preparation & Planning
All migrations are different, but our approach remains the same. The first stage involves fact finding to ensure that we fully understand your business, and your data. This will involve a questionnaire, and at least one on-site visit from us. Don't worry, we know you're busy, so we will always try to minimise any impact we have on your working day.
3. Risk Management
We're really big on this! Basically, Risk Management is a systematic process for identifying, assessing, and controlling potential threats or uncertainties that could impact your migration. By applying rigorous Risk Management techniques at all stages of every migration, we can be confident that we fully understand the road ahead, and do not get any nasty surprises along the way.
4. Communication
One of the many things we've learned over the last 30 years is that you can never communicate too much. For that reason, we will always keep you fully up to speed with progress during your onboarding, in the form of reports, or Teams updates if you'd prefer. This ensures that you know exactly what stage everything is at, and that no assumptions have been made at any point (by you, or by us).
5. Setup Phase
The Setup Phase essentially involves all of the hardware provisioning and software configuration activities that we need to do. It also includes migration of your current Products and Contacts data into ProStore®. It's pretty complicated, but we take care of every aspect of it for you.
By the way, if your current platform allows, we can also discuss migrating other existing data into ProStore® too.
6. Testing & Training
Before long, your brand new ProStore® solution will be ready for the start of the next phase, Testing and Training. At this point, your Products, Brands and Contacts data will have been imported, your chosen configuration will have been applied, and your secure, private server will be humming away nicely in our state-of-the-art UK Data Center.
You will now be free to perform as much testing as you need, and we will be training and shadowing you throughout this period.
7. Go-Live
Once acceptance testing has been completed, we will want to "flick the switch" so that you can go live with ProStore® and start enjoying the benefits as soon as possible.
This phase is planned in great detail in order to minimise risk, and will include clearing down of all test data, and performing a real-time refresh of your current Product inventory.
We will discuss all of this with you well ahead of time.
8. Post Go-Live
Things may get quite busy for a while as you adjust to your new environment, but rest assured that Unify Digital Ltd will be with you every step of the way.
If you need extra training, or you want to adjust anything as a result of real-world usage... we're there for you.
Remember - go-live is just the beginning. We're your dedicated technical partners for the whole journey ahead.