Today, the deciding components of the success of your e-commerce store are the tools that you are employing to manage it and the e-commerce platform, you are working with. Consider your business objectives, your technical skills, size of store and the individual preferences, while choosing the e-commerce platform. You should get familiar with the characteristics of each platform before making the actual decision.
To deal with such a complex platform can be a bit difficult for a newbie or the people, who are not very technically savvy. We have put together some of the guidelines to help you in migration.
Here are a few tips and tricks that should be considered while migrating to Magento platform:
- Do not forget to take the back up of your entire data on DVD, an external drive (Zip drive). You can choose the appropriate one to suit your requirements.
- You can take the help of detailed installation guide that are provided by the Magento official site.
- Migration to Magento and its hosted solution (Magentogo) are different. This is because the Magentogo is API based shopping cart and hence, requires API key and password.
- We recommend you to choose a reputed and reliable service provider. It is somewhat cumbersome to handle the complete migration all alone.
- It is better to find a good web development company with enormous experience in this field. It must ensure quality solution and high-security standards in a cost efficient manner.
- The perfect way to migrate without any downtime. This means your customers should not face any hassle or disturbance while shopping online at your site. Also, they do not even feel the migration is being carrying out at the same time. In this way, you do not lose your customers.
- Manual data transfer cannot give you such benefits.
There are a few things that must be taken special care during migration:
- To avoid the corruption of search engine rankings, implement 301 and custom 404 page to redirect to current store and main pages on the new site respectively.
- Remember to update NS, if you are changing the hosting provider.
- Clean the cache and re-index data to eliminate the common issues that might occur after migration.
Various steps involved during the migration have been discussed below:
- It is essential to back up the database with all the necessary information. Plan the entire process comprehensively. Collect the web hosting disposal at your disposal that includes access to control panel for hosting, FTP access and MySQL database.
- Now, download the Magento full feature software and install the shopping cart. Once download and installation is complete, test the new site for the perfect functionality.
- Be ready to store migration. There are various ways to transfer the data like use of scripts that is usually used by the professional developers. You will find some import module that helps import data in Magento store. The entire process can be complicated to be carried out alone. It involves exporting the data from the current platform.
4. You may consider hiring a developer or approaching a web development company to save your valuable time and efforts. A number of service providers are available online that provide migration services at affordable prices. This option is much beneficial for the newbies, as they will get professional assistance from the experts.
5.Once the migration is done, check for any issues in the store. Enter the domain name and check, if the site works properly and all the links or forms are active.
6. Make sure that the migration incorporates website data & content along with the actual data.
Conclusion:
More and more online merchants are now heading towards the most powerful e-commerce platform. The store owners need to reconsider their store management and make essential changes by migrating to Magento to improve the functionality of their stores.