2. Starting in the middle of a migration
A failure story of myself (Patrick) as the author of this article. In this creepy (true) story I take you back to one of the scariest of my life… It all started with a customer of mine who wanted his webshop to rank higher in the search results.
So I would start by trying to get his webshop higher in the SERP. So far so good. I had researched the niche and told him it would be difficult because of the big competition. No problem he said, we have enough time. And so it started.
No preparation
Only the client had planned to migrate the store software in October, one of the busiest times of the year. There was no preparation whatsoever. Since the old software was EOL, it was a bit urgent to migrate as soon as possible.
I started in the middle of this migration… If everything was planned well and there was good support from the new software customer service, no problem… But as you can guess, it wasn’t. Far from it.
Instead of focusing on SERP results and making the canada telegram data webshop more visible, I had to be in full contact with support to make sure everything went according to the plan I had quickly made. And let me tell you: the support for the new software was terrible. Only support tickets and phone support from 09:00 to 12:00!
No 301 plan
Of course that is not good, I believe that during a migration the support from the new platform should be excellent! And that is not all, there was also no 301 plan! Because we changed platforms all URLs changed too. Therefore I had to export all existing URLs and import them into Excel so I could create a good 301 redirect template.
After 2 months of hard work we went live. The store wasn’t even close to being ready, but our project manager of the new software said it was ok. So I told them I had my doubts, but there was no other way… We went live.
No champagne, just hard work to see how the store was doing. Lots of 404 errors from pages that no longer exist. Wrong inventory information. Wrong product images. And no meta title or description. After 2-3 weeks, orders were down 81%. SERP results were even more dramatic. A migration from hell!
