The most frequent challenges during websites’ migration process

You have probably already encountered many challenges whenever you changed or updated a website. Some issues are more common than the others. Let’s talk about the most frequent challenges.

Keeping existing address links

It’s widely known that links from different Web resources leading to your website improve its ranking in the search engines, because they favor websites with the great number of links referring to them.

If your previous website address links become invalid during the migration or changes processes, all your efforts, time and money will be lost in vain. As a result, you will have to start promotion from scratch. 

Luckily, we can offer you a solution of transferring the materials which will keep the old address links automatically and without any extra moves required from your side. 

All you need to do is inform us if some of your content had one or more links in the past. In this case we will take care of all your materials and links used at all times. The address links to these materials will stay the same. 

Organizing materials

A necessity to transfer all materials arises when you change the website’s platform from Joomla to Wordpress or Drupal for instance. 

Usually there are two case scenarios – whether it’s a familiar to you platform or something totally new. 

A familiar platform

If you had a similar experience of migration in the past, then you might also have your own hints, frameworks and methods. In this case, all you need to do is adjust some technical aspects in the existing framework of yours and that’s it.

For example, we have experience of transferring materials to Drupal from the following platforms:

• Joomla;
• Bitrix;
• Wordpress;
• Old and VERY old versions of Drupal.

Yet, you need to consider that there are certain websites working with one of these platforms, but they might be also stuffed with beats and pieces from different versions of this platform. Even if they manage to function, it’s better to treat such websites like unfamiliar to us and deal with them accordingly. 

Unfamiliar platforms

Sometimes you can see a website working on a rare platform or it was hand coded. This is the case when we have to build a transferring system from scratch.

Generally speaking, an analysis of the entire data structure takes one to two weeks. Yet, we had two examples when the process took us a month. Those websites were over ten years old and they had many other correlated issues. 

Once the analysis is finished, you need to make a test transfer of the materials. Usually it takes up to two-three days, but can it also last for a week if you have hundreds of thousands of articles.

Design of the control panel

“You will get used to ugliness the same way you got used to the beauty of your bellowed woman” said Aesop and was absolutely right. His words can be very well applicable to the transferring process from one platform to another. 

It happens pretty often that regardless the inconvenience of the old admin panel the staff got used to it and insist on using it in the future. The very first thing to remember is that administrative panel is the tool which is made for certain tasks. If you fail to adjust it in accordance with new requirements and new tasks timely, it will either make life of your staff a nightmare or will become a useless tool.

Of course, no one likes changes and a familiar tool seems much better to us for an effective performance. Yet, when you are about to change the platform, this is the right time to change the admin panel too.

We can certainly build absolutely any admin panel. Once we developed a control panel from A to Z for Drupal which had nothing in common with the platform itself. However, it’s important to consider that special solutions require high expertise and cost much.

Regardless of the paragraphs above, everything is not as bad as you may be thinking. According to our experience, a page with the most frequent tasks for a particular website merged in groups is one of the most popular solutions. Hence, if you don’t need a special solution, but rather a simple, transparent and reliable tool for controlling your website, this option should be suitable for you.

Replicating old design on a new website

Maintaining the website design and layout may seem reasonable to most people, considering a possibility of saving budget. Sometimes, the savings can be quite noticeable. However, the decision to keep the old web design has its pros and cons and some of them might not be that evident from the first glance.

The pros:

• Savings - You can save budget if you refuse doing redesign of your website. Some studios are very expensive and there’s no point of changing the look if your current design addresses your needs, portrays your brand and delivers the right message to your target audience.
• Simplicity - Sometimes it would be enough to adjust the code slightly and you will change certain visual elements by yourself.
• Tradition - Sometimes you want to keep the same design because it’s a part of a corporate brand with its historical roots and your biggest priority in this case is brand recognition. 

The cons:

• Tough implementation - If the structure of materials is changed entirely, then it may be surprisingly difficult to adjust the old coding to these changes. As a result, you may spend a lot more resources than expected and get something unpredictable by the end of the day. 
• Old fashion – It’s quite often the case when the design which used to be trendy and modern years ago gets outdated with time. Unless your business is related to antiquity, the old-fashioned design will create the wrong impression about you, which may cause the decrease of traffic and sales.

And now, the choice of priorities is yours. The last thing to remember is that there are no universal solutions. 

General scope of materials 

This is one of the most confusing topic. If you have two tens of thousands articles listed on a platform, which is only familiar to God, then transferring them may seem like a mission impossible.

In fact, such judgement is incorrect. The difficulty level of transferring the materials practically does not depend on the quantity of these materials, but it rather depends on their structure. It’s much easier to transfer a million news than hundred news, three hundred products of one type, two hundred and ten products of different type and fifteen promo materials. 

In other words, the difficulty of the task depends on the structure of the materials, which needs to be maintained.  You need to conduct a prior analysis of the materials’ types, how they are organized and correlated. 

Here’s a real case scenario from our experience. We had to import a database of FIAS – a Russian Federal Information Address System, which contains the addresses of all houses, geolocations of cities, towns and so on. Analysis of the database structure took us about three weeks, considering that there were three million objects in the system and our computers did not have any superpowers. Other than this challenge, it was just a regular task for transferring a database.