Gift Focus - Mar/Apr 2018 (Issue 106)

If you’re an established independent retailer, it’s a fairly safe bet that you already have an e-commerce website of some description. With the ever-accelerating pace of e-commerce in the UK, many retailers already have fully functioning websites that contribute to overall revenue generation. If your business is already utilising e-commerce, but you’re thinking of moving your website to a different platform, perhaps with a different supplier, then read on. This information will certainly save you losing a lot of money – and worry! Why migrate? Migration is the act of setting up redirection from one page or resource to another, and is simply a directive telling any user interested that the resource has moved. Migration is required because search engines, people and other websites expect your pages to be under one page URI (Uniform Resource Identifier, the page.html bit of site.com/page.html ). If you change your website to a newer one, the actual page URI will almost certainly be different. If you don’t migrate the pages by putting redirects in place, search engines and people won’t know where to go and any external links will be broken, affecting search engine rankings. Migrating one website to another isn’t rocket science, but it does require a substantial amount of planning to get right. The sad fact is, there’s no fast and easy way to do a migration. Large e-commerce websites especially can take literally hundreds of hours of work to successfully migrate if there is no automated way of setting up permanent redirects, but doing it right will mean that those all- important Google listings are retained. Get a migration wrong and you’re almost certainly in for a tough time at the tills. Some retailers I work with take well over half of their overall revenue through their e-commerce website. Getting a On the web David Fairhurst of Intelligent Retail talks website migration and when it pays to plan ahead 90 giftfocus

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