Battersea Pen Home Shopify Migration
"Phil’s input, guidance and advice proved invaluable in terms of considering each element of the new site in terms of its impact on rankings and visibility." Simon Grey, Battersea Pen Home
Having ignored several early warnings from Paypal about the need to upgrade my website’s security to TLS 1.2, it was with some degree of horror that I realized that without this upgrade not only Paypal but my site’s other payment systems were likely to stop working altogether at the end of June 2018.
Contacting my website designer brought further bad news. My site’s software could not cope with the TLS 1.2 without being upgraded to the latest release and, even worse, my designer was fully committed to other projects and unable to assist with the upgrades.
Urgent action was needed
My business revolves around buying, selling and repairing vintage fountain pens. Despite having built our first website in 1996 using Microsoft Frontpage, I had never felt the need to develop any further technical expertise. So long as the site worked and search engines continued to give it high rankings, I was quite happy. Of course, in 1996 we didn’t face much competition for rankings as we had one of the first websites in the world which dealt with pens.
"Phil’s input, guidance and advice proved invaluable and enabled us to maintain our rankings and visibility during the migration." Simon Grey, Battersea Pen Home
In mid-2018, complacency gave way to mild panic as I realized that I needed to find a new secure platform for the site and that this shift could do serious damage to our rankings and visibility on all the search engines.
Fortunately my former site designer suggested that I contact Phil at EcomEvolve for help with selecting a new hosting platform and with the site move. After very useful initial discussions, we opted to build a new site on the Shopify platform.
Essential advice
From here on, Phil’s input, guidance and advice proved invaluable in terms of considering each element of the new site in terms of its impact on rankings and visibility. It was important that the structure of the new site mirrored the old one as closely as possible; that directory/sub directory names were identical; that product names remained unchanged and that the SEO information (page titles, descriptions, URLs etc) were consistent and optimized.
Without Phil’s constant advice, I would have missed much of this. I would have viewed creating a new website as an exciting opportunity to improve and change key elements of the site and its structure. Fortunately Phil managed to curb my enthusiasm and to ensure that the new site stayed sufficiently identical in most respects to the old one thereby protecting our rankings and visibility.
While creating a new site is always stressful, Phil’s input and contribution was invaluable in ensuring that the transition was achieved faultlessly. Shopify with its integrated payments facility turned out to be an excellent choice for the platform, and our new website launched in late June 2018 with no reduction in rankings or loss of visibility.
Since then, Phil has continued to monitor the site’s performance and to suggest changes and improvements to maintain, improve and protect our rankings.
Simon Grey, Battersea Pen Home
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