Introduction
Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, the customer journey of an online store is packed in the time when they’re at your website. In order to convert more, you need to focus on creating a great purchasing experience for your customer. This can really create the leverage point to bring positive change to your system
If you feel like your current platform does not have what it takes to bring a better customer experience namely the lack of necessary features, slow loading time, never-ending maintenance costs, and so on, it’s time for a website re-platforming.
In this article, we will be showing you:
- What is website re-platforming?
- 5 signs you might want to migrate your store
- What’s the best way to execute it?
Now, let’s get into it.
What is Website Re-platforming?
Ecommerce website re-platforming is the process of moving all your data from one eCommerce platform to another. The transfer usually includes choosing a suitable platform, installing the new system, migrating data, and finalizing your new website.
The main purpose of moving to a new website is to improve capabilities and usability for your business. Additionally, you can also reduce unnecessary maintenance costs, add up more features, and boost your site performance.
Sometimes, it’s hard to tell when is a good time for migrating to a new eCommerce platform. For instance, many store owners initially aim at user-friendliness and minimizing the expense when choosing an eCommerce platform for the first time. As a result, they tend to select a platform with a basic set of features and low starting costs.
As time goes on and the store grows, it might get slower, lacking necessary functions, errors in displaying products, and so on. At this point, a website replatforming will save you time and money.
In order to help you make better decisions, we have sorted out 5 signs for you to decide if it’s a good time for moving to a new eCommerce platform.
5 Signs That You Should Go for a Website Re-platforming
If the current eCommerce platform might not be able to keep up with your business growth, there are some obvious signs to identify when you should go for a website re-platforming.
A fresh start will allow you to rearrange the database, improve the look of your site, and most importantly, increase your customer experience. Proud to be #1 shopping cart migration expert, LitExtension is always here to help you migrate your store to a new robust one!
Without ado, let’s get straight to 5 signs you might need to migrate your store!
1. Slow site speed
How long does it take your customer to load your homepage when landing on your site? New research by Google has found that 53% of shoppers will leave a site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Common causes of sluggish loading websites include:
- Too many images/ads/flash contents
- JavaScript issues
- Unclear code
- Insufficient hosting
- Outdated or excessive third-party apps.
Slow loading time can harm your business in so many ways. For example, search engines consider website performance as one of the important aspects to rank your website. Hence, slow page loading time can bring negative impacts to your SEO. In addition, it also creates a bad experience for your customers, resulting in decreasing number of visitors, conversion rate, time on-site…
- Source: Think With Google
2. Too many updates and patches
Is your developer team spending a lot of time fixing bugs that result in more bugs? This implies that you are wasting money and time. Your software structure may be responsible for this problem. Hence, trying to repair these bugs is not going to solve the problem. If this is happening to you, it’s necessary to switch to a better-built eCommerce platform.
3. Poor integration
To develop a business, you’ll need more functions than just what your eCommerce platform gives you originally. Integrate with a third-party extension will help your store become more powerful. It is a great choice when it comes to expanding your store’s functionality.
Unfortunately, different eCommerce platforms deal with integration differently. For example, Squarespace – a hosted solution gives you just over 20 apps and add-ons while with Magento – an open-source eCommerce platform, you’ll have more than 3000 options. If you are having problems with data integration in your current platform, it’s time to consider re-platforming.
4. Lack of features
Are you struggling to find a new functionality that brings more value to your business? Is your current eCommerce platform preventing you from converting more customers?
If this is the case, it’s a clear justification for a website re-platforming. WooCommerce, Shopify, or BigCommerce are some of the best choices if your priority is to incorporate more useful, trendy, and unique functions for your store.
5. Restricted capacity
Some platforms offer unlimited products, orders, variants,… while others set a cap. Have you ever felt annoyed when you have to keep bumping up against the store limits? Or do you want to use a product configurator that allows your customers to design their own products? Remember that there are eCommerce platforms that are offering these features without charging any further cost.
What to Do Next?
Above we have listed out 5 reasons why you should go for a website re-platforming. If your website is facing more than one of these problems, you’d better move on with another eCommerce platform.
Data migration now can be performed with LitExtension automatically and only takes a few hours with no technical skill required. More importantly, the source store works normally during migration, you can freely get new customers, orders, products…
You only need to go through 3 simple steps to migrate your data with LitExtension:
- Input cart information
Firstly, you need to choose your source cart and target cart from the dropdown list and fill in the required information such as URL, API, customer ID…
- Select data to migrate
At this step, You can choose to migrate only a few or click “Select all” to migrate all of them. Furthermore, we also offer more than 10 additional options for you to expand your migration possibility such as 301 redirect, clear data on target store, password migration, custom field migration, and so on.
- Perform migration
Now you are ready for the full migration. If you’re still unsure, try our FREE DEMO to see how your website will look like after the migration before you decide to pay for it. Once the migration starts, it will run seamlessly on the server. Therefore, you don’t need to keep your PC on while the data is being transferred. It is completely safe to turn it off!
Check out in detail how easily our migration tool works and facilitates your business with your new powerful store.
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Good luck!