Should you upgrade your online shop, portal or website?
Upgrading your online shop can seem like the natural next step when the business grows. The old solution has become slow, you’re missing features and now you want something big and beautiful. But moving to a new platform can cost you visitors, customers and money if you don’t prepare thoroughly. I’ve experienced that myself.
I’m recording this warning on a walk in Florida in July 2010. Along the way, I spot a building plot right on the Intracoastal for sale at $850,000. It’s beautiful, but unfortunately it isn’t a project I have the money for right now. Anyway, we aren’t talking about the plot. We’re talking about your website.
It’s fine to start small
When you start an online shop, a portal or another website, things can go different ways. Perhaps it never really amounts to anything. Perhaps it becomes a huge success. If it goes well, at some point you discover the solution wasn’t built for that many users.
The pages become slow. What you had built might have been a prototype. Perhaps you didn’t have the necessary knowledge, or perhaps you deliberately didn’t spend much money at the start.
I actually think that’s a bloody good idea: Start up and get things moving without spending too much. But remember that, hopefully, a time will come when you need to upgrade the whole lot.
You may have a rented online shop and now need your own solution because it has to connect with a bigger accounting system, stock management and lots of other things. There can be many good reasons to switch.
The big version two can become a disaster
Amino started with IdealBB, and later we moved to Community Server. I also have a small stake in a film website that started with its own little review system. That kind of development is common: You build something, and at some point you want to make a new version.
The problem is that I’ve seen far too many transitions go completely wrong. You switch abruptly from the old solution to the new one, and then problems come from every direction.
You lose visibility on Google. Users are utterly confused. There are errors, complaints and angry customers. Some leave because they can’t find their way around anymore. Others never find you at all because they usually come through Google, and the search engine no longer shows the pages it used to.
One reason is that all the URLs suddenly change. If you haven’t planned the transition properly, you risk flushing the value your old pages have built up down the toilet.
It also matters that users have learned to navigate a certain way. When everything looks different overnight, some people think: I might as well forget it.
I’ve seen that many times. I’ve seen businesses go bust and people put under enormous pressure by it. That’s why it’s a warning I take seriously.
I lost half my visitors myself
With my experience, I ought to know better. Yet I made the mistake myself on one of my websites a few months earlier. We went in and built an entirely new site.
I’d explained to my developers what they needed to do. I’d stressed how important it was to transfer the old URLs correctly to the new ones. I thought I’d done what I reasonably could to explain why it mattered.
Yet serious mistakes and omissions were made. We lost 50 per cent of all our visitors from one minute to the next. Half.
In the video, I refer rather loosely to the time as a few months and around half a year. What matters is that, at the time of recording, we still aren’t quite back where we were before. We’ve still lost something.
I’d delegated responsibility, and you should do that. But that doesn’t change the fact that we ended up with an expensive problem. I’m not telling you this to cry or be angry. I’m telling you because even I can make that mistake. So think bloody carefully if you have something that already works.
Upgrading your online shop: One module at a time
My first advice is to avoid making a big version two if you can. Take version one and improve it gradually. One module at a time.
Bring customers and search engines along through the changes. Do it at a pace that allows a coherent transition, instead of turning everything upside down at once.
If you have to move from one system to another, bring in a search engine optimisation expert before you do anything. Not after the damage is done. Before.
Get help ensuring the value of the old pages is carried over and the new website can be properly optimised for search engines. URLs, meta tags, headings and all the technical details need to be handled properly. You don’t necessarily need to know the details yourself, but someone needs to know what they’re doing.
Don’t change both the technology and the appearance at once
Tell users in advance. And try to make the new system look as much like the old one as possible. Don’t change too much about how people use the site at the same time as changing the technical platform.
I understand the temptation to create an entirely new layout while you’re rebuilding anyway. But you increase the risk of things falling apart somewhere when both the technology and the user experience change at once.
In the video, I bluntly say a system change is 90 per cent certain to be a disaster. That’s my strong warning based on what I’ve experienced, not a statistical study. It can be done. Good transitions are those where people have thought carefully, prepared and involved the right people.
I’ve lost a ridiculous amount of money on this myself. That’s why you get this advice: Look after the business you already have when you build the next version. You’ll find more of my experiences with online sales in E-pusher.
If you have an existing online platform that’s getting too small, slow, old and so on, you’re probably considering building something big, beautiful and grand. But be careful: You’re facing a nightmare and potentially commercial suicide if you don’t think it through extremely carefully… Listen to find out why:
Part two Best wishes, Martin
Ja det er mindre end 24 timer siden vi lancerede en ny udgave af http://www.bryllup.dk og fuckede fuldstændig op i det – alt kørte super i testen og da det så kom på liveserveren og brugerne begyndte at komme ind, kunne det bare slet ikke køre og vi måtte "rulle" tilbage til det gamle site.
Surt og frygtelig frustrerende, når man har testet og forberedt sig godt 🙂