You’ve decided your website needs a migration or a rebuild (thanks to our previous article, perhaps?), and the biggest risk now is the switch itself. Downtime, a dip in rankings and a team pulled away from their day jobs can cost more in lost sales than the problem you set out to fix.
Protect revenue by finding out where it comes from before anything moves, budgeting for your own team’s time as well as the build, and launching in the quietest window you can find. Here’s how Sean Dwyer, Managing Director, William Sharp, Account Manager and Kieran Priest, Project Manager, approach it.
Sean’s first question before any migration is which parts of the site do the trading.
“Fundamentally the marketer in me, as with rebrands, errs on the side of consistency and upholding the equity that’s been built. This is the best way to protect revenue.”
Once you know which sections carry the sales, you can plan around them, either leaving them as they are while the rest moves or building the migration around protecting them. “Once you know this, you can manage around it,” says Sean.
Most business cases cost the licence and the build. The costs that catch teams out are harder to see.
Your team’s time after handover
William says the cost people miss is their own team’s time, and it grows as the project goes on. People expect the heavy lifting to end at handover. In practice, QA, content population and testing still sit with the internal team, and they can hold up the whole launch. Then there’s retraining on whatever has changed in the systems and tools.
Project management
Kieran puts it somewhere less visible: “Hidden costs are usually project management. Those 30-minute phone calls and last-minute video meetings during the working day.”
Build that time into the plan before the budget is signed off.
William says some downtime is unavoidable, so the aim is to keep it short and low-risk. Launch in quieter hours or at a weekend. Do enough preparation that the site comes back fully working, with no list of fixes waiting after launch.
How do you find the quietest trading window?
Kieran’s rule is simple: “We let the client be the guide.” He uses Google Analytics to find the quietest trading spells and gives the client plenty of notice to prepare.
How do you keep the dip in rankings small?
Some drop in search rankings after a relaunch is normal. William’s advice is to carry across as much authority and relevance from the old site as you can, which keeps the dip small and short.
Every week on a site that isn’t working costs you. William points to bugs, weak UX and technical constraints holding back organic performance, each one leaving customers and revenue on the table. Kieran adds that problems snowball while teams wait, and work already done can be lost if momentum goes.
If you’re still deciding which route your site needs, start with How to decide whether to audit, migrate or rebuild your website. If you want a partner to plan the work around your trading calendar, read how Door4 works as a technical partner.
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“Fundamentally the marketer in me, as with rebrands, errs on the side of consistency and upholding the equity that’s been built. This is the best way to protect revenue.”