How to standardize branding during a site migration?

In 2021, Shopify became the platform hosting the most e-merchants with more than one million shops created on the platform. With a combination of powerful tools and flexibility of the solution, Shopify is therefore a no-brainer for e-merchants who wish to develop and achieve more growth. When migrating their store from a regular platform to Shopify, e-commerce store owners often face many challenges. One of the most important during a Shopify migration is to manage to keep their databases and keep their branding. Generally, in this situation, many e-merchants do not know how to proceed. Admittedly, this is not easy, but we are going to present you solutions to do it simply. So, in the rest of this article, find out how to quickly migrate your site to Shopify without losing your data and keeping your brand's branding.

Why go through a Shopify agency for your site migration?

Migrating a site from an ordinary platform to Shopify is a very complex and delicate operation. Indeed, at the slightest mistake, you risk losing everything. Thus, to do so, you must have a good command of the Shopify platform and have expertise in terms of development and mastery of SEO. Otherwise, after the migration, you will end up with a perfectly new site that has nothing to do with your old site. Which is a shame, since you will lose months, even years of work and especially a large part of your clientele. Still, if you entrust this task to a Shopify agency , you will be more than satisfied with the results. Indeed, in Shopify agencies, this work will be assigned to specialized professionals and with many years of experience under their belt. This will not only save you time, but also money. Thanks to their know-how, the work is more simplified and your site is immediately put online to allow you to acquire new customers. In addition, you will also have a good rendering. Thus, the expertise of the professionals of a Shopify agency, allows you to make a fast, efficient migration without any loss of data. A Shopify agency will also take care of maintaining your visual design from your old store to your new store without any bugs, elements that are not part of your branding, etc... They can also take care in certain exceptional cases of developing a branch of your branding for you.

How to map your site at a given time for your site migration?

Before proceeding with the migration of a site to Shopify, there are a number of actions to take in order to make a comparison of the data before and after the migration. Among these actions, the most important are: the crawl of the site and the model of the site. So, to crawl the site, you have to use software such as Screaming Frog ( an SEO tool ) and Xmind. Thus, they allow you to see the ergonomics and the Flow Chart of the site before the migration. This allows you to become aware of the entire tree structure of your site, and not to forget a part of it. Indeed, these software segment your URLs by typology. This allows you to quickly assess all of your URLs. The purpose of this action is to facilitate verification of all your URLs after the migration. Therefore, you will be sure that you have not lost anything during the migration. Before any migration, making the model of a site is also important, in the sense that it allows you to keep the Visual Design of your current site. The goal is to keep the visual elements of your site. These include, among others:

• The graphic charter;
• Your brand logo;
• Call-to-action elements;
• And your visual creations.

So, to get a successful mockup of your site, you don't need the technical skills to do it. Use graphic editing tools. One of the most effective in this area is the Figma software. It will allow you to complete this task in a matter of seconds. Ideally, hire a UX Designer and a Front-End Shopify developer to make this mockup, but also to recreate the design of your old store on your new Shopify store. You can get help from a Shopify expert to find the right people for your project. Also, changing CMS for your online store can be an opportunity to update your design. If you were told it was old or outdated, consider revamping your store with the people you hire (ideally a Shopify expert ). Are you redesigning your online store? Get accompanied by a Shopify Agency made up of Shopoify experts at your service. I START MY PROJECT!

How to make a copy of the database during site migration?

When transferring your site from a regular platform to Shopify, you need to migrate many things such as:

• The blog ;
• Product pages;
• Accessory pages (about page, general conditions of sale page, etc.)
• And all the data relating to all transactions with your customers.

When it comes to migrating your customer data, be aware that it may take some time. However, every effort should be made to successfully migrate them. Since customer data is the very basis of your business. So, to do this, you must start by putting together a migration plan. Then, you have to evaluate the existing data to be sure to have the same metrics after the migration. After evaluating your data, you need to determine the method you will use to migrate it. Indeed, several methods are available to you to migrate your content from another platform to Shopify: manual transfer using CVS files, use of existing migration applications on Shopify, create and use an application using the Admi API and copy-paste. For the migration of your customer data, we strongly recommend that you use the copy-paste method. Indeed, it is a recommended method for migrating a small amount of data. However, there is also a very important aspect to consider before migrating your customer data. To keep the complete transaction history of your customers, there is a certain order to consider before migrating this data. Indeed, the migration of customer data must be done after the migration of your product pages and before the migration of your order history. As a last resort, it should be noted that the migration of all your data must be done with delicacy, so as not to end up with typos in your customer files.

How to check the migration of your site?

After having migrated all the content of your site to Shopify, you must now be reassured that it works perfectly. In this case, take some time to check out the features of the new site. Thus, you will check its pages one by one to see if they are functional and if they have kept their content. Also, check if some pages have not been missed. Also test your site's translator to see if it works perfectly. Finally, check if there is any part of your content and lorem ipsum that has not been forgotten. Do you want to create your ideal website and build your online future now, thanks to Shopify? Let's go ! I START MY PROJECT!