SEP 26 2016
Demands for website design and responsiveness are greater than ever. SMB service providers who have been producing websites at scale for a long time, will often experience that they cannot keep pace with design and technology trends due to the limitations of their old platform. The main challenge for them is to cost effectively migrate old websites to a new and modern platform for truly-responsive websites.
When it comes to online presence, keeping up with rapidly changing technology and design trends is critical to ensure success across all digital marketing. One of the biggest and most obvious technology changes was the evolution from desktop sites to mobile-friendly websites to responsive and adaptive design. However, there have been less obvious evolutions for example when it comes to speed and security with SSL certificates and HTTP2 or subtle changes to SCHEMA.org markup.
Whether driven by consumer trends or Google’s latest algorithm change, SMB service providers need a platform that will not only react to, but also anticipate and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to this ever changing landscape. Although, we find that many service providers are stuck with a great number of websites on an outdated legacy platform that does not keep up with design and technology trends. What are their options to bring their end-customers’ websites up to speed?
The desire to switch to a new platform
Given the ever evolving digital landscape, there can be many reasons for an SMB service provider to want to switch to a new platform: Maybe their current sites are not responsive? Maybe the do not perform well for SEO? Or perhaps the design is outdated and their platform is too inefficient? Whatever the reason, most of our partners and prospective partners are faced with the problem that they have large quantity of existing websites sitting on one (or more) outdated legacy website platforms, ranging from home grown platforms and old acquisitions to SaaS solutions that have not kept up with technology and open source CMSs that have too many security flaws and scalability issues.
Once an SMB service provider has decided they need a new platform, then the next decision that they are faced with is whether or not they have the capacity to migrate their existing websites onto the new platform. Migration is a project in itself that comes with a number of challenges and must be well thought out and planned in order to be successfully executed.
Migration considerations and challenges
There are many technical and design considerations when engaging in a migration project. From a technical perspective, will the migration be a simple content transfer and injection, or a custom migration to get a close to a 1:1 content and design transfer? Almost as important, there are both internal and external expectations that need to be managed throughout the process as well: How will this process be communicated to customers? The sales team? The fulfillment and account teams? How will resources be managed to keep up with production and support?
Migration at scale with Mono
At Mono, we believe that the goal of a migration project should not be simply to move a site from one platform to another (this can actually be quite easy) but rather to improve the site through the moving process. At minimum, the new site should be faster, perform better in terms of SEO, be responsive to fit all modern screens and provide a more intuitive platform and user experience for making updates and content changes. Furthermore it goes without saying that the site should be fully editable by both DIFM-managers and DIY users in its migrated stage.
In Mono´s extensive experience in the migration field, migration projects are never simple. There are many moving parts and potential pitfalls that can be avoided with the right approach and expertise. One of the most important success criteria is of course to prevent churn and improve customer satisfaction. A good migration strategy along with Mono´s powerful platform tools and know-how have successfully steered several of our partners through a mass migration-process and provided them with not only happier customers, but also with a stronger product.
Download migration white paper
If you’d like to learn more about our experiences with migrating websites at scale, please download our latest white paper Website Migration - a solid approach to downloading websites at scale below and don't hesitate to get in touch.
