UA The need to move a store to another platform usually comes up in one of three situations:
- You realize your expectations for the CMS didn’t pan out: in practice, the drawbacks outweighed the benefits.
- At the current stage of your project, the platform’s capabilities have been completely outgrown.
- The platform’s terms have changed — its policy toward store owners, pricing, functionality, and so on — making it no longer worthwhile to keep using it.
And if you’re now facing the task of moving from one platform to another, don’t panic just yet.
In this article, we’ll walk through the stages of a safe migration that will help you preserve your SEO gains, functionality, time, and nerves. Let’s start with why the desire — or need — to move away from Prom.ua comes up in the first place, and what’s worth keeping in mind if you’re considering opening a store there.
5 reasons to move your online store off Prom.ua
Prom.ua is a popular marketplace for commercial projects. It gives every store owner a personal manager, pushes sellers’ products into a shared catalog, reminds customers about abandoned carts, and collects buyer reviews. It maintains solid traffic — which is pretty good, especially for a launch with a limited budget or a dropshipping model.
On the other hand, working with Prom comes with a number of drawbacks:
- Glitchy search filters. Stories of people searching Prom.ua for a kid’s toy and getting a chainsaw in the results are easy to find online.
- Cookie-cutter listings. Identical small photos leave shoppers with essentially one way to choose: by price.
- Closed code and limited functionality. No extra plugins, no room for custom improvements.
- Financial mismatches. Rates for the internal ProSale ads come close to search engine ad rates, and the cost of the pricing plans doesn’t always pay off or let you turn a profit.
- SEO challenges. As your link profile grows, its weight gets distributed not just across your store’s pages, but across the whole Prom platform. And there’s no built-in functionality to automate routine SEO work.
Alternative options for your online store
Depending on the scale and specifics of your business, it’s worth considering the following options:
- Custom-built platforms. A data management system designed specifically for your e-commerce project’s needs.
- Cloud services. Portals with ready-made functionality where launching an online store takes just a few hours.
- Boxed CMS platforms. Ready to use right after installing on a server. Usually come with broad functionality and the ability to install add-ons, design templates, and configure the modules you need.
Stages of a safe migration from Prom.ua to a new platform
Once the decision is made and a new CMS has been chosen for the store, you can start preparing for the move.
It’s a lot like moving into a new apartment: you need to take care of comfort in the new place, transport your belongings, and settle in properly.
What’s worth paying attention to:
- Preserving your content. During a migration, part of your unique content can end up lost. To avoid that, it’s best to create a backup on the old CMS or through the server’s control panel.
- URL structure. When you switch platforms, links often change their structure automatically. This leads to duplicates, broken links, and non-functioning buttons and widgets on pages. You’re unlikely to avoid this entirely, so it’s important to crawl and re-check every link after the migration.
- Functionality. Naturally, the old and new CMS will differ in what they can do. It’s worth thinking ahead about how to make the most of what the new platform already offers, and which additional modules you’ll need to add.
- Design. If your store uses a template design, you won’t be able to keep it during the move. The solution is either a designer’s services or a template from the new platform’s selection.
- Redirects. It’s important to carry over your old redirects to the new platform and set up new ones. We’ll come back to this in more detail when we go through the migration stages.
- Search rankings. Your SEO gains can take a serious hit if the platform migration isn’t handled correctly. To prevent that, follow the sequence of steps below.
Stages of moving to a new platform
- Step 1. Record your site’s key performance indicators as they stand today: traffic, rankings for key queries, behavioral metrics, and the list of pages that get the most traffic. This step is essential so you can immediately assess the impact of the migration, rather than waiting to see how revenue changes over a short period.
- Step 2. Put your URLs into a spreadsheet. This time-consuming step exists specifically to help you avoid URLs with an incorrect structure. Using any site-crawling tool, collect the links into a table and sort them by server response code. Then build a second table mapping them to the new URLs.
- Step 3. Set up the new platform. Install all the necessary modules and plugins, settle on a design, and add microdata markup. While this work is underway, block the site from search engine indexing.
- Step 4. Migrate the content: category page text, product card content, information from service pages, and blog or news articles.
- Step 5. Set up redirects. For old pages that converted well, drove traffic, and have backlinks, set up 301 redirects. For new pages, use a 200 status code. For everything else, use 404. Over time, the new pages will get re-indexed and the old ones will drop out of search results. You can check that the links are working correctly with tools like Megaindex or Ahrefs.
- Step 6. Test the site on the new platform. What’s especially important to check:
-That buttons, links, and widgets work correctly.
-The user-facing functionality: the entire flow from finding a product to completing an order.
-Internal SEO.
-Links: finding and fixing duplicates, broken links, and URLs with an incorrect structure. - Step 7. Set up your analytics systems: add search engine verification codes and connect analytics services.
- Step 8. Generate a sitemap for the site and submit the file to search engines for review.
- Step 9. Compare site performance before and after the migration. If the move to the new platform was done correctly, performance shouldn’t take a significant hit. If it did, you’ll now have a clear picture of exactly what needs to be fixed and improved to win back your former rankings and keep moving forward.
Opportunities and risks
A new platform can give your online store more room to grow: for active SEO promotion, implementing modern functionality, creating an original design, and ensuring reliability and security.
On the other hand, a poorly executed platform migration can lead to lost functionality, financial losses, dropped search rankings, reduced traffic, and, as a result, lower revenue. Every mistake in this process can end up being very costly.
That’s exactly why we offer website development services designed to make your business run smoothly and comfortably going forward. On our end, we promise fast turnaround and quality execution.
Learn more here:
