Antler
Antlers successful migration from Magento to Shopify
IndustryLifestyle
The Challenge
What was the challenge Antler came to us with?
During a difficult period due to the impact of Covid-19 on the travel industry, Antler were looking to build upon their heritage brand with a fresh outlook, moving from a legacy Magento 2 CMS to Shopify. We were tasked with:
- Ensuring the authority of the site was maintained through the migration.
- Minimising the impact of traffic & visibility loss expected due to product consolidation.
- Cleaning up the index, previously bloated from a Magento 2 filter system.
- Technical analysis of the staging environment & highlighting of priority fixes launch.
- Identifying opportunities for growth post-migration.
Our Strategy
What did we do and what was our solution?
Our migration plan included :
- Comprehensive redirect mapping of Magento 2 URLs to Shopify URLs, including historical URLs to pass all existing authority over to the new site which hit a massive 250,000 redirects
- Identification and analysis of issues on staging environment in Shopify. This included the identification of filters generating crawlable URLs and backend tags generating duplicate & thin collection pages.
- Redirect testing in staging and again post-launch & identification of errors and 404s.
- Communicating progress, blockers, and considerations to key stakeholders and prioritising essential SEO actions pre-launch.
- Post-migration analysis of performance, identification of areas for improvement, visibility drops due to product consolidation for review and potential re-introduction of products, and areas for focus moving forward.
The Results
What were the results?
Visibility has remained stable since the migration, despite the consolidation of high performing products during the migration for business reasons.
(Date line indicates day of migration)
A significant reduction in the number of indexed pages in Search Console, correlating with an increase in the number of recognised redirects due to historical pages redirected has ensured the site is lean, core pages are prioritised and the site is in a great position to grow.
Traffic since the migration has seen an overall increase of 7% compared to the previous period.
Note: numbers above are hidden to protect the data and rights of the brand, growth uplifts and percentages are representative of this case study). Visibility data has been taken from external tools Sistrix and do not represent real traffic numbers
"I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Novos. The team were amazing and handled a complex re-platform with us, not only hitting our goal of zero traffic loss but we even saw a slight increase in traffic post migration. Nothing was too much trouble for the Novos team, and they were able to work well with all levels of the organisation along with key external third parties. Their knowledge of the Shopify Plus platform and architecture was second to none and I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Novos again."
Michael O’Connor, Head of Ecommerce, Antler