Important Checklist Before Migrating an External Site to StoreFronts

This document covers some important checklist items that you should complete before migrating your existing external site over to a new UltraCart StoreFront.  While this list may not be exhaustive and cover every possible aspect of a site migration, it is a compilation of things we've learned.

Domain

Make sure that the domain that you use for your StoreFront is the same as your existing site.  For example if your existing site is www.myproductsllc.com then make sure you use the same domain and prefix when the Change Store Web Address wizard.

If you are using www.myproductsllc.com for your domain then UltraCart will automatically add myproductsllc.com as an alias for the StoreFront.  This will allow merchants to visit the site from both host names.

Make sure that you do not have any content with hard coded URLs to MID.ultracartstore.com or MID.ultracartdev.com within your content.  If all of your custom content URLs start with / then the site will tolerate the change to the production host name.  Don't worry if you see full URLs in the source to your page for all the content generated by the template.  The StoreFront templates use the $baseUrl and $baseThemeUrl to build up their URL structure and will instantly reflect the host name change on the StoreFront.  Only blocks of HTML content that you enter into the Pages or Item Content sections should be of concern.

Search Engines

Make sure that you register the site map files with all the major search engines.  By providing a site map file to each of the major search engines they will crawl the new site quicker.

Require HTTPS

Your StoreFront is designed to support everything via HTTPS.  We suggest that you enable this feature to give your customer the most secure browsing experience possible.  Google gives you brownie points for it as well.

Redirect Existing URLs

Without a doubt, your new StoreFront will have URLs that do not exactly watch your existing site.  We recommend that you take a sitemap of your existing website and make sure every single URL of the existing site either matches a new StoreFront URL or you should configure a redirect.  The redirect configuration tells Google where the content has moved to.  This allows the search engine to retain the history of the page and helps in your search engine ranking.  You also don't want to lose all the traffic coming to your site from other websites.

Conversion Tracking

Make sure that you have configured Google Analytics or whatever other traffic tracker on your new StoreFront.  This will allow you to properly measure the traffic to the site after you make the change.