CLIENT: KuantoKusta.
YEAR: 2014-2016.
CHALLENGE: Website migration without losing traffic.
SOLUTIONS: Website Migration, UX and Information Architecture.
RESULTS: No penalization and 40% increase growth.
WEBSITE: www.kuantokusta.pt
SOCIAL MEDIA:
The website migration was proposed by Kuantokusta due to a redesign and development of a new and optimized framework for the website. The restructuration of the website was implemented in order to incorporate new functionalities and responsive design for mobile devices.
With the lead of KuantoKusta’s CTO (Luís Grave), the website’s technical infrastructure is now a distributed and scalable solution, decoupled from the back-end and communicating with it through non-blocking web services. This allows for the front-end to be up and running 24/7, without depending on the availability of the back-end.
The distributed solution consists on a load-balancing by DNS system, with a minimum of 3 load-balancers that distribute the load on to a minimum of 3 application servers. On the search level, there are at least 2 Apache Solr (Solr is an open source enterprise search platform, written in Java, from Apache Lucene. Apache Lucene is a free open source information retrieval software library, originally written in Java) installations that serve the application servers.
Finally, on the application system level, PHP programming and a ZF2 framework (Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under BSD License) allow the implementation of an MVC concept (Model View Controller is a very useful and popular design pattern composed by three parts: Model, View and Controller (hence the name). It isolates content from presentation and data-processing from content).
A two-phase migration plan was developed, based on a full strategy that changed a lot of details in KuantoKusta's Website.
The First Phase had its focus on a full website audit. A report was made in order to identify the main problems, in terms of user experience and technical issues, focused on identifying best practices to keep on the new website, and identifying problems and other needs that should be corrected, in order to improve overall performance on the new website, after the migration. Along with this full reporting, we performed an URL Structure Analysis and gathered Analytics data for future analysis as well.
During this first phase, all web design and content updating was suspended and we made some considerations about the navigation on the website in order to improve User Experience. At the same time, we made a log of the top pages with best ranking/traffic and the top backlinks. Also, a User Experience test was made, online, with a Hundred users being asked to view and compare the original website and the new one, on a testing platform, and respond to several questions, allowing us to get some extra feedback on the user’s experience and general navigational feel. Participation on this questionnaire was encouraged by offering to the participants, the opportunity of winning a smartphone.
The Second Phase of the migration plan started by developing a 7-day schedule for a phased migration. This schedule included structural network changes, such as preparing the DNS records as to avoid critical TTL records ( which are settings for each DNS record that specify how long a DNS query will be cached before expiring) during the switch process, and a checklist for the involved staff, to validate the concordance about the several procedures. With the conclusion of these first two steps we entered the “48 hours countdown” which consisted on double checking the developed redirect formulas (in order to see if they would not cause any lag) and bringing TTL to a minimum value for launch day. After these procedures, we arrived to “M-Day”, or “Migration Day”. For this particular day, we developed a step-by-step checklist, to make sure that we would have the best migration process possible, and the migration proved to be a success.
● Sessions from June 2014 to March 2015
● Sessions from June 2013 to March 2014
With the completion of the entire migration process, we maintained a close Website follow-up, just to make sure that everything was going fine. Using our MindSEO® S.O.N.A.R. to get a complete look of the website’s performance after the migration, we noticed that website traffic had not been penalized with the migration and had in fact increased by nearly 40%. After the migration, we observed that organic search traffic grew 33.19%, when comparing YOY (Year Over Year) organic search performance, going from 5,873,809 sessions to a total of 7,823,235 sessions. Furthermore, the investment in paid advertising has been reduced, in favor of other inbound marketing solutions, such as email marketing campaigns.
Since the Migration Day, KuantoKusta reveals to be a happy and satisfied client, evermore convinced that they have made the right choice, trusting us to help them with their Website Migration.
After the MindSEO Migration Plan implementation, KuantoKusta has made their online business grow, day after day.