A gloves-on approach to Primrose’s migration

Primrose wanted to move away from their legacy eCommerce platform to a better supported Magento framework as a base to continue to improve the site, providing better flexibility and functionality whilst resolving multiple technical issues associated with the older platform.

Evolved were a good fit for this project thanks to a strong technical SEO offering and experience with large migrations. The recommended approach was a phased migration which accommodated necessary key changes to the site as part of the move, whilst ensuring that the results remained measurable throughout.

During the migration planning stages, the domain was significantly affected by a June/July 2021 core algorithm update. This became a challenge to overcome and significantly increased pressure on the success of the migration to be able to re-establish Primrose as one of the leaders in the gardening sector.

We planned out the key required steps of the migration into eight critical phases and produced the full migration plan detailing clear required subtasks, milestones, and target dates for each phase.

We established a key set of performance KPIs for monitoring across the migration window alongside a traffic vulnerability estimate based on the necessary removal of products and categories.

A detailed migration technical integrity audit was carried out to identify and prioritise fixes for key issues expected to impact the success of the migration.

The new site platform went live in December 2021 alongside tens of thousands of redirection rules to move the site onto an improved structure and resolve legacy URL issues.