Incremental Migration
Incremental migration is a strategic approach to replatforming e-commerce websites that allows businesses to transition from their old systems to new ones gradually. Instead of migrating the entire website at once, incremental migration focuses on moving one page type at a time—such as product pages, category pages, or checkout flows. This method not only reduces the risk of disruptions but also enables businesses to achieve quicker results and adapt more effectively.
Key Benefits of Incremental Migration
1. Faster Time to Market
By migrating one page type at a time, businesses can launch new features and improvements faster. For instance, by prioritizing product detail pages (PDPs) and launching them within weeks instead of months, you can start reaping the benefits of the new platform sooner. This quick turnaround can lead to improved user experience, better rankings, better Quality Scores and potentially increased sales right away.
2. Reduced Risk
Migrating an entire e-commerce site in one go can be fraught with challenges. Incremental migration mitigates these risks by allowing for thorough testing and optimization of each page type before moving on to the next. If issues arise, they can be addressed on a smaller scale, minimizing the impact on the overall website.
3. Improved User Experience
With incremental migration, you can continuously enhance the user experience as you roll out new features and designs. By focusing on key pages that directly affect user interactions—like PDPs—you can gather feedback and make adjustments before proceeding to other areas of the site. This iterative approach allows you to refine your offerings based on real user data.
4. Easier Management of Resources
Incremental migration allows for better resource allocation. Instead of overwhelming the development team with a massive project, you can schedule migrations over time, making it easier to manage workloads and prioritize tasks. This flexibility ensures that your team can maintain focus on delivering high-quality features without burning out.
Should we use Incremental Migration in your project?
It's always a good idea. But here's a few situations where it might be a really good idea.
Failing Core Web Vitals
If you're failing Core Web Vitals you could benefit to replace your PDPs as soon as possible. Google admits to up to 8 times higher click costs in Google Ads if you fail Core Web Vitals. On average we see a 20-30% ads savings when fixing this issue, so we want to do it quickly.
Missing critical features
If you're missing critical features that's hurting your business, it could be something like structured data on product pages or a really messy checkout structure. Then it's a good idea to replace that page type quickly and not in 5 months when the entire new website is done.
Let's talk Incremental Migration