Same Store – New Design

When you run a busy eCommerce store, you can’t afford to get it wrong! And you certainly can’t afford to lose any orders.

This was all true for our client Vibragear, sure they were getting plenty of orders from their old store, but it just lacked any interactive elements, in short, they felt it was boring.

When upgrading a WooCommerce WordPress website, there are a number of things to bear in mind.

Do you start from scratch, lose all of your current data or keep all your existing orders and contacts.

For starters, you obviously need to back up all of your data! If you use a third party marketing suite like Mailchimp or SendFox and all of your contact info is syncronised, you can start fresh without losing valuable client contact information.

Products and orders are a different story, particularly if you have complicated variable products (that’s one product with different options like size, colour) this has caused headaches in the past because variable data doesn’t always export and import well.

Best thing to do is have a discussion before doing anything (contact info below).

Whilst designing and developing your new website, you old website is still collecting new data so this needs to be taken into consideration.

For Vibragear, we took a copy (clone) of the old website and took it offline into a local development environment, re-designed the theme and layouts, obtained signoff from the client. Placed thier old site into maintenance mode during a quite period and installed the new layout to the existing website and then turned off maintenance mode.

There are many ways to complete and update, feel free to get in touch to discuss your options.