Opencart > Magento without losing search rankings.

[Tech4Homes]

I don't want to open an Opencart Vs Magento can of worms but before Christmas I made the decision to move my three sites to Magento. (new site(s) are almost complete and I really don't regret that decision at all, I'm finding Magento 100 times better all round so far, steep learning curve though!).

I have created the new categories and new products, I've kept all SEO urls the same, all meta data the same and all descriptions the same for all of the products and all of the categories. There will be a few category changes and a few lost URLs due to the differences between the platforms and because I've implemented a better more user friendly category structure, so I will have to set 301's for these. But all products and 90% of others pages will remain on the same URL.

Is there anything else I need to do to ensure I don't lose my top 3 results? Should I be fine switching these? I am considering employing someone to manage the move (i.e pre-check the new site, link structures, make the move, check and set 301's then confirm all is well) two of the sites I'm not really that worried about, but one of my sites has top 3 results for most terms and brings in a lot of orders.

 

[ecenica]

With a big change like this no one can say for certain whether you'll keep the top 3 results (assuming their natural not PPC). However your 301 redirects will certainly help!

Have you registered your site and sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools?

Are you hosting your Magento sites on the same web server?

Magento has a greater CPU/memory overhead so important to ensure pages still load quickly. (something Google factors when ranking).

 

[edmondscommerce]

Yes speed in terms of the server (time to first byte, the Magento bit) and also how nicely your theme is rendering (ie Pagespeed insights score) need to be at least as good as they were on OpenCart.

 

[Tech4Homes]

For the minute I'm going to move the other two sites that I'm not so worried about and start building them, I'll leave the existing site as is as I really don't want to risk losing anything and to be honest I'm building that site to eventually sell so it might be better to keep it as a separate entity anyway.

Still loving Magento though.

 

[antropy]

Still loving Magento though.

I'm interested to know what are the biggest plus points from a seller's point of view?

 

[Tech4Homes]

I'm interested to know what are the biggest plus points from a seller's point of view?

Hi Paul,

The move came about because I want to easily list on eBay & Amazon. I also wanted to use the multi stores as I have a main site and a few sub-sites. The main site has all of the products of the sub sites so it makes sense to have one "pool" of products which I can then list on multiple sites, eBay, Amazon etc.

Opencart can do all of this, but I didn't think Openbay was much good IMO and the multi stores isn't very flexible (in my abilities anyway)

Magento has matched every feature of my OC out the box (I paid for most of the OC features) and I'm finding M2E Pro is easy to use, multi store is very simple and very flexible.

Other features I like out of the box is the product attributes, I can create text area attributes so I can fill installation details, what's in the box etc details on each product page and display in tabs. You can have a banner on specific pages so you can tailor each page to the target audience and you can make landing pages, custom templates etc etc.

I don't doubt that this could all be done on OC. It was just easier and cheaper to move to Magento in this situation. If I was doing it with my main site I probably would have stuck with Opencart as it would have been too much to risk, which is also why I'm going to leave the other site on OC.

 

[milow]

You should do 301 redirects for the pages with changed url. Unfortunately the html tags and page structure will probably change and there will be some change on the pages themselves. In my opinion this could inpact the google rating also