Troubleshooting URL structure changes
The American manufacturer and seller of b2c nail polishes decided to move from the Magento platform to WooCommerce. The decision was made for several reasons, one of which is the limitations of the first platform. Our team participated in testing, additional development, bug fixes, and other processes after the migration.
Reconfiguring the URL after moving from one platform to another is a must. If this is not done, part of the traffic will be lost, which will lead to a decrease in the company’s profit. Due to the previous move from Magento, some of the popular URLs were reconfigured right away, for example, product cards, and popular categories, and some were skipped.
Because of this, part of the traffic was lost, which negatively affected the business. For example, people who navigated from bookmarks to Pinterest, which involved the old URL, hence the huge number of 404 errors in the server log. In particular, the server received an extra load that did not carry any utility. We approached these issues in the following way:
- Redirection WordPress Plugin Usage. With its help, logging of absolutely all 404 errors that reached WordPress was configured.
- Nginx usage. The Nginx proxy manager intercepted non-existent pictures and other elements.
- The appropriate groups were configured for different URL segments, and as a result, after several observation days, we were able to accumulate representative data for analysis and identify the main problems.
Since the number of 404 errors reached several thousand per day, this represented a huge danger for the business. Among them could be customers who simply left when they saw a mistake. Our WordPress development company algorithm to fix the problem:
- Firstly, we set up redirects from all OLD personal account addresses (on the previous platform — Magento). These could be users who previously bought and wanted to get into their accounts.
- Secondly, we set up redirects for all URL variations of the old filters. It was quite a quest since the format of these URLs was 100% unknown and had to be based on error logs. As a result of this setup, we caught about 60% of all errors.
- Next, our WordPress developers did a similar job for a single product page (which was good organic traffic from Pinterest). Some of the products were no longer available for order, so a state was developed for products out of stock with similar products. This covered another 30% of errors.
In total, we spent 8-10 hours completing this stage for analysis and 10 hours for developing the state for out-of-stock items. As a result, we have achieved +800-1000 better clicks to the site per day. Customers began to see not a mistake that scared them and made them leave, but more or less relevant content.
This did not affect the visits number to the site in Google Analytics, but reduced the bounce rate on these pages and probably added a few dozen sales per day. Keep a close eye on your error logs. Especially if it’s a 404. This kind of error scares buyers and potential customers. Our WordPress website developers can audit your site and help you fix these errors and other problems.
