Total Site Redesign - ASP to PHP

[jlander]

Hello,

It's been a while since I've been in here. Because of the new PCI Compliance standards, I'm being forced into a total site redesign. The site is a 7 year old ecommerce site written in ASP. It has around 250 pages and for some pretty competitive keywords, it does very well.

I've done some reading of old posts concerning site redesign and the main concern seems to be when the page names change. I have no choice to change the page names because the new site is written in PHP.

I've decided to view this as an opportunity and not a problem. My site looks old and my shopping cart is basic. My new design is modern and shaping up really nice. I did a lot of research and chose a shopping cart that has many more features than my old one. I'm utilizing SE friendly URLs, which my old shopping cart didn't have. I'm going through and rewriting my site articles to make them more interesting. They are now much better, more informative, and organized.

I expect to take a hit when I make the change over, but I was wondering if anyone can give me some advice so that it will come back quickly.

[StoutFiles]

Define SE friendly URL's. Are you going to leave the .php off the URL?

example.com/products.php?product=box&color=red should really be example.com/products/box/red/

Make sure to 301 redirect all your old pages to their new URL.

[TheMadScientist]

I have no choice to change the page names because the new site is written in PHP.

Sure you do if you're on an Apache Box...

(Get used to having a more control and flexibility if you're moving from Windows to Apache. It's a tough adjustment for some, much like going from a PC to a Mac or something, but definitely worth it... IMO)

All you have to do is parse .asp extensions as .php and you can leave the URLs exactly as they are. If you're good with mod_rewrite or find someone who is, you could probably even use your new cart on the old URLs and not change anything except the back-end, so the technology switch would be transparent to search engines and visitors.

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I can understand why you're wanting to change though, and the biggest recommendation I would make is don't do it all at once... Change the design. Then change the text. Then change the URLs (shopping cart) or something to that effect in a different order. IMO you don't want to make it look like you have a whole new site overnight, so change one piece at a time.

Make sure you 301 like StoutFiles said if you change the URLs... Double check using one tool, then double check different pages again the next day using another one, then double check one more time, because it's the most important part of changing URLs. You might try FireFox with the Live Header extension, then use the control panel here and maybe even try one more, or just make sure you run through some different URLs with an empty cache and live headers or something, but it's important to know you are redirecting properly.

You might also get those linking to you to change the links to the new URL(s) after you make the change if you can.

[wanderingmind]

Also, there is an Apache:ASP module which will allow running classic ASP without a hitch. I moved to Apache a few years back, and ASP pages on the site run without a problem. However, this is best tested out to be certain.

[jlander]

Stout,

My old urls look like this:

[mystore.com...]

They will now look like:

[mystore.com...]

Every product url ends in prod_1.html. I'm definately going to 301 redirect the old file names to the new ones.

[jlander]

Scientist,

Thanks for the advice. I'll slow down and change only the layout as much as possible. I'll upload the original articles. How do I know when it is time to change the articles and URLs?

I can understand why you're wanting to change though, and the biggest recommendation I would make is don't do it all at once... Change the design. Then change the text. Then change the URLs (shopping cart) or something to that effect in a different order.

Keeping the same page URLs for the articles will be easy. I'm using the same categories in the new cart, but the URLs will be different. I'll ask my programmer if it is possible to use the old URL structure. I'm not sure how easy it will be to do this with the product detail pages.

All you have to do is parse .asp extensions as .php and you can leave the URLs exactly as they are.

I'll ask my programmer how much of this can be done. I know that the articles will be easy. The category pages should also not be that hard. I'm not sure about the product detail pages. I know that I can 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones, but I don't know about the internal link structure.

[TheMadScientist]

How do I know when it is time to change the articles and URLs?

My personal method has been 'watch and see...' Meaning I'll make a change and wait until everything gets indexed again and watch traffic, etc. and when everything settles back to where it was before one change I'll move on to the next and do the same thing again until all the changes are in place.

I usually try to wait a couple of weeks (rule of thumb), but it really varies depending on crawling and updating of the indexes by the SEs. Sometimes it happens in a week (everything's indexed and traffic / rankings are steady) and I'm comfortable making the next change and sometimes I'll just sit and wait for a month or more.

Keeping the same page URLs for the articles will be easy.

I think this will be a big help in providing some 'solidity' to the site.

I'm not sure about the product detail pages. I know that I can 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones, but I don't know about the internal link structure.

I might not even worry too much about it if you can leave the bulk of the content on the same URLs. IMO You should just wait until everything else settles down before you move them. If there are very many I think it has been advised to move them in sections if possible.

[pageoneresults]

Every product url ends in prod_1.html

I would stay away from this type of naming convention. Moving forward, extensionless is probably your best option to keep things lean and mean.

If I were launching a new ecommerce site today, my final destination URIs might look something like /mfg/sku using a single and/or two-word (separated by a hyphen) category naming convention.

I'd keep your URIs short and without underscores, those things fly in the face of usability.

I'd be real careful with a final destination URI that exceeded a certain character length and did not contain anything but a-z and 0-9, I like to keep them REAL simple.

If you plan on doing any promotion at the Social Media level, you'll need clean URIs, short ones too. The /mfg/sku convention allows you to do that if you implement a URI structure based on brevity.

Why the change from asp to php? You could have easily rewritten the existing URIs to match whatever pattern you wanted.

[jlander]

I might not even worry too much about it if you can leave the bulk of the content on the same URLs. IMO You should just wait until everything else settles down before you move them. If there are very many I think it has been advised to move them in sections if possible.

The only way I could move the site in sections will be to divide the articles (static pages) from the shopping cart. I don't think; however, is that is what you mean. It will not be possible to move products slowly because it would mean a customer would be switching between the old and new carts.

OK, here is what my new strategy will be when I change to the new site. Please let me know if I’m on the right track and if you would change things if you were doing it.

For the first update, change the design only...as much as possible. Keep as many of the original page names (using mod rewrite) and as much of the original text as possible. Use mod rewrite to rewrite asp to php pages as much as possible. 301 redirect anything else. Create a gg sitemaps, gg base, and product rss feed...be careful at first to keep the original asp extensions.

Let this sit for a while and then remove the mod rewrite and 301 redirect the asp pages to the new php pages. Let this sit a while and then start to change the content.

As far as the product page URLs, what I'm getting is a dramatic improvement over what I had. What caused this in the first place is the new PCI Compliance standards and I'd like to keep as much of the cart standard as possible so that I won't have to hire a programmer every time an update comes out. I will ask how easy it will be to remove the cat_1.html and prod_1.html and either leave the URL with the trailing /, or add .html directly to the category or product name.