Online stores are complex applications with components that can misbehave when moving to a new server. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a complicated process however; our support team is available to assist with every step of the migration.
The first steps are as follows:
- We duplicate a copy of your website across to your new server. Your existing website is not modified, and will continue to field live traffic for your customers.
- This duplicate copy of your website is set up with a temporary address on your new server, and we provide this to you for testing.
Once we have duplicated your site, it is critical that you (or your developers) check each of the items in the checklist below so that any issues are resolved before the final migration.
Checklist
Page load, content, caching, redirects
- Do all images on your store's home, product and category pages load correctly?
- Are there any elements missing such as dropdowns, banners, navigation bars?
- Are redirects working on expected pages (products, etc) and behaving correctly?
- Is page load speed as fast or faster than the live website on all pages?
- You can use our speed tester: http://speedtest.mdg-it.com.au/
- It is recommended to test at least the following pages for speed:
- Homepage
- Product pages
- Category pages
Products, categories, cart, checkout
- Do products appear correctly in the store?
- Are categories working as expected?
- Do configurable products behave correctly?
- Does search work correctly?
- Can you add/remove products to/from the cart?
- Can you complete the checkout of a test order?
- Do all payment methods work as expected?
- As per Magento's documentation, you can test these with the following test credit card numbers:
- Visa: 4111 1111 1111 1111
- MasterCard: 5555 55555 5555 4444
- American Express: 3782 8224 6310 005
- Expiration Date: Any future date
- CVV/CVC: Any 3-digit number
- As per Magento's documentation, you can test these with the following test credit card numbers:
The goal in this test case is to confirm that your checkout reaches the payment stage. You should receive a "Declined" or "Transaction cannot be processed" response from the payment gateway when using one of the test card numbers above, this means that the transaction details are being received by the gateway.
For vendor-specific payments such as Paypal, we'd recommend getting as far as the Paypal gateway and seeing if it carries through the correct payment amount.
Backend, product/order management
- Can you log in to the Magento backend?
- Does the backend admin panel display all elements correctly?
- Can you view and manage products, categories, stores?
- Can you view and manage orders, including the recent test order?
- Do all third party extensions behave as expected?
- Is Magento displaying unexpected warnings or errors at the top of the page?
- Are there non-standard services or applications such as Redis, Memcache or SOLR to be installed on the server? Your developer or previous web host can help answer this question if you are unsure.
If you encounter any issues with any of the above steps, or require further information or assistance, please open a support ticket from the Client Area.
Going Live
Once you have confirmed that all works as expected in the new environment, please let us know and we can schedule in a time (typically outside of business hours) to perform the live migration for you.
The systems administrator in charge of your migration will let you know if we require any further information to perform this, such as specific logins for DNS.
At the appointed time we place the site into maintenance mode, sync up any differences with the live store, and then point traffic to your new server.
