Packaging site migration using Umbraco

Pitreavie Group are Scotland's largest provider of packaging and industrial solutions.  They provide a wide range of services encompassing supply, design, development, and, manufacturing. Pitreavie maintains a commitment to continuous innovation in order to deliver top-quality products and services to their customers.

Customers of Pitreavie can expect a high standard of service and support from a team of dedicated professionals with extensive experience. The company is dedicated to offering optimal solutions for packaging and industrial requirements to its clientele. They have locations in Fife, Glasgow and, Worcester and have been active for over a decade.

What Was Required

We were contacted by Pitreavie to discuss the prospect of moving their current site to a new hosting environment as well as enrolling in our continuous web development service. At the time they were happy with how the site was designed however there were many small to medium issues that they wanted us to look into. These issues ranged from improper technical SEO to site navigation not working, all of which needed to be located and fixed. 

Things to Overcome

Inheriting a site from a previous developer can be tricky, not only do you have to worry about the process of moving the site you also cant rely on anything being at the standard you are accustomed to. To start, the site is on another server, so the files and databases will need to be transferred to our hosting platform. Setting up a site on a new server, although not complex, needs to be done with care as mistakes can lead to a drop in ranking on the SERP.

As the site was built on Umbraco it would need to be placed on a Windows based server, we normally work with Linux based machines, the differences between the two of these needed to be kept in mind.  

Our Approach

You should never rush a site move, of any size, if you want to preserve your search ranking. This is what we told Pitreavie and they agreed that we should break this into stages. The first step was to set up a VPS for the Windows server instance, this is relatively simple as Umbraco is an ASP.NET application and it doesn't require anything special to run. We retrieved the sites files and database, adding them to the Umbraco installation, we also needed to make sure that the correct version was used.

Once we had the staging site in place we could run tests to make sure the site ran correctly on our system. Next was the DNS changes, although this is essentially just an A record change, we would still advise caution and to wait at least a couple of weeks after this to make sure Google sees the change and there is no effect to site traffic. During this time we preformed a site review, going through the whole site making a list of issues that needed fixed

After making sure the live site was working and letting it settle for a short time, we could now begin the task of fixing all the problems found in the site review.

Conclusion

Pitreavie Group is another happy customer. They are satisfied with the services we provided, including moving their site to a new hosting environment and enrolling in our continuous web development service. We were able to overcome the challenges of inheriting a site from a previous developer and have the site running smoothly on our system. We look forward to continuing to work with Pitreavie Group to provide them with the best possible service.