 OK. Check, check. You guys can hear me right? All right. I guess it's special that I don't get an introduction. Thanks for your patience, everyone. We had a little bit of a technical difficulty, but it actually was just a ploy to make sure that nobody has any time for questions at the end. So there you go. Shout out to AJ Morris at Liquid Web. Let's give him a round of applause for getting us going. And thumbs down to Google Slides for failing me when it was working a minute ago. So anyway, let's get started. I'd like to know, well, first of all, welcome to WordCamp Phoenix. This is the 10th year of this event happening in the Valley of the Sun. So it's exciting to be back and present. My first WordCamp was actually exactly 10 years ago. I was at the WordCamp at the tent in Tempe, 2009. So I was there. Maybe I saw you, maybe I didn't. But there's some information for you. So this talk is going to be about WooCommerce, specifically e-commerce stores, and moving them to WooCommerce. So I'd like to know who I'm talking to in this room. Raise your hand if you have an online store. All right, welcome in. This is exciting. And raise your hand if you are a consultant or somebody who works with somebody who has an online store. Raise your hand. OK, I think everybody's accounted for in this room, or we just have some lurkers. Welcome in, everyone. Short little plug, we actually have a WooCommerce meetup the first Wednesday of every single month at Galvanize down here in downtown Phoenix. So you're invited to come out to that. It's 6 o'clock, and we talk a lot about WooCommerce. So just a quick little plug for that. So let's get started. Re-platforming to WooCommerce. So first question, why store owners re-platform their online store? Well, if you've re-platformed, you can answer that question for yourself. But I think that's probably a really obvious answer, because a lot of times we start our online store on one platform, and growth happens. Hopefully that's a good thing. It presents a whole bunch of problems that are good to have, but are stressful to deal with. So we're forced with the situation, whether we started on a hosted platform, we started on something that maybe was cobbled together to move on to a platform that will suit our growth. So a lot of times it's driven not only by those challenges with growth, but a lot of times it provides a lot of opportunities for us to be able to do so many great things and take control of our destiny. And WooCommerce affords us an opportunity to really customize the experience end to end, which is a challenge on a lot of hosted platforms. So specifically, WooCommerce is a great landing spot if you've hosted your e-commerce store on another platform that is very restrictive. So you may be wondering, OK, I said I was at the first WordCamp 10 years ago, and I'm talking about WooCommerce, and I plugged my meetup, but who exactly am I? Well, I'm glad you asked that question, and I'm about to tell you. My name is Cody Landefeld, and I am the co-founder of ModeFX. Our company specializes in helping online stores with a myriad of technical issues and help them with massive growth. A few tidbits about me. I started my first business when I was 13. Phoenix and all its spread out landscape, pretty much everybody has a lawn back and front. So if you lived in my neighborhood when I was 13, I probably knocked on your door, and hopefully you let me mow my lawn so I could have some money to buy stuff. I recorded a rap album at 17. It's hard to believe, but yeah, I did anyway. I began a web design at age 20. I was going to school for IT and found web design much more desirable. And finally, at age 25, I co-founded ModeFX with my wife and I, we're still doing it, so anyway. So that's a little bit about me. So let's go ahead and get into it. So I like in a replatforming experience or process, kind of like home remodeling. And so when we think about home remodeling, that's a good metaphor for website redesign or replatforming. And when we start thinking about this process, we have an expectation. We have a mental picture. We kind of think about what it's going to be like. And so HGTV, or specifically Chip and Joanna Gaines are in our mind as like the picture perfect version of remodeling project that can be put on TV and it's a perfect process. But if you're anything like me when I try to do things at home or remodeling or anything of the like, or even working on your website, it kind of ends up like the second picture. It's more like, it can end up a mess. So that is the challenge we have as we go into this process of replatforming. We think about trying to do it ourselves or starting on a platform that really doesn't give us a lot of support. And so it can really end up to be a mess. And it's really when we're thinking about going through that process, starting at ourselves or hiring somebody who is not really well versed in WooCommerce specifically, it can really be a pain in the neck to go through that process and migrate your store, go through all the data. And then it's just, it's a complete nightmare. So I hope that I'm not triggering some type of a bad memory or anything or maybe you're here to get a better way to go forward. So anyway, that's kind of the way it can go. So you're asking yourself as you're going through this process, you start up, you're thinking you gotta get onto another platform, WooCommerce is the one for you. You get into this little mess and you're like, oh my gosh, what am I getting into? What am I thinking? Or maybe better yet, you haven't quite gotten yourself into a mess and you're really trying to think through exactly what you need to do. So what I'd like to talk about is to give you some food for thought, things to better organize your approach to be able to move your store from one platform to WooCommerce or maybe even a really poor cobbled together version of WooCommerce to a brand new shiny, scalable version of WooCommerce. So when we're thinking about a replatforming of our online store, it really applies to data, information on our online store. Hopefully we've been able to launch, we've been able to make some money, gain some customers and our store contains essentially all of the data that relates to our businesses that run online. So there are three key components that we wanna think about when we get ready to transfer or rather replatform our store to WooCommerce. So we wanna make sure we're planning for that data migration. We wanna take advantage of improving the whole infrastructure of our business online as it relates to our online store. And we also wanna take an opportunity to possibly declutter all of the code of the organization of our online store as well. So these are three things we can really accomplish when we replatform to a new, when we replatform our store from one platform to WooCommerce. So let's unpack these areas. When we're thinking about or going through the process of planning for data migration, we wanna make sure that we're getting all of the pieces and all the information that are pertaining to our customers and our store data on our current platform. And this requires a lot of careful planning, a lot of things that we have to get right. Otherwise, if we launch on a new platform, we don't bring something over that's crucial, it's really gonna cause a massive problem for us in our business. So it's crucial that data cannot get lost and we retain some critical functions that need to be migrated over or recreated. And that's a key really for us to think about because not all platforms are created the same. Or rather, if you found out if you're a consultant or if you've done it yourself, you realize that databases aren't always formatted the same. So it's really something we need to think about when we're moving to WooCommerce. Now this includes aspects of the current platform such as tools like MailChimp, other things that are built into our platform as third-party services are integrated. There may be the unfortunate process of going and recreating those on our new platform, specifically with WooCommerce. But it's good to know that more than likely, a lot of the popular third-party services, especially in the automation space, already exist with WooCommerce. So that's a plus when we're thinking about data migration. So when we're going through this process of going through and wanting to replatform, we also wanna take this opportunity to improve the infrastructure on our online store. The goal for us is to create a faster, more powerful infrastructure. And WooCommerce is a great opportunity for this. And I wanna talk about what's a challenge we run into with WooCommerce often. And in mode of fact, we talk to a lot of customers, a lot of store owners that have seen some challenges with either loading in tons of plugins or just having a certain volume of sales that have caused a lot of slowdown to their system, specifically that are painting the business owner when it deals to going into the admin and doing daily processes. So that's a really big opportunity we wanna think about when we're moving either from another platform to WooCommerce or possibly even an older version of WooCommerce to a brand new, fresh, scalable version of WooCommerce. So going through this process, we wanna make sure we have a scalable infrastructure that can quickly absorb incoming data. And we've got a lot of things that are included with that. Something to keep in mind when I think about the business owner and how they use the admin specifically is thinking about fulfillment management. And that is so crucial to make sure that a store owner going through, making sure your order data's in there, making sure you've got fulfillment and make sure they're sinking back and forth with your inventory. Those are things that really can add up to seconds, minutes and hours and days taken out of your time as a business owner or your staff's time in being able to go through and efficiently use the admins. So we wanna think about how that relates to improving infrastructure and how we can speed that up or better yet, how we can rebuild our store or bring our store into WooCommerce and make that process very scalable and fast. Another thing to think about is creating seamless integration with marketing tools. And I know that there are so many automation tools, so many things that you could put on your store. I wanna think about how that relates to the database. I wanna think about also how we can create, possibly customize the integration as it relates to WooCommerce. And we can really have that in mind with creating a powerful infrastructure and improving it from the current platform and moving into WooCommerce. Lastly, in this point, we wanna take this opportunity to declutter our online store. And this is pretty interesting, I'm getting texts from your wife. Anyway, that's cool, I can't see it. Anyway, thanks again, AJ. Yeah, so as you probably have encountered, maybe your store owner or maybe you work with store owners, there's a lot of really slow, cluttered websites, even on WooCommerce that have so much junk in there. So we wanna take this opportunity as we're replatforming to really think through that process. How do we improve? How do we create a more scalable version? And that's something we get to take part in in mode effect all the time. In fact, one of our clients, they're an excellent client of ours. They've been with us for years. We found out they did half a million in sales around the holidays. And so we went back in and we learned a lot about their store and their infrastructure. And we're like, well, there's a lot to address here. So as you can see, there's a lot of advantages to do that. So we wanna make sure with this replatforming process and we're gonna declutter the things, wanna make sure that we are doing something that will not compromise the speed on our site or lose sales. And also taking advantage of what WooCommerce has to offer in its incremental updates and its system-wide updates, along with all the extensions that are related to the system-wide updates. So anyway, hopefully you get the picture with the opportunity we get to declutter our store and improve that in a store replatforming process. Does that make sense so far? I'm trying to be a little more high-level. I mean, we could talk for days about this, but I wanna make sure that we're kinda giving some more food for thought. So anyway, let's go ahead and move on to the next point. The keys to data migration. I wanna focus on just four as we get into this. Obviously, there are more than four, but in particular, there are four that we wanna talk about. There are attributes, variations, customer data, and product order data. And replatforming brings organizational challenges where data is concerned. And if you find yourself in a place where you're doing this on your own or you're working with a team that's maybe more of a generalist web agency, you can find that oftentimes, they don't understand WooCommerce or rather, e-commerce end-to-end. And it can be a challenge when you go through this process of bringing over this data. So let's tackle some of these keys to data migration point-by-point. So attributes, you probably already know this. If you're in the e-commerce space, it covers these particular keys. So for an example, in WooCommerce, products are organized and classified using taxonomies. And this may be something you knew within your first week of working with WooCommerce. But taxonomies includes incoming data needing to be preserved and integrated. And during the replatforming process, we need to make sure that we're pushing all this data into the structure best suited for WooCommerce then we'll scale with our site specifically in our database. The next point is variations. We wanna think about how it relates in the replatforming process to variations. It's quite possible that in a previous platform, they used a completely different classification method. So we need to make sure with whoever's in charge of this data migration, we won't lose any data in how it's put into its new variations within the specific confines of WooCommerce's database. So that's something to keep in mind as well. And next, a crucial part of our data is our customer data, how it relates to us. Like I said, hopefully we've been online for a while, we've got information about our customers and if we lose any bit of this information and if it doesn't come over correctly into our new WooCommerce website, this can cause a massive problem for us, especially if our business relies on ongoing orders or any marketing data to go out and try to move them through our funnel and increase loyalty. So to make sure we're including all this information as it relates to customer data. Finally, product order data. So that's more of a sub point to customer data, but we wanna make sure that we understand, we wanna retain that data that's related to what our customers are actually buying and make sure that that comes over into the format of what WooCommerce affords so that it will be set up correctly within the database. Is that making sense so far? All right. Good, everybody's lively bunch here. All right, so let's move on to our next point. When we are going through the process of re-platforming to WooCommerce, we wanna take an opportunity to enhance our sales. I don't think that we're in this game to move backward as a store owner. We want to improve our offerings, wanna improve our service, and moving into WooCommerce really allows us to take advantage of what WooCommerce has as a platform to customize things. So our goal is to enhance sales. So there's three things in particular that we can look at to enhance sales on WooCommerce. And the first one is looking what the SEO opportunities can afford us. Secondly, possibly going through a full website refresh process. And then finally, specifically looking at refreshing our content. So let's dig into these point by point. SEO boosts, this is an important thing. So there are two specific things wanna think about when we re-platform that are pertaining to SEO. And those are URL management and canonical tags. Now, Google is the biggest player and rather the gatekeeper of how traffic gets into our website, especially as it relates to search. So they'll know something's up when we relaunch our website or more specifically, they'll know what's not done well or what's not matching. And just as a quick aside, when we're thinking about Google, when we're thinking about SEO, wanna consider looking deeply into our analytics. I got a question for the store owners in the room here. How many of you have analytics installed on your store? I hope everybody does. All right, great. How many of you would say that you've properly set up analytics on your store to track all of your conversions? Raise your hand. Fewer hands go up. Okay, we noticed that too, a mode effect. We understand, it's so shocking. So, sorry, real side point, but this is my challenge and encouragement to you. Make sure that you properly set up Google Analytics on your store specifically for conversion tracking because it's so crucial to your business. How many of you look at your analytics every single day? Raise your hand. Every single week? Every single month? All right, look at every year? All right. So this is so crucial because you could hire a firm to redesign your website, replatform your entire online store, but if they don't look at your analytics, if they don't pay attention to what your SEO is on your current store and matching that up, it can cause massive harm to your business. You could take a massive step back. This is such a crucial point of replatforming your store. So we wanna make sure that we're doing well with URL management. We wanna make sure that things match up. We wanna take advantage of what WooCommerce has to offer with the SEO information, the SEO plugins Yoast has a WooCommerce add-on. That can improve your store's SEO performance from one platform into moving into WooCommerce. Secondly, canonical tagging. Canonical tags boost SEO by ensuring that there is always an authority page on your website when there are multiple pages with similar content and products. These tags are actually inserted into the page code. So again, making sure that all of these points are checked. And when you hire a website development agency to work with you on your online store, they have to get this right. They have to make sure your analytics are properly dialed in and make sure your SEO is dialed into its maximum potential. And the great news is WooCommerce affords you to do that, so you can take advantage and improve that from one platform to another. All right, long rant on that one. So we'll move on to the next point. We could take this opportunity when we're moving to a new platform to enhance our sales to do a full website refresh. And that's not uncommon. In fact, a lot of stores we meet at Mode Effect, a lot of our clients aren't always looking to fully knock down their store and start from scratch. A lot of times they're interested in just improving things incrementally. But at some point in your store or your business's journey, it's going to benefit you massively to redesign your store. So when you're going through this repot-forming process, this could be a good time to look at it. So one of the things to think about, and maybe this is something we already know, but mobile-first design, how many of you understand the difference between desktop and mobile users on your online store? All right, we had a store that we recently talked to who has been a client with us for years. 70% of their users are on mobile. Who to thank it? And the business owner didn't even know this. So we've taken this opportunity to engage them with a website refresh and completely think about how people use their stores or rather view their store on a mobile device. So this is crucial, especially with SEO, especially with how people use Google, and especially with how people first engage with your store or your brand. So mobile-first is huge. The repot-forming process provides an excellent opportunity to redesign an e-commerce site and run some A-B tests as well. So that can be a little bit challenging if we're doing, or maybe it's within our process already where we're doing that on an incremental basis, but A-B tests with a redesign could really create a great opportunity for us to really get it right, really understand what our users are enjoying and keeping them coming back and eventually buying and buying again and again and again. All right, next in this process of thinking about improving sales is specific to our content. I wanna take this opportunity to look at our content and see how it relates to trying to make sure that it matches up well with what our audience is doing. And again, this comes back to analytics. We look at our analytics, we understand the behavior of users on our online store, and we can use those things that are doing well for us to improve overall. So we're boosting our SEO, we're taking and running A and B tests, and we're also thinking about specific content and how to improve that. So a mobile-first design can really help with this process as we're thinking about how people will see our sites within the first view, but we can also think about how it will expand to a desktop as well, and that will help us as we refresh our content, we'll look at the behavior with analytics and see how users engage with our store. So that can really help us with going through this process of refreshing our content. So a few key things we can really think about to implement on our store specifically when it comes to refreshing our content is creating more white space so that our content is actually easier to read. How many of you go on to an online store and you see it's just there's so much information there, or maybe there's not enough information, or maybe there's not enough photos, or maybe there's just kind of those photos from a product that are very much like just the concept or not really the true rendering of the product, or it's hard for us to picture a piece of clothing or a backpack with somebody wearing it as opposed to just seeing a picture of a backpack on a white background. These are things with our content that we get a chance to improve as we go through this process. Another thing we can do is develop infographics that repeat the content on our desktop site. Now, depending on what your online store is, that's not always gonna be a match for match, but that could be something that you can possibly do and maybe leverage your blog to be able to drive people that may be interested in a particular topic or a category of an item you're selling online and bring them back eventually to buy from your store. And finally, refreshing our content. In refreshing our content, we could pay particular attention to the headlines on our site. And these will help us as it relates to mobile as well as desktop and how to organize these things and get them just right, especially with SEO. So anyway, so those are the points related to going through this process and also making sure that our sales, we can improve our sales on our online website and replatform it. All right, so I kind of tried to go fast through these points, so I'm right at the end. So I thank you so much for coming in here and participating. So I think I have a little bit of time for questions, right? What time are we at? Okay, great. So I do have time for questions. Yep. Yes, you mentioned white space, improving white space. I wasn't running away from you. Okay, are you saying, you're asking? They seem to break. Yeah, there's always exceptions. Like, okay. So the question is, I'm talking about improving white space. What about a website like Craigslist? So my answer to that question is with online stores, with sites that are so vastly popular, there's always exceptions. There's always gonna be exceptions. Even for your store, in a niche market, there can be an exception. So for most people, improving white space, following best practices, you're gonna get a better result, but there's always gonna be those exceptions. So I don't really know a good answer to that, but good observation, that's a good question. Yes. What are the most common good question? What are the most common pitfalls we see when we migrate a site to WooCommerce? Things remaining in the database. Tables, product, old product order information, old things that are just remaining in. And what often happens for us is we don't always get hired to do that best for a client. A lot of times, we inherit a site that's got that bad, but our observations that we see, there's just a lot of things remaining in the database. I mean, we're talking databases that are three to four gigabytes large with maybe a gigabyte of old ghosted information. So that could happen. Those are some of the pitfalls, and that causes a massive load challenge on the site. So that's one thing in particular we see. Yeah, that's a good question. So the question was, are we saying that mobile sales are a greater priority over desktop sales? In short, okay. So that all depends on exactly how your story is. As a general rule, e-commerce as a whole, people will first view your products or your website on a mobile device, but likely buy on a desktop if you get them to come back. But it just depends on your store. What we've noticed is that a lot of people will buy products, and they want to log back in, like specifically with our customer we have, they do digital downloads. So they want to buy their product and they'll go back to the store and they'll go back to the store and they'll go back and view it on mobile. So they're staying within a mobile version. So it's a case by case basis. For a brand new store in a category that doesn't yet have loyalty and maybe first time purchase, the odds or the stats pretty much are still matched up with the purchase being made on a desktop. But mobile's important to get that first impression. So that's what you want to think about. Yeah, hand in the bag. Okay, so you're saying if you had an online store for a while and you have the permalink set up a certain way, is it important to make sure that those stay the same? I think for the most part, yes. As far as if you're happy with that end results, if you think that end result can be improved, then make it better. Because a lot of times there are specific terms, specific things that can match up better within a permalink that can maybe match a certain category of a product if you're trying to kind of catch on with a wave. Yeah, stick with it as long, stick with it unless you can improve it. Yeah. So you're asking if with the URL management, is there an automated way to do that? Yeah, that's a good question. There are smarter people on our team that probably know the answer better. I got my partner in the room so I can introduce you to him. Or I can ask him the answer, I'll just get. No, sorry, I don't have a great answer for that. I think there's some automation with Yoast, but I don't know the best answer to that, so unfortunately, so good question, no. Do I have time, how many, how am I doing? Couple of minutes, any more questions? You guys just want to see me get the hell out of here? What? All right, good, any more questions? Yeah, one more. Okay, good, great question. So what are the top platforms we see people moving to WooCommerce from? Shopify, a lot of people start out there and let me give you a little bit of advice. Shopify is not a bad platform to launch your first store. It's cheaper, it's absolutely cheaper than WooCommerce. So a lot of people get tired of the limited functionality of Shopify and want to move to WooCommerce. BigCommerce, Etsy, people selling on Amazon, people who don't quite own their platform just yet. So they'll want to move to WooCommerce. Yeah, or even maybe even easy digital downloads to WooCommerce. So yeah, it's kind of all over the place. All good, one more, one more, all good. Going once, going twice. Thanks, everybody. Because you don't have ongoing maintenance and other long-term expenses like.