Key Things to Remember Before You Migrate Your Website To Another Technology

We all know that technology is evolving every day. Every day new technologies or frameworks are coming out in the market. Old ones are becoming obsolete and these new technologies are becoming the replacement of old ones. To survive in today’s market companies are moving to these new platforms or tech stacks. 

A company can always migrate to a better platform. In technical terms, migration means moving from the current platform to another better platform. A platform that can provide a better working environment and user experience. We have already discussed that new technologies are the main reason for companies to migrate their website. Security is another concern for companies when it comes to moving their website to another platform. 

Migration depends on your main concern, whether you want to migrate only frontend technology, backend technology, or the database. Migration is a very big topic to understand and in this blog, we will mention some key things to remember before you migrate your website to another platform. 

1. Why is There a Need for Migration?

• When your website built on the current technology doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations.
• When the technology gets outdated, and you don’t get vendor support for the issues that arise on your website.
• When you’re unable to pay the licensing cost of the current stack.

In all the above case scenario migration is the best option for your website. Migrating a website is a complex process, and it takes a lot of planning. You will have to set some definitions and ground rules to migrate your website smoothly. 

• Explore the current state of your project or application that needs to be migrated.
• Analyze the calculated risk and prepare the roadmap for it. Also, find out the possible solutions that may occur during the migration.
• Choose suitable technologies that fulfill all the requirements of the project.
• Make a roadmap or a proper plan to execute the migration process.
• Once migration is done, test the functionality of your application on the new platform.

Before you move forward with the planning phase of migration, below are the key points you need to keep in mind…

• Depending on the business problem decide the project budget and timeline.
• Set hourly or weekly charges for a new client who wants to migrate to the new platform or system.
• If your client doesn’t have much more knowledge about the technologies or if the client is non-technical then it’s good to have a contract signed off mentioned with the scope of migration. A client can also hire a contractual project manager who can connect with the development team regarding this.

2. Understand the Scope of Migration

Before the migration of the website takes place client and the development team should interact with each other. The development team needs to have a good understanding of the flow of the system. A development team can take sufficient time to analyze the existing system and to come up with a migration plan. A client can raise the business problem facing the existing system. 

The client needs to share the detailed project requirement to complete the migration successfully. A proper discussion and clarification should be there between the client and the developer. Both of them need to be on the same page with a proper migration plan. 

Proper documentation should be prepared by the development team with all the migration details or the business logic. Documentation is really important when the migration is done by a new team. 

3. How to Cater to the Scope Creeps?

Scope creep is defined as the modification in the technical requirements introduced in the project but the timeline or the increment in the project budget doesn’t get exceeded. Some common reasons for Scope Creeps are given below…

• When developers misunderstand the project requirements. This creates troubles later in the future during the migration. 
• Avoiding frequent feedback from the end-users. It’s not important to entertaining all the feedback, but you should also not avoid feedbacks completely. Select the most repetitive and stopper ones.
• It is not good to agree with the client to make changes for all the requests they are asking for. It can build a positive relationship at first, but later your client may get disappointed with you. It’s good to work on the priority or the urgent changes. You also need to inform the client about the impact on the efforts.
• Some factors that can impact the project scope can not be under your control, such as new features added to the existing technology, economic changes in the market, or any kind of personal emergency.

You might have understood the term Scope Creep. There is no way to where you can exactly assume every future request for feature changes in the project requirement. 

4. Technology Selection

Being a developer, you may have a lot of options present in front of you such as MySQL to MongoDB, Angular to React, MEAN stack to LAMP stack, or the cloud hosting servers like Amazon AWS to self-hosting servers like Apache. Things are confusing….isn’t it?? It’s the responsibility of the developer to select the planned technology stack for migration. Prepare yourself for every future need. 

If you want to select the migration platform, and you don’t get the idea of the requirements for the new platform clearly then you have the option to hire a solution architect. A solution architect already holds the experience of working in a complex system. It comes under third-party consulting so if the client wants…he/she can hire the solution architect on their own, or they also have the option to pay to the developing company. 

It can be negotiated or agreed upon tasks, done before the migration planning phase. Make sure that the new platform features are tried and tested. Make sure the data is secure and other features do not require more changes after migrating to the new platform. 

Migration is not an easy process but if you do it correctly, it will give you a new start to the old, outdated technology. You need to check that whether your current system has DevOps in place or not. System development lifecycle can be shorted by DevOps. Use some sort of CI/CD tools to make the migration process easy and systematic. 

Conclusion

Once you have the project requirements and you are sure about the technology stack, you can select the replacement for your platform and migrate your website. There will be many difficulties while migrating your website and some of them we have discussed, although it’s important to take the right decision at the right moment.