A botched website move helped sink a $6 million brand
Missing redirects and ads pointing at dead pages are at the centre of one SEO's breakdown of what went wrong.
A Melbourne skincare company collapsed after a failed website migration, and its founder has faced bankruptcy.
7NEWS Melbourne reported that cosmetics entrepreneur Briony Kennedy faced bankruptcy after her $6 million sustainable skincare company Adorn Cosmetics collapsed following a failed website migration to Adobe's e-commerce platform. Adobe declined to comment on the case for legal reasons. Gagan Ghotra flagged the report to the SEO world, calling it a "platform migration to Adobe e-commerce gone wrong".
platform migration to Adobe e-commerce gone wrong!
What went wrong
Harpreet, an SEO who posted a breakdown, listed three problems. The web dev agency did not set up redirects. The paid ads team ran ads to 404 URLs. And the site was migrated to Adobe in the first place.
Two of those are worth understanding if you ever change website platforms.
A redirect is an instruction that sends an old page address to its new one. When you move platforms, your page addresses usually change. Without redirects, every link Google has in its index, and every link other sites point at you, lands on nothing. The rankings you built over years do not carry across.
A 404 is the error page a browser shows when the address does not exist. Running paid ads to 404 URLs means you are paying for clicks that land on a dead page. The money goes out, nobody can buy anything.
What to do if you are moving your site
If a platform move is on your list, make redirects a written requirement before anyone starts work. Ask whoever is building it for a list that maps every old page address to its new one, and check that list exists before the new site goes live.
The day you switch, click your own ads. If any of them land on an error page, pause the campaign until the link is fixed.
If you are not moving platforms, there is nothing to do here. This is a story about one migration going badly, not about Adobe or any platform being unsafe for small businesses. Nobody outside the case has said exactly how the collapse unfolded.
web dev agency not setting up redirects
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