Not every store should switch platforms – but when the platform itself is costing you orders, migration stops being optional. Evrmemories.com is a clear example of when migration makes sense, and what a migration done correctly actually involves. This is the story of that project and the lessons that generalize to any merchant weighing a move.
The problem: a platform that was losing orders
Evrmemories.com ran on Volusion and was losing orders because of its checkout process. The checkout was full of small, compounding problems, and there were other platform issues that could no longer be ignored. The most damaging was functional, not cosmetic: the store sells custom cremation jewelry and urns, many personalized with a customer’s photo – and the Volusion template did not properly support customers uploading those images. For a business whose entire value proposition is bespoke, photo-based memorial pieces, a broken upload flow wasn’t an inconvenience; it was a daily disconnect in the ordering process that delayed orders and frustrated grieving customers at the worst possible moment.
The lesson that generalizes: the trigger for migration is rarely “we want something newer.” It is a specific, quantifiable cost – lost orders, a feature the business model depends on that the platform can’t deliver, or operational drag that won’t go away. If you can name the orders or hours you’re losing, you have a migration case; if you can’t, you may just have platform fatigue.
The solution: replatform plus redesign, done together
1Digital® provided a path to migrate from Volusion to BigCommerce, a platform that better fit their needs – with a more responsive template, the ability for developers to build features into the template, and, critically, native support for customer image uploads on custom products. A full custom redesign went along with the migration.
Pairing a redesign with a migration is a deliberate choice, not scope creep. When you are already moving every product, URL, and customer record, doing the design work in the same project avoids migrating twice and lets the new design be built around the new platform’s strengths rather than retrofitted later. The reverse is also true: a redesign that ignores an underlying platform limitation just repaints a store that will keep losing orders.
Why they chose a partner – and what to look for in one
Evrmemories found 1Digital® after extensive research and quotes from several agencies. What decided it was a detailed, transparent proposal that accounted for the edge cases. “The one thing that stuck out to me was that 1Digital was very prompt on getting back to me. The proposal was very detailed in exactly what was included. I could just tell that 1Digital just had more experience and history in doing this type of project,” said Casey Doran, founder and CEO of Evrmemories.
The takeaway for anyone evaluating migration partners: the quality of the proposal predicts the quality of the migration. A vague proposal that doesn’t mention redirects, data validation, or the “what ifs” usually becomes a migration with those same gaps.
The part most migrations get wrong: preserving SEO
A migration is not a redesign – it is moving a store from one platform to another, with extensive back-end work behind a deceptively simple description. The single highest-risk piece is search equity. Our developers implemented 301 redirects so Evrmemories.com preserved its organic rankings: mapping the old URLs to their new equivalents kept the inbound links pointing at the old domain working and carried the existing SEO rankings over to the new store. The data migrated from Volusion to BigCommerce without a hitch, and rankings and inbound links were retained. “In this type of work, you really do get what you pay for. We knew that 1Digital would cover everything and we weren’t left hung out to dry.”
This is the step that turns a successful technical migration into a successful business one. A store can move perfectly and still lose half its traffic overnight if URLs change without one-to-one 301s. Redirect mapping, preserved metadata, and a post-launch monitoring window are not optional extras – they are the difference between a migration and a self-inflicted traffic cliff.
The result, and the founder’s advice
Evrmemories.com now runs on BigCommerce and works flawlessly. Asked what advice he’d give merchants considering a switch, Casey said: “Make sure to read the proposal thoroughly. Also, understand the process of what will happen. And the most important thing, no one cares about your site as much as you, so always be involved, pay attention to detail, and provide feedback as much as you can.”
That last point is the quiet key to every successful migration. The merchant is the only person who knows every quirk of their catalog and every important URL. The migrations that go smoothest are the ones where the client stays engaged, reviews staging carefully, and flags issues early – not the ones where the store is handed over and checked at launch.
When does migration make sense for you?
Use Evrmemories as a checklist. Migration makes sense when: the platform is causing measurable lost revenue; a capability your business model depends on isn’t supported and can’t be reasonably worked around; operational friction is a recurring tax on the team; and the cost of staying clearly exceeds the cost and risk of moving. When those are true, the right move is a planned migration with a redesign where warranted, redirects mapped before launch, data validated in staging, and the merchant actively involved throughout.
What “migration” actually involves behind the scenes
Because the word makes it sound like flipping a switch, it’s worth being concrete about the work the Evrmemories project represents. A real migration includes: a full inventory of products, variants, customers, orders, and content; data profiling and cleanup before anything moves; field-by-field mapping between the old and new platform’s data models; a complete old-to-new URL map with one-to-one 301 redirects; recreating or rebuilding integrations (payment, shipping, email, any custom tooling); a full build and import on a staging environment that never touches the live store; structured QA across catalog accuracy, checkout, and redirects; and a monitored cutover with a rollback plan. The custom-upload capability Evrmemories needed had to be designed and tested as part of this, not bolted on after launch. None of it is visible to the customer when it’s done right – which is exactly the point.
The risks of doing it without a plan
The same project done carelessly is how stores lose months of traffic. Skipping the redirect map drops every ranked URL into a 404. Migrating dirty data carries duplicate SKUs and broken images into the new store as customer-facing bugs. Forgetting to lift staging’s noindex – or leaving it on production – can deindex the entire site. Not validating checkout in staging means discovering a broken payment flow with real customers. Evrmemories avoided all of this because the work was sequenced and the redirects were in place before launch; that sequencing, not luck, is why rankings and links survived the move.
After a site redesign and a smooth migration, Evrmemories.com is back to being a fully functioning home for people remembering their loved ones. If your platform is costing you orders, contact 1Digital® Agency to talk through whether migration makes sense for you.