Navigating Your Shop Migration: A Guide to Sustaining Peak Performance

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Key Takeaways

• Talk To Us Early: The single most important step for a successful migration is to inform your Customer Success Manager as soon as you start planning. The earlier we are involved, the more value we can provide, from sharing real-world performance data for your target platform to connecting you with other customers who have already made the switch.
• Proven Uplift on Any Platform: Our data proves that Speed Kit accelerates all common e-commerce platforms, delivering a measurable ROI regardless of the technology you use.
• A Risk-Free Partnership: When you migrate, we protect your investment by reconfirming the performance uplift Speed Kit delivers in your new environment, free of charge.

Introduction: Protecting Your Future Investment

For any successful e-commerce business, a platform migration—whether changing your e-commerce system or your cloud provider—is an eventual reality. It’s a major project that presents both a huge opportunity and a significant risk. Getting it right leads to growth; getting it wrong can lead to a slower site and frustrated customers.

The key to a successful migration is making performance a core part of the strategy from the very beginning. This guide explains the critical performance factors to consider, and how a partnership with Speed Kit ensures that whenever you decide to migrate, the outcome is a faster, more profitable website.

Proven Performance on Any Platform

No matter which e-commerce platform you use—or plan to migrate to—Speed Kit delivers a significant and measurable performance uplift. This is possible because our acceleration technology operates from the client-side—in the user's browser.

While a fast shop system is a valuable foundation, the user experience becomes truly instant only when you eliminate the final bottlenecks of network latency and browser rendering. Speed Kit tackles this directly with advanced methods like predictive preloading. By preparing the next page before the user even clicks, we make navigations feel seamless. Our data from hundreds of clients shows a clear ROI across all major systems, proving that our browser-side approach ensures your site operates at peak performance, complementing any backend technology.

A real-world example of this is Titus, Germany's leading retailer for skateboards and streetwear. After migrating to Shopify, they partnered with Speed Kit to ensure their online experience was as fast as their sport. The result was a 31% improvement in LCP, making their site faster than Amazon.de, and a user experience where 80% of navigations were correctly predicted and pre-rendered for an instant feel. You can read the full Titus case study here.

Laying the Foundation for a High-Performance Migration

Whenever you plan your migration, you will be faced with critical technical decisions. As a business leader, you don't need to be the expert, but you need to know what to listen for. Whether you are signing a contract with a development agency or briefing your internal team, it is vital to establish a performance budget before committing to a specific architecture. This means setting clear, measurable goals for key metrics.

Using our Real User Monitoring (RUM) tool, we analyze how performance currently impacts your business KPIs. This allows us to define data-driven targets for your new platform that are designed to maximize business success. Defining these targets upfront is a business responsibility that ensures all partners and internal stakeholders are aligned on your performance expectations from day one, safeguarding your investment.

This leadership is critical because without clear business goals, development teams may prioritize developer experience (using the newest technologies) over customer experience (ensuring the site is unconditionally fast). This can lead to architectural decisions that are exciting to build but difficult to optimize later, locking in poor performance. With these goals in place, you can better evaluate technical proposals. For example, if your project plan includes a Single-Page Application (SPA) or relies heavily on Client-Side Rendering (CSR), your alarm bells should ring. For most e-commerce sites, these architectures can lead to slower page loads, unreliable performance metrics, and potential SEO challenges—problems that are very difficult and expensive to fix after launch.

To help you navigate these critical decisions and avoid such pitfalls, we provide data-driven insights to support your technical planning. This includes exclusive access to our powerful benchmarking tool, which uses data from over 300,000 online shops to compare the real-world performance of different technologies and e-commerce platforms. Beyond the data, where possible, we also try to connect you with peers who have already migrated to your target platform, offering firsthand insights you won’t find anywhere else.

Planning a Migration Soon? Why You Should Partner With Us Now

If your migration is on the horizon, you might be tempted to wait until your new site is live before focusing on performance. This approach often leads to costly delays and unforeseen problems.

Engaging with us early in your migration planning provides several key advantages for a smoother transition:

• Gather Critical Performance Data: By activating Speed Kit on your current site, we collect valuable Real User Monitoring (RUM) data. This provides a data-driven baseline of your key business metrics. When your new site is ready, we can compare its performance against the old system to instantly spot and fix any new bottlenecks.
• Make Data-Driven Platform Decisions: We provide access to a unique tool that lets you run a side-by-side performance comparison between different shop systems, showing the concrete uplift Speed Kit provides on each. This helps you choose the right platform with confidence.
• Generate Value Now: You'll get an immediate performance boost on your current platform that improves your business metrics, instead of waiting months for your migration to finish.
• Ensure a Seamless Partnership: By starting now, we become your dedicated performance partner throughout the entire migration, helping you avoid common pitfalls from day one.

Our Migration Partnership: Your Performance Safety Net

As a Speed Kit customer, you get exclusive access to our multi-faceted support package designed to de-risk your migration. Our Migration Success Offer provides expert guidance, unique data, and a complete financial safety net. It includes:

Risk-Free Re-Evaluation

Your investment is safe. We will create a new Speed Kit configuration for your new platform for free. We then revalidate the business impact by analyzing the performance uplift using Real User Monitoring (RUM) data. If our analysis doesn't confirm that Speed Kit continues to deliver a positive impact, you have a special right to terminate your contract.

Expert Guidance and Unique Insights

We provide comprehensive support to help you make the best decisions for your new platform:

• Leverage Our Data: To help you make a data-driven decision, we provide access to the industry's largest performance database. This unique resource contains data from ~250,000 online shops, allowing you to effectively compare different shop platforms, technologies, and third-party integrations.

• Connect with Peers: Gain insights you can't get anywhere else. With the consent of all parties, we will facilitate a 1-on-1 introduction with other e-commerce peers who have relevant, hands-on experience—for example, by operating the exact shop system you are planning to migrate to.
• Get Instant Quick Wins: Our partnership delivers value from day one. The moment your new site goes live, our experts will deliver a 'Quick Win Audit'. This complimentary analysis provides your team with a clear, actionable list of easy-to-implement performance boosts, focusing on critical metrics like INP, CLS, and LCP to fine-tune your new platform.

Your Next Step

The takeaway is simple: Tell your Customer Success Manager about a planned migration as soon as possible. Whether you are in the earliest stages of considering a new platform or have a detailed plan, bringing us into the conversation early is the best way to ensure a smooth, successful, and profitable transition. We can provide the most help when we are involved from the start.

Contact your CSM today to open the conversation.