I have helped a lot of job boards over the years to move to a new software platform. “Replatforming” as its called, involves a good deal of planning and data extraction so it’s not to be taken lightly. You need to do it carefully otherwise you risk losing a great deal of traffic and sales.
Specifically you need to:
- Plan and implement a communication and training strategy for your existing customers. You need to warn them of upcoming site changes and then educate them on the new features.
- Make sure all your job seeker and employer data is extractable from your existing platform. Depending on your platform you might lost some data in the transition such as passwords which usually aren’t exportable.
- Maintain your feeds. If you get traffic from sites like Indeed you need to either send them the new feed BEFORE you go live or ensure its contents are unchanged when you move to a new platform. I have seen several site lose their aggregator traffic because they forgot about this step.
- Reset your social channels. If you currently auto publish and jobs or content to social media you’ll need to reset those feeds if your RSS has changed.
- Keep high traffic pages. If you have pages on your existing site that get a lot of SEO traffic it is imperative you recreate those pages on the new site with the same URL structure. Otherwise you will lose that traffic.
So if you are planning to replatform in 2017 take my advice or hire me to help.
