The Most Successful Migration in Dunelm’s History
Dunelm is a prominent home furnishings retailer with more than 170 locations throughout the UK and a robust online presence. To enhance their digital platform, they opted to transition to a new online system that offers greater agility and superior user experience, along with improved technical capabilities for integrating new products and services. This transition involved migrating the entire website to the new platform, complete with a fresh design and upgraded technical framework. Our role was to oversee the development of the new website and manage the transition from the old site. Our main goal was to preserve Dunelm's organic visibility and avoid any deterioration in their online presence during this process. We provided guidance for the website's creation, maintained direct communication with the developers, and conducted multiple audits of the beta version, offering recommendations regarding the new site structure, robots.txt file, and XML Sitemap. In the days leading up to the migration, our team worked onsite at Dunelm's offices to improve communication and collaboratively address the final steps of the transition. Alongside the Dunelm team, we conducted the necessary migration tests in preparation for launch day.
Results: After the migration, and accounting for the usual fluctuations that occur following such significant changes, we were pleased to observe a modest increase in organic traffic (the primary goal was to maintain it) and a more substantial rise in organic revenue due to enhancements in user experience made possible by the new platform. In the month following the migration, we recorded an 11.13% increase in Organic Traffic month-over-month and 11.22% year-over-year, alongside a 14.39% increase in Organic Revenue month-over-month and 14.41% year-over-year.